The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East 9781474427708

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

Edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Anna Ball and Karim Mattar, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10 / 12 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2768 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2770 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2771 5 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Note on Transliteration Preface

viii ix xi xvii xviii

Introduction 1. Dialectics of Post/Colonial Modernity in the Middle East: A Critical, Theoretical and Disciplinary Overview Anna Ball and Karim Mattar 2. Edward Said and the Institution of Postcolonial Studies Karim Mattar 3. Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first-century Horizons Waïl S. Hassan

3 23

43

4. Interview with Ahdaf Soueif Anna Ball

57

5. Interview with Sinan Antoon Karim Mattar

67

Part I: The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism 6. Between the Postcolonial and the Middle East: Writing the Subaltern in the Arab World Juan R. I. Cole

83

7. Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World Wen-chin Ouyang

97

8. On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited Ella Shohat

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118

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9. Colonial Violence, Law and Justice in Egypt Stephen Morton 10. Peripheral Visions: Translational Polemics and Feminist Arguments in Colonial Egypt Marilyn Booth 11. Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy Erdağ Göknar

160

183 213

Part II: States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality 12. Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert) Réda Bensmaïa 13. Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies and Millennial Palestine Salah D. Hassan 14. ‘They are in the right because I love them’: Literature and Palestine Solidarity in the 1980s Anna Bernard 15. Nikes in Nineveh: Daesh, the Ruin and the Global Logic of Eradication Sadia Abbas

241 253

275 293

16. There was no ‘Humble Task’ in the Revolution: Anti-colonial Activity and Arab Women Anastasia Valassopoulos

309

17. The Queerness of Textuality and/as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter Lindsey Moore

329

Part III: The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context 18. Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar Tahia Abdel Nasser 19. Bare Life in the ‘New Iraq’ Ikram Masmoudi 20. Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature? Iranian Literary Blogs and the Evolution of the Literary Field Laetitia Nanquette

349 362

383

21. Popular Culture and the Arab Spring Caroline Rooney

407

22. The Syrian Revolution, Art and the End of Ideology miriam cooke

427

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contents 23. Biopolitical Landscapes of the ‘Small Human’: Figuring the Child in the Contemporary Middle Eastern Refugee Crisis in Europe Anna Ball

vii

446

Afterword: Critical Companionships, Urgent Affiliations Anna Ball and Karim Mattar

469

Bibliography Index

476 514

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Figures

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 23.1 23.2

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Marcelin Flandrin, ‘Atlas Marocain. Groupe de Juives à Tin-Mel’, Atlas Marocain Unknown photographer, ‘Femme Juive’ Théodore Chassériau, Juives d’Alger au balcon Théodore Chassériau, Scène dans le quartier juif de Constantine Eugene Delacroix, Noce juive au Maroc Alfred Dehodencq, L’exécution de la Juive Eugene Delacroix, Scène des massacres de Scio Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Por linage de ebros Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Escena de Inquisición Alfred Dehodencq, Portrait de Sol Hatchuel Alfred Dehodencq, La Mariée juive Alfred Dehodencq, Mariée juive au Maroc Jean-Léon Gérôme, Le Charmeur de Serpents Tombstone of Sol Hachuel in Fez, Morocco, 2018 Al-Baqi cemetery before demolition The Makkah Clock Royal Tower Hotel and the Haram Sharif Still of destruction of Nineveh, Dabiq, Issue 8 ‘The Flood’, Dabiq, Issue 2 ‘Abandon the Lands of Shirk, Come to the Land of Islam’, Dabiq, Issue 8 ‘Lotfi, Sarra and Selim’s teacher, will be staying a few days here’, The Silences of the Palace Khalti Hadda washes Lotfi, The Silences of the Palace ‘Things are going to change’, The Silences of the Palace ‘A new future awaits us’, The Silences of the Palace Tammam ‘Azzam, Syrian Museum: Matisse’s La Danse Hani Abbas, Sednaya Prison Wissam al-Jazairi, Women Dancing In Front of a Tank Sari Kiwan, Man Dancing on a Barrel Bomb A young girl from Syria walks on the beach after reaching the shores of Lesbos, having crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey, 2015 Oguz Sen and Justus Becker, Mural of Aylan Kurdi/Alan Shenu, 2016

128 128 129 129 130 131 134 136 137 138 139 140 142 146 294 295 298 298 299 323 323 324 324 434 436 441 441 446 453

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Acknowledgements

Anna Ball: My thanks are due first and foremost to my co-editor, Karim Mattar, whose exceptional knowledge, ability, diligence and dedication have made this project possible. I am deeply indebted to him for all of his collaboration over the course of the volume’s creation. Thank you, too, to all of the marvellous contributors to this volume, who have journeyed with us over the past several years in order to express their own keen investment in this field. I am extremely grateful to Edinburgh University Press for their impeccable support and guidance, and to the anonymous reviewers who shared our belief in this project. My thanks are also due to colleagues and students at the Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University, and to Professor Nahem Yousaf, Professor Philip Leonard and Professor Andrew Thacker for their research support and mentoring over the years, as well as to my mentor and former supervisor, Dr Anastasia Valassopoulos. Thank you to the ‘excellent women’, Dr Sarah Jackson and Dr Catherine Clay, for the sound advice and solidarity that saw me through this project. Above all, thank you to my wonderful husband, Lee Garland, and to our daughter Clara Garland, for their endless patience and support over the last few years. As I pass this volume to the reader, I return myself to them wholeheartedly. Karim Mattar: I would like to thank my co-editor Anna Ball for her tireless efforts in bringing this volume to fruition over the past several years. Her work ethic, commitment, perseverance, attention to detail and vision have been essential to the volume’s success, and inspirational to me both personally and professionally. I would also like to thank Edinburgh University Press and its editorial team – especially Nicola Ramsey, Ellie Bush, Ersev Ersoy and Kirsty Woods. The support they have shown us, their enthusiasm for this project from its outset, and their guidance in its assembly and refinement have all been outstanding – they have, indeed, made this volume possible. Finally, I would like to thank each of the contributors for the originality, insight and sheer brilliance of their wide-ranging engagements with the questions and concerns we had hoped to address in this volume. Individually and collectively, their chapters comprise the critical nexus between postcolonial studies and the Middle East at its heart. It is my hope that as this volume makes its way into the world, readers will for many years to come likewise appreciate the fine scholarship on display in the following pages.

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acknowledgements

The editors: We would like to thank the American Comparative Literature Association, at whose 2016 conference at Harvard University we hosted a seminar on ‘The Postcolonial Middle East: Theory, Politics, Culture’. Many of the chapters included in this volume originated as papers for this seminar, and the discussion that took place there helped us refine our conception of the project. We would also like to thank Interventions, the Journal of Arabic Literature, Routledge, Princeton University Press, Biography and Edinburgh University Press for granting their permission to reprint previously published material. Chapter 3, ‘Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first-century Horizons’ by Waïl S. Hassan, is a modified version of an article which first appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (9 November 2017; pp. 1–17). Chapter 7, ‘Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World’ by Wen-chin Ouyang, is a modified version of an article which first appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature (49, 2018; pp. 1–30). Chapter 11, ‘Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy’ by Erdağ Göknar, is a modified version of a book chapter which first appeared in Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London & New York: Routledge, 2013; pp. 127–62). Chapter 12, ‘Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert)’ by Réda Bensmaïa, is a modified version of a book chapter which first appeared in Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003; pp. 67–82). Chapter 13, ‘Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies and Millennial Palestine’ by Salah D. Hassan, is a modified version of an article which first appeared in Biography (36:1, 2013; pp. 27–50). Chapter 19, ‘Bare Life in the “New Iraq”’ by Ikram Masmoudi, is a modified version of a book chapter which first appeared in War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015; pp. 134–83). Finally, thank you to all of those who provided copyright permission to reproduce images in this volume. Credits are listed in the captions for each image, and the editors will be glad to make suitable arrangements with any copyright holders whom they have not been able to contact.

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Notes on the Contributors

Sadia Abbas is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She specialises in postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, early modern English literature, and the history of twentieth-century criticism. In 2014, her first monograph – At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament – was published with Fordham University Press. This book was co-awarded the MLA First Book Prize in 2015. She is currently working on a book on Greece and the idea of Europe. Her first novel, The Empty Room, published by Urvashi Butalia’s Zubaan Press, is forthcoming. She is co-producing a book on Shahzia Sikander’s work with Jan Howard for the RISD museum. She is running campus lecture series on the themes ‘Beyond Islamophobia’ and ‘Postcolonial Questions and Performances’. Sinan Antoon is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. His teaching and research interests lie in pre-modern and modern Arabic literature and contemporary Arab culture and politics. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (2014) and numerous essays on Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus and contemporary Iraqi culture. He is also an award-winning poet, novelist, translator and filmmaker. He has published three collections of poetry, four novels and numerous translations of Arabic poetry, and he directed and featured in a documentary about his native city, About Baghdad (2004). He is the recipient of the Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation (2013) and the Prix de la Litterature Arabe (2017), as well as numerous other honours and awards. Anna Ball is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University, where she also co-directs the Postcolonial Studies Centre. Her research explores the intersections between postcolonial, gender, literary and visual cultural studies, particularly in relation to sites of emergent postcolonial enquiry within the Middle East and its diaspora. She is the author of Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Perspective (2012) and of numerous articles exploring questions relating to mobility, gender, sexuality and nationhood in Middle Eastern literature, art and visual media. She is currently working on a new monograph, Wingwomen: Towards a Transnational Feminist Politics and Poetics of Women’s Forced Migration.

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Réda Bensmaïa is Professor Emeritus, formerly University Professor of French and Francophone literature in the French Studies Department and in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. He has published extensively on French and Francophone literature of the twentieth century as well as on film theory and contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Barthes Effect: Introduction to the Reflective Text (1987), The Years of Passages (1995), Alger ou la Maladie de la Mémoire (1997), Experimental Nations or The Invention of the Maghreb (2003) and Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory and the Philosophy of Limits (2017). He is also the editor of Gilles Deleuze (1989) and Recommending Deleuze (1998). Anna Bernard is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013), and co-editor of Debating Orientalism (2013) and What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (2015). She has published widely on Palestinian and Israeli ‘world’ literature, literature as advocacy and activism, and postcolonial literature and theory. She is currently working on a book about international solidarity movements and culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Marilyn Booth is the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, Oxford University. Her most recent monograph is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siècle Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). She has also written books on biographies in the Arabic women’s press and on nationalist vernacular writing, and has edited or co-edited collections on histories of the harem, Egypt in the 1890s and (currently) translation in the late Ottoman Empire. She is writing a critical biography of Zaynab Fawwaz. She has translated numerous novels, short story collections and memoirs from the Arabic. Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. He has written widely about Egypt, Iran, Iraq and South Asia, as well as about the upheavals in the Arab world since 2011. His most recent book is The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East (2014). He also authored Engaging the Muslim World (2009), Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (2007) and many other books. He has translated works by Lebanese-American author Kahlil Gibran. miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University. She has been a visiting professor in Tunisia, Romania, Indonesia, Qatar and Istanbul. She serves on several national and international advisory boards, including academic journals and institutions. She is editor of the Journal for Middle East Women’s Studies. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature and on Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism. She has also written about Arab cultures with a concentration on Syria, the Arab Gulf and the networked connections among Arabs and Muslims around the world. She is the author of several monographs that include War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1987), Women and the War Story (1997), Women Claim Islam (2001), Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (2007), Nazira Zeineddine:

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A Pioneer of Islamic Feminism (2010), Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014) and Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2017). She has also published a novel, Hayati, My Life (2000). Several books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch and German. Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, where he directs the Duke Middle East Studies Center. His research focuses on intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East, specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in contemporary Turkish culture. His work explores questions of Turkish and Muslim representation in fiction, historiography and popular culture. His books include a monograph, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (2013); a co-edited volume, Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (2008); and English-language translations of My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk (2001, 2010), Earth and Ashes, by Atiq Rahimi (2002, from Dari), and A Mind at Peace, by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (2011). His most recent publication is a collection of poetry, Nomadologies: Poems (2017). Salah D. Hassan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. He is also core faculty in the Muslim Studies Program and in Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities. His areas of research and teaching include postcolonial literature and theory, anti-colonial intellectual movements, and Muslim and Arab American studies. He has published widely on Palestinian culture and politics, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. In 2010 he produced a short documentary film titled Death of an Imam that focuses on the 2008 FBI shooting of Imam Luqman Abdullah in a Detroit suburb. He is the producer of the 2015 documentary Migrations of Islam, which explores Muslim Americans participation in popular culture. He is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Arabs/America: Race, Representation and Radical Politics. Waïl S. Hassan is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author of Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (2003) and Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (2011), he is currently writing a book on Arab-Brazilian literature. He is the co-editor (with Susan Muaddi Darraj) of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz (2012), the editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Arabic Novel (2017) and the translator, from Arabic into English, of Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language (2008) and, from Portuguese into Arabic, of Alberto Mussa’s Lughz al-qāf (Egypt’s National Center for Translation, 2015). He has been elected as the 2019–20 President of the American Comparative Literature Association. Ikram Masmoudi is Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Delaware. Her areas of interest include Arabic language, modern Arabic literature, Iraqi fiction and literary translation. Her monograph, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), examines how recent Iraqi fiction depicts the Iraqi subject in its relation to war, coercion and occupation, focusing particularly on experiences of war desertion, detention, suicide bombing and sectarian killings. She has translated the novels Beyond Love by Iraqi author Hadiya Hussein (2012), The Green Zone by Shakir Noori (forthcoming) and The Clouds’ Soloist by Ali Bader (forthcoming).

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Karim Mattar is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His work addresses the problematic of world literature within the context of global capitalist modernity. In his writings and in the classroom, he deploys a range of comparative, postcolonial and Marxist critical approaches to assess how the dialectics of modernity are registered in and engaged by literary and cultural texts from around the world. As reflected in his current monograph project, Specters of World Literature: Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East, this inquiry is at present focalised around the Middle East. He is editor or co-editor of two journal special issues, on ‘The Global Checkpoint’ (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50.1, 2014; with David Fieni) and ‘Cartographies of Dissent’ (English Language Notes, 52.2, 2014). In 2012, he co-convened the first ever ‘Oxford Palestine Film Season’ with Anna Ball and Mohamed-Salah Omri. Lindsey Moore is Senior Lecturer in English (Postcolonial and Contemporary) Literature at Lancaster University. She is the author of Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (1998) and of Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (2018), as well as numerous articles and chapters on creative work issuing from Arab world, Iranian and South Asian contexts. She is co-editor of Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (2015). Stephen Morton is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Southampton. His publications include States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law (2013); Terror and the Postcolonial, co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (2009); Foucault in an Age of Terror, co-edited with Stephen Bygrave (2008); Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003). Laetitia Nanquette is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her monograph, Orientalism versus Occidentalism: Literary and Cultural Imaging between France and Iran since the Islamic Revolution, was published in 2013 with I. B. Tauris. She is interested in modern and contemporary Middle Eastern literatures, particularly Persian literature; the circulation of literature and culture between the Middle East and the diasporas; the relations between the West and the postcolonial world; World Literature; literature and globalisation, exile and diaspora literatures. Her current work project as a DECRA Fellow is entitled: ‘A Global Comparative Study of Contemporary Iranian Literature’. Tahia Abdel Nasser is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her book manuscript in progress focuses on Arab and Latin American literary and cultural exchange in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and she is at work on another book that examines cultural and literary ties between Palestine and Latin America. Wen-chin Ouyang is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has written extensively on classical and modern Arabic narrative and literary criticism. She is the author of

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Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism and Chinese storytelling. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies. Caroline Rooney is a RCUK Leadership Fellow (PaCCS) and Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent. Her work on liberation struggles includes African Literature, Animism and Politics (2000) and Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (2007). She has published widely on the cultures of the contemporary Middle East (Egyptian, Lebanese and Palestinian) and is co-director of the arts documentary White Flags (2014). Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. Her books include: On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (recipient of the 2017 Middle East Monitor Palestine Book Award in the Memoir Category); Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices; Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation; Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age; Unthinking Eurocentrism (with Robert Stam, 1994 Katherine Kovacs Singer Best Book Award); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (with Robert Stam); Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (with Robert Stam); and several co-edited volumes. Her writings have been translated into various languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of such journals as Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Social Text, for which she has co-edited several special issues. She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller, Fulbright research/lectureship and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she has also taught at the School of Criticism and Theory. Ahdaf Soueif is a novelist, translator and political and cultural commentator. Her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993), is a bildungsroman set in Egypt and England, starring a young Egyptian who, by her own admission, ‘feels more comfortable with art than with life’. Her second novel, The Map of Love (1999), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been translated into thirty languages and has sold over a million copies. Soueif also has one collection of short stories, I Think of You (2007), and one of essays, Mezzaterra (2004). In 2000, she translated Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English. Soueif’s personal account of the Egyptian revolution of January 2011 came out in 2012. In 2008 she founded the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest) and in 2017 celebrated its tenth edition with the anthology: This Is Not a Border, Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. Anastasia Valassopoulos is Senior Lecturer in World Literatures at the University of Manchester. Her research is in the postcolonial literature and culture of the Middle

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East. She is also very interested in the wider cultural production and reception of Arab film and music. Recent publications (2014) include work on the Palestinian resistance movement, and on cinema, revolution and music in the Egyptian context. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled ‘Palestine in the Popular Imagination’.

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Note on Transliteration

This volume contains transliterated terms from various languages (especially Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Hebrew). The editors have ensured that all transliterations from Arabic conform to the guidelines provided by The International Journal of Middle East Studies. Terms from other languages have been transliterated according to the conventions of the authors in whose chapters they appear. Proper nouns are generally reproduced in their commonly cited Anglicised forms for ease of reference (e.g. Said, Nahda, etc.), unless otherwise indicated by authors.

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Preface

The field of postcolonial studies remains a primary site of radical political and cultural critique within the global anglophone academy. In response to the geopolitical conflicts and crises of our post-9/11 world, critics and scholars variously located within the field have in recent years begun to turn their attention towards ‘the Middle East’ as a crucial new area for postcolonial inquiry. Prominent themes to have emerged in the scholarship on this area include the politics of neo-imperialism, terror and warfare; Israel/ Palestine and the politics of colonisation, occupation and resistance; the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; the Islamic Revival and Islamic fundamentalisms; gender and sexuality in Islam and the Middle East; the Arab Spring and its aftermath; and transnational Middle Eastern identities, migrations and cultures. While individually urgent, these themes have been pursued largely in isolation from one another in the critical discourse. Furthermore, each has maintained a largely presentist orientation. As a consequence, the category of ‘the Middle East’ has been constructed in postcolonial studies in an ahistorical, unsystematic and fragmentary way. A coherent and comprehensive framework for addressing this region thus remains wanting in the field. The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East seeks to develop just such a framework. This Companion assembles some of the world’s foremost postcolonialists and writer-intellectuals to reflexively interrogate the category of ‘the Middle East’ as it has been figured in postcolonial studies, and to collaboratively explore the core critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for the field. In twenty-four chapters distributed across an introductory and three main sections, it aims to attune postcolonial studies to a global, dialectical understanding of the region. It will thereby provide a foundational reference point for the field as scholars and students continue to research and teach in this direction. Given the new readings of the region it generates, it will also be of value to those working in adjacent fields such as Middle East studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, history, critical geography, politics and international relations, and so forth. This Companion deploys the concept of ‘post/colonial modernity’ as a broad intellectual and historical horizon for analysis. Suggesting both the impact of diverse colonial encounters on the modern history of the region and the forging of complex postcolonial positionalities against continued manifestations of local and global hegemony, this concept provides a grounding for the synthetic and historical perspective hitherto lacking in

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postcolonial studies. It allows for the comparative assessment of questions of colonialism, imperialism, statecraft, religion, ethnicity, minority, gender, sexuality, terror, war, revolution and migration within and across the Levant, the Gulf, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and beyond. Throughout, the focus of this Companion is on literary and cultural critique. Across parts (I) ‘The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and AntiImperialism’, (II) ‘States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality’ and (III) ‘The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context’, its chapters reveal via original readings of literary and cultural texts the political, social and cultural dialectics of post/colonial modernity in the Middle East. Spanning the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries; working flexibly across national, regional and global contexts; and covering a range of forms and genres including fiction, poetry, life-writing, film, documentary, pictorial art, performance art, popular music, graffiti, the digital media and translation, they individually and collectively trace the conflicts and contradictions of such as registered in the literatures and cultures of the Middle East. In sum, this Edinburgh Companion contributes to the evolving worldly remit of postcolonial studies by examining and revising its inherited critical constructs according to the specificities of the Middle East. In the process, it develops a ‘post/colonial’ framework appropriate to the region and a new, ‘post/colonial’ sense of Middle Eastern literary and cultural modernity. Contributors include: Sadia Abbas, Sinan Antoon, Anna Ball, Réda Bensmaïa, Anna Bernard, Marilyn Booth, Juan R. I. Cole, miriam cooke, Erdağ Göknar, Salah D. Hassan, Waïl S. Hassan, Ikram Masmoudi, Karim Mattar, Lindsey Moore, Stephen Morton, Laetitia Nanquette, Tahia Abdel Nasser, Wen-chin Ouyang, Caroline Rooney, Ella Shohat, Ahdaf Soueif and Anastasia Valassopoulos.

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Introduction

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Chapter 1 Dialectics of Post/Colonial Modernity in the Middle East: A Critical, Theoretical and Disciplinary Overview Anna Ball and Karim Mattar

Postcolonial Studies and the Middle East

T

he field of postcolonial studies remains a primary site of radical political and cultural critique within the global anglophone academy. Like any other disciplinary formation, it has been in a process of constant evolution since its inception in English and French departments across the Atlantic in the 1980s. From its high-theory beginnings with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and its so-called ‘materialist turn’ with Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, Timothy Brennan, Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus, it has, in recent years, opened up to multiple developments in the contemporary world. In the last generation, postcolonial critics and scholars have turned their attention towards a range of new issues including globalisation, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism; international law and its transgressions; the global security state and unconventional warfare; terror; minority and indigeneity; religiosity, secularism and post-secularism; ‘third-wave’ gender and sexual identities; environmental crisis and the Anthropocene; children’s, disability and animal rights; global migrant and refugee crises; cultural trauma; translation; and the digital media, among others. In so doing, they have framed postcolonial studies as a site of origin for identifying, conceptualising and critically interrogating some of the most timely and pressing questions of today’s world. The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East seeks to advance the evolving worldly remit of postcolonial studies by foregrounding the Middle East as one such area of inquiry. Thinking genealogically, it is clear that the status of the Middle East as a critical object within the field has always been fraught and ambiguous. In its early years, postcolonial studies, as is widely acknowledged, drew much of its impetus and inspiration from scholarship on colonial history in this region, as in the foundational work of Said (Palestine, the Levant), Frantz Fanon (Algeria) and Albert Memmi (Tunisia). Indeed, it is barely an exaggeration to claim that the field was inaugurated with Said’s Orientalism (1978), which, among other things, involved a discourse analysis of the category of ‘the Middle East’ that exposed its constitution in Euro-American imperialism, its Orientalist epistemologies and ontologies, and its homogenising functions with respect to a vast and diverse region stretching across the Levant, the Gulf, North Africa, Iran, Turkey, and beyond.1 Undergirded by a pervasive system of Orientalist knowledge production, the term ‘Middle East’ was first formulated in 1902 by the American naval strategist Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan to refer

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to an area of British strategic interest in and around the Persian Gulf.2 In itself, it serves as a reminder of the overt role that British and French imperialism played in the charting of the region’s political geography over the course of the twentieth century. Such implications are consolidated when taking into account the formation of Middle East studies, an offshoot of area studies, during the Cold War period. As Zachary Lockman has most extensively demonstrated, this field and its governing, Orientalism-derived assumptions about the Arab-Islamic world were initially designed in order to facilitate the United States’ geopolitical interests in the region.3 Further testifying to the (neo-) imperialist implications of the term, the US administration forwarded the notion of a ‘Greater Middle East’ in the period following the events of 11 September 2001 so as to legitimate a univocal policy of ‘democratisation’ and therefore of (military) intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey in addition to the wider Arab world.4 Given the origins of the field as well as the political and institutional history of the designation ‘Middle East’ itself, it seems self-evident that this region should have been a substantial and sustained object of critical scrutiny in postcolonial studies from its beginnings. Yet as postcolonialists around the world sought to legitimate their work within the disciplinary edifices of English and French in the 1980s, and thus to consolidate their institutional standing, they tended to neglect the politics, societies and cultures of the region, and to veer away from, even repress, the Middle Eastern origins of their adopted models of colonial discourse, the coloniser/colonised interface and cultural resistance. Postcolonial studies was thereby articulated as a field whose central concern was the anglophone and francophone literatures of (former) colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Oceania, and by migrants from these regions to the (former) imperial metropolis. The classic statement of the field’s self-definition in these terms is Bill Ashcroft’s, Gareth Griffith’s and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), another foundational text. In what these authors intend as an exhaustive list of postcolonial literatures and cultures – which comprises those of ‘African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, . . . Sri Lanka, [and] the USA’ – those of the Middle East are conspicuous by their absence.5 A number of explanations have been put forward for what appears to be this constitutive tension in postcolonial studies. For Waïl Hassan (and Rebecca Saunders), the Middle East has been considered a context too varied and anomalous in its (post) colonial status, too strained in its national and cultural politics, and too challenging in its linguistic demands to find a home within the parameters of an endemically anglophone postcolonial academy.6 Focusing on the neglect of Palestine in particular within the field, Anna Bernard likewise attributes this to the challenges posed by an Arabic-language literary tradition as well as to the stigmas associated with reading in translation. But she also highlights other factors specific to the case. Given the recalcitrant nationalist impulses of its politics and cultures, Palestine, she argues, has proven to be a case study antithetical to what she calls the field’s prevailing, Bhabha-derived ‘paradigms [of] difference, hybridity, scepticism towards grand narratives, and above all . . . anti-nationalism’.7 Furthermore, and as evidenced by recent controversies involving Said (Columbia), Joseph Massad (Columbia), Juan Cole (Yale), Norman Finkelstein (DePaul) and Stephen Salaita (Illinois), among others, what she calls the

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more ‘sinister’ pressures imposed by the academic politics of studying Palestine in the anglophone world has acted as a major disincentive for postcolonialists.8 As a result of these various constraints, and with the notable exception of texts like Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature (1986), few avowed ‘postcolonial’ scholarly works of the 1980s and 1990s indeed attended to the Middle East in any substantial way.9 With this background in mind, it is understandable that scholars of the period whose work was oriented around colonialism in the Middle East should distrust what had in effect emerged as the institution of ‘Postcolonial Studies’. In an interview for the inaugural issue of Interventions conducted in 1997, Said, for instance, distanced himself from the field he was instrumental in founding with a modest yet firm ‘I do not think I belong to that’.10 Such misgivings, though, ran deeper than the field’s manifest disavowal of its progenitors and their intellectual terrain, to the term ‘postcolonial’ itself. Later in the same interview, Said continues that ‘postcolonialism’ is a ‘misnomer’ that, by implying ‘colonialism is over’, distorts or masks the prevalence of ‘neo-colonialism’ both in ‘my part of the world’ and in the activities of globalising agents such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.11 Focusing on Palestine, both Ella Shohat and Massad have likewise rejected the literal ‘post’ of ‘postcolonial’ as inapplicable to that context. For Shohat, Palestine and its writers (such as Mahmoud Darwish and Sahar Khalifeh) demonstrate in their engagement with ‘contemporary anti-colonial/anti-racist struggles’ the ‘ahistorical’, ‘universalizing’ and ‘depoliticizing’ implications of the categories ‘the postcolonial condition’ and ‘post-coloniality’.12 For Massad, it is ‘the synchronicity of the colonial and the postcolonial’ in the contemporary space of Israel/Palestine that renders the teleology suggested by these designations incoherent.13 When ‘postcolonial’ is read strictly as a historical signifier – as it was in the wide array of scholarship on decolonisation, anti-colonial nationalism and state-formation in the 1970s – these critiques are of course accurate. But within postcolonial studies as discussed here, the term has more often been deployed in a more flexible way. Citing Bhabha for his influence in framing the field, Lazarus explains that since the 1970s, ‘“postcolonial” has ceased to be a historical category’, and has become rather ‘a fighting term, a theoretical weapon, which “intervene[s]” in existing debates and “resists” certain political and philosophical constructions’.14 In the last generation, a chorus of scholars have picked up on this sense of ‘postcolonial’ as a trans-period deconstructive praxis that traverses the discourses of colonial modernity in order to identify and critique manifestations of political, social and cultural hegemony in the contemporary world. They have sought to revitalise the field for precisely the challenges Said thought it, by definition, obscures. In their important volume Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005), Ania Loomba and her co-editors insist that the field ‘respond not only to the search for historical clarity about the making of modern empires but also to the continuing and bloody ambition of neo-imperialism’.15 Given what they call ‘the wide ideological and intellectual spectrum that has begun . . . to align itself with the global juggernaut’, ‘the agenda of postcolonial studies’ is, they conclude, ‘more pressing than ever’.16 In their special issue of new formations on ‘After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies’ (2006), Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal stress that the field must change its ‘framing assumptions, organising principles and intellectual habits’ for ‘the contemporaneity of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism’.17 And in their volume Terror and the Postcolonial (2010), Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton likewise underline ‘the contemporary

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neo-imperial hegemony of the United States’ as among ‘the most pressing postcolonial issues of our age’.18 With the remit of postcolonial studies thus redefined for ‘our age’, the Middle East, the geopolitical conflicts and crises associated with it in our post-9/11 world, has now become not just legible within the field, but also a pivotal site for postcolonial critical thought. It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that despite the disciplinary conflicts, institutional embargos and linguistic challenges faced by those seeking to work on the Middle East through a broadly defined postcolonial framework, the current generation of postcolonialists has found itself increasingly drawn to the conceptual intrigues and political urgencies of the Middle East, as well as to the rich literary and cultural offerings of this diverse and shifting region. As such, critics and scholars variously located within the field have begun to circle towards the region and its politics, societies and cultures. Over the last decade or so, a number of research areas, critical interventions and debates pertaining to specific Middle Eastern national and regional contexts have become especially pronounced in what might be considered the emergent subfield of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. The politics of neo-imperialism, terror and warfare represent a central concern within much of this contemporary scholarship. Urging renewed inquiry into such, numerous postcolonialists have drawn attention to both the subtle and the not-so-subtle continuities between historical and contemporary manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and Orientalism in the Middle East (Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, Juan Cole, Faisal Devji, Derek Gregory, Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Hawley, Zachary Lockman, Ania Loomba et al., etc.). This sense of the Middle East as a theatre or laboratory of contemporary neoimperial warfare has been further substantiated by those who have focused on the post-9/11 invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in particular (Nadje alAli, Samir Amin, Sinan Antoon, Gregory, Neil Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal, Ikram Masmoudi, Muhsin al-Musawi, etc.). More recently, the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring and its aftermath have produced a mounting postcolonial response, often channelled through analysis of new or newly deployed cultural forms such as graffiti, popular music and the social media (Gilbert Achcar, miriam cooke, Hamid Dabashi, Dalia Mostafa, Caroline Rooney, etc.). Finally, and perhaps at the heart of any conception of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’, the question of Israel/Palestine and its associated politics of colonisation, occupation and resistance has throughout this period been generating a steady stream of postcolonial scholarship that is among the most urgent and innovative in the field. Indebted to, yet extending far beyond Said’s foundational analysis, such scholarship has come to encompass a variety of critical approaches, including the theoretical (Joseph Massad, Ella Shohat, etc.), the sociohistorical (Salah Hassan, Saree Makdisi, Nur Masalha, Basem Ra’ad, Ahmad Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, etc.) and the literary, filmic and cultural (Anna Ball, Anna Bernard, Joe Cleary, Barbara Harlow, Karim Mattar, Ihab Saloul, etc.). As an interconnected whole, the work that has thus far been accomplished by postcolonialists in these and related areas comprises a powerful testament to postcolonialism’s enduring exigency as a medium for critical thinking in the face of violent political realities. In addition to the sort of more nationally and regionally oriented scholarship outlined above, postcolonialists have in this period also pursued areas, interventions and debates of more transnational resonance. Related to many of the issues noted

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above, those of the Islamic Revival and Islamic fundamentalisms have been extensively explored in contexts both regional (Sadia Abbas, Talal Asad, Cole, Devji, Anouar Majid, Massad, etc.) and diasporic (Rehana Ahmed, Claire Chambers, Peter Morey, Amina Yaqin, etc.). Likewise, those of gender and sexuality in the Middle East have been addressed in relation to a range of socio-historical settings, including those of the (neo-)Orientalist encounter (Reina Lewis, Massad, Meyda Yegenoglu, etc.), Arab women’s liberation movements (Margot Badran, Marilyn Booth, Anastasia Valassopoulos, etc.), Islamic feminisms (Abu-Lughod, Leila Ahmed, cooke, Saba Mahmood, etc.) and the politics of non-normative identification in the region (Paul Amar, Joseph Allen Boone, Jasbir Puar, etc.). And those of transnational Middle Eastern literary and cultural production have been traversed via a plethora of postcolonial routes. Key topoi to have emerged in the more literary critical approaches to ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ include Anglo-Arab and Arab-American literatures (Carol Fadda-Conrey, Nouri Gana, Waïl Hassan, Layla al-Maleh, Lindsey Moore, Tahia Abdel Nasser, Stephen Salaita, etc.), the adoption and adaptation of transnational forms and genres in regional literatures (Tarek El-Ariss, Rasheed El-Enany, Erdağ Göknar, Stephan Meyer, al-Musawi, Laetitia Nanquette, Wen-chin Ouyang, Kamran Rastegar, etc.), anglophone and francophone writing there (Réda Bensmaïa, Norbert Bugeja, etc.) and literary translation from and into Middle Eastern languages (Salih Altoma, Said Faiq, etc.). Just as regionally directed postcolonial scholarship on the Middle East foregrounds the vitality of the postcolonial as a critical tool, such transnationally directed scholarship suggests the multiplicity of critical perspectives it can bring to bear on the region’s worldly investments. Far from exhaustive, this brief overview of current scholarship on ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ nevertheless reveals something of the scale and value of this growing subfield. In each of its areas of inquiry, it is clear that scholars have brought the unique critical resources of postcolonial studies – including its literary critical tools, theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary possibilities – to bear on analyses of the region, its literatures and cultures, that are among the most original, incisive and compelling in the contemporary academy. Why, then, given this wide array of critical work, might it be necessary to foreground and examine afresh the role of postcolonial scholarship in relation to the Middle East? As will already be apparent to those performing such work, these themes, while individually urgent, have been pursued largely in isolation from one another in the critical discourse. Little or no dialogue has taken place among postcolonialists about their reciprocal and complementary imbrication in the wider issues of the region. Furthermore, each has maintained a largely presentist orientation. Forged in response to the demands of the present, they have tended to downplay or marginalise questions of the deep history of Orientalism, colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East, and of how this gave rise to the network of issues prevalent in the region today. And finally, little sustained effort has been put into reflexively negotiating the field of postcolonial studies itself according to the specificities of the region, or into unpacking the critical, theoretical and disciplinary questions raised by new inquiry into its literatures and cultures. As a consequence, the category of ‘the Middle East’ has been constructed in postcolonial studies in an ahistorical, unsystematic and fragmentary way. A coherent and comprehensive framework for addressing this region thus remains wanting in the field.

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‘Post/Colonial Modernity’: A New Horizon for Analysis This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop just such a framework. It assembles some of the world’s foremost postcolonialists to reflexively interrogate the category of ‘the Middle East’ as it has been figured in postcolonial studies, and to collaboratively explore the core critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for the field. In twenty-four chapters distributed across an introductory and three main sections, it aims to attune postcolonial studies to a global, dialectical understanding of the region. It thereby provides a foundational reference point for the field as scholars and students continue to research and teach in this direction. Given the new readings of the region it generates, it will also be of value to those working in adjacent fields such as Middle East studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, history, critical geography, politics and international relations, and so forth. Chapters have been provided by scholars at leading institutions from around the world on the basis of their acknowledged, field-defining work on or around these questions. The Companion also includes two interviews conducted by the editors with prominent writer-intellectuals – Ahdaf Soueif and Sinan Antoon – whose literary and cultural practices have to a large extent been shaped by their abiding personal as well as political investments in the region, and whose works have received significant postcolonial scholarly acclaim. The framework this Companion develops for its postcolonial approach to the Middle East is derived from what the editors and contributors have homed in on as the concept of ‘post/colonial modernity’.19 As a broad intellectual and historical horizon for analysis, this concept suggests both the impact of diverse colonial encounters on the modern history of the region and the forging of complex postcolonial positionalities against continued manifestations of local and global hegemony. Evoking the recent upsurge of interest in questions of modernity in the field of Middle East studies, it provides a grounding for the synthetic and historical perspective hitherto lacking in postcolonial studies.20 In so doing, it allows for the comparative assessment of questions of colonialism, imperialism, statecraft, religion, ethnicity, minority, gender, sexuality, terror, war, revolution and migration within and across the Levant, the Gulf, North Africa, Iran, Turkey, and beyond. Focalised through the lens of a post/colonial modernity where multiple colonial genealogies, anti-colonial resistance movements and postcolonial formations define political, social and cultural expression across its regional and transnational geographies, the Middle East demands what Waïl Hassan, one of the contributors to this Companion, has forwarded as a ‘tertiary model of comparison’.21 Triangulating the ‘North-South’ and ‘East-West’ critical paradigms long predominant in postcolonial studies with a ‘South-South’ paradigm attentive to such exchange on a regional scale, this model responds to discourses and practices of colonialism, imperialism and global capitalism in the Middle East without sacrificing the specificity of the local. And just as this model acknowledges the essential simultaneity of the global and local within its mode of analysis, so too does it elucidate the interplay between concurrently colonial and postcolonial modernities, rendered legible through its insistence on the forward-slash in the term ‘post/colonial’: a construction that indicates the precarious interplay between states of post/coloniality in operation. Thus adopting a tertiary or triangulated model of comparison in its very design – its juxtaposition of chapters that engage distinct but mutually informative historical and geographical registers

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within sections and within the whole – this Companion enacts as well as prescribes a new, ‘post/colonial’ framework for the Middle East. Throughout, the focus of this Companion is on literary and cultural critique. Across parts (I) ‘The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism’, (II) ‘States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality’ and (III) ‘The Post/ Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context’, its chapters reveal the political, social and cultural dialectics of post/colonial modernity in the Middle East via original readings of literary and cultural texts. Spanning the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries; working flexibly across national, regional and global contexts; and covering a range of forms and genres including fiction, poetry, life-writing, film, documentary, pictorial art, performance art, popular music, graffiti, the digital media and translation, they individually and collectively trace the conflicts and contradictions of such as registered in the literatures and cultures of the Middle East. The analytical perspective afforded by this Companion’s broadly ‘post/colonial’ approach to Middle Eastern literary and cultural texts promises significant new insight into questions crucial not just to postcolonial studies as it continues to engage this region, but also to the entire interdisciplinary spectrum of contemporary literary studies. Oriented around this framework, the chapters of this Companion provide new readings of questions of comparative literary history in the Middle East; the evolution of literary and cultural forms as mediated by regional and transnational influences; linguistic interactions between Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew, among other languages; diasporic Middle Eastern writing in languages both regional and global; the translational circulation and reception of Middle Eastern texts in English and other global languages; processes of Middle Eastern canonisation in the region and in the world; representations of the Middle East among ‘Western’ authors, cultural practitioners and media sources; the relationship between aesthetics, politics and resistance in global context; the digital media and fluctuating figurations of ‘the literary’; and, most broadly, the place of the Middle East in current theorisations of world literature. As such, this framework establishes a conceptual as well as a historical basis for the project of expanding both postcolonial and global literary studies for the region. Through parts I, II and III, this Companion re-examines questions of colonial history, the postcolonial state and neo-imperialism from the perspective of a range of pertinent Middle Eastern texts and contexts. In so doing, it cumulatively traces how the present conflicts and crises of the region are defined by the dialectics of post/colonial modernity, emphasising along the way the persistence of imperialism and its aftermath there. By undertaking this approach, this Companion articulates a new, ‘post/colonial’ sense of Middle Eastern literary and cultural modernity. Individually, chapters focus on the (postcolonial) problematic of the ‘subaltern’ in the Arab world; the role of Orientalism in the formation of a modern Arab literary, cultural and educational sphere; the origins of the ‘Arab’/‘Jew’ divide in Orientalism; the roots and contemporary branches of the Israel/Palestine conflict; colonial history, state formation and cultures of resistance in Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb, and the wider Arab world; the clash of tradition and modernity in regional and transnational expressions of (fundamentalist) Islam; the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world from the late nineteenth century to the present; the ongoing crises in Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria; the Arab Spring; and the Middle Eastern refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe. The range of Middle Eastern literatures and cultures covered by this Companion include not only those of Egypt, Palestine,

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Israel, Turkey, the Maghreb, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria, but also their global correlates as manifest in anglophone and translated fiction, poetry, life-writing and film; metropolitan writings and films about Palestine; digital media art, activism and propaganda; literary blogs focused on the region; and popular forms such as graffiti and music in their transnational circulation. While developing postcolonial theories and methodologies appropriate to the Middle East, this Companion thus also provides unique analyses of some of the most pressing issues and compelling representations of the region through its post/colonial modernity. In sum, this Edinburgh Companion contributes to the evolving worldly remit of postcolonial studies by examining and revising its inherited critical constructs according to the specificities of the Middle East. In the process, it develops a ‘post/colonial’ framework appropriate to the region, and a new, ‘post/colonial’ sense of Middle Eastern literary and cultural modernity.

Overview of Parts and Chapters The twenty-four chapters of this Edinburgh Companion are distributed across an introductory and three main parts. Each of these sections takes what might be considered more a conceptual than a historical ‘moment’ as its point of departure. While the moments of colonial encounter (Part I) and of state formation (Part II) in the Middle East are certainly historically and geographically localisable, their effects, logics and often even practices just as certainly reverberate into what the editors call the region’s ‘post/colonial present’ (Part III). By positing such moments as conceptual and allocating chapters on the basis of their engagements with them, this Companion embodies in its structure the dialectical intertwining of past and present, local and global that might be said to define post/colonial modernity in the Middle East.

Introduction Including the current one, the introductory section of this Companion is comprised of five chapters. It identifies the urgency of the Middle East as an area of inquiry within postcolonial studies and re-examines the field according to its intellectual demands. It explores questions of the institutional history of postcolonial studies; the status and remit of postcolonial scholarship in the contemporary anglophone academy; the nature and extent of its engagement with the Middle East; its present limitations in dealing with a region of vast political, social and cultural complexity; and the role of the engaged writer-intellectual in response to the representational, political, and other challenges posed by such. As explained above, this analysis rapidly reveals the need for a coherent and comprehensive framework for the Middle East in postcolonial studies. The chapters of the Introduction proceed to conceptualise and address the core issues facing a postcolonial approach to this region. By confronting these issues directly, the Introduction establishes a framework – which the editors broadly define as ‘post/colonial modernity’ – that structures the remainder of this Companion and that envisions a possible future for postcolonial scholarship on this region. Chapter 2, ‘Edward Said and the Institution of Postcolonial Studies’ by Karim Mattar, sets the Companion in motion with a critique of the institutionalisation of

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‘Postcolonial Studies’ in the anglophone academy. Achieved by means of its repression of the Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins of Edward Said’s theory of colonial discourse (a theory it consequently misread, misappropriated for other mainly British imperial contexts, as in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft), such institutionalisation, Mattar argues, must be overturned in order to adapt the field to the Middle East and to revive its once radical political intent. For the author, this project necessarily begins with a reinstatement of Said’s understanding of Palestine, the materiality of exile, exilic consciousness, contrapuntalism and secular humanism as a cornerstone of the postcolonial. In undertaking such a project, Mattar proposes a new genealogy of the postcolonial that locates the Middle East at its very heart. Chapter 3, ‘Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first-century Horizons’ by Waïl S. Hassan, furthers this line of inquiry by assessing the implications of postcolonial theory for the critical consideration of Middle Eastern literatures and cultures. In this chapter, Hassan traverses the intellectual histories of postcolonial studies, comparative literature and Middle Eastern (especially Arabic) literary studies with an eye towards reconfiguring the relationship between them. Identifying key limitations or failures in each as traditionally conceived (postcolonialism’s ‘mortuary rhetoric’, comparative literature’s Eurocentrism, Middle East studies’ indebtedness to the categories of European modernity, etc.), he deftly moves towards a new, dialectical sense of mutual illumination and cross-fertilisation as expressed by his prescriptions of ‘re-comparativising’ Arabic and ‘triangulating’ our frameworks of analysis. He details the extent and potency of such an approach by outlining a new, politically incisive and theoretically rigorous research agenda that spans the fields while at the same time suggesting alternatives to their internal shortcomings. Throughout, Hassan draws on a wide range of Arabic literary texts from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries to illustrate the critical and interpretive possibilities opened by his approach. Chapters 4 and 5 break from the essay format of other contributions in order to present interviews conducted by the editors with Ahdaf Soueif and Sinan Antoon. The interview form presents an invaluable opportunity to explore the ways in which concepts and approaches drawn from postcolonial discourse translate into practice for those actually engaged in the production of cultural and political discourses both within the region and in transnational relation to it. In Chapter 4, Anna Ball and Soueif discuss the politics of location, form and cultural activism in relation to both the transnational landscapes of Soueif’s novels and to the geographically specific locations of her political work in Egypt and Palestine. In Chapter 5, Karim Mattar and Antoon discuss the role and responsibilities of the engaged Middle Eastern writerintellectual; the burden imposed by personal as well as political history on creative practices; the ongoing crises in Iraq and Palestine; the politics of language, translation and the academy; and the category of ‘the postcolonial’. Navigating a variety of perspectives on these and other questions apposite to this Companion, these interviews thus make for a supple and open-ended complement to the preceding chapters of the Introduction. With the critical, theoretical and disciplinary foundations of this Companion having been laid in the Introduction, Parts I, II and III proceed to illustrate the valences of its ‘post/colonial’ framework with reference to a range of Middle Eastern texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

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I. The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Part I is focused on the modern colonial encounter in the Middle East, and explores the formative impact of this moment on the history of the region as well as on its literatures and cultures. The history of empire in this region is a long and complex one. From classical antiquity to the Caliphate in its various dynastic manifestations, the Crusades, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and so forth, the political as well as socio-cultural topography of the region was inscribed and re-inscribed according to influences both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, both local and global. This Companion, however, takes as its critical point of departure the interface between, broadly, ‘East’ and ‘West’ as defined by modern European – primarily British, French and Zionist – imperialism there. This is because, as discussed above, the category of ‘the Middle East’ was itself first devised on this historical terrain as a means to facilitate such interests, rendering this method of contextualisation foundational to a postcolonial approach to the region. Furthermore, and as most influentially elaborated by Edward Said in terms of Orientalism, the discourses, practices and technologies of modern European imperialism in the Middle East were (and continue to be) specific to the region, and thus demand specialised postcolonial attention.22 In itself critically compelling, analysis of the mechanisms of power and control (including statecraft, political cartography, legal and political administration, institution-building, military control, population control, ethnic and religious classification, the introduction of new languages, and new scholarly enterprises such as Oriental studies) that were in large part to shape the modern history of the Middle East also provides a grounds for comparison with other regions of the colonial world. Along similar lines, the impact of modern European imperialism on the literatures and cultures of the Middle East was also localised and distinct. It not only spurred what is (problematically) known as the ‘Nahda’ – or cultural renaissance – of the Arab world via the attendant influx and adoption of new literary forms and genres, philosophical and political world views, sciences and technologies, languages, translations, and so forth. Further, it gave rise to a multitude of local and specific forms of anti-imperial nationalism, resistance and political consciousness that were, and that continue to find expression, in the evolving literary and cultural traditions of the region. In short, the encounter with Europe – ongoing and incomplete – prompted what we are calling a ‘post/colonial’ modernity specific to the Middle East, one with important ramifications for our understanding of its literatures and cultures. By tracing these resonances in detail, Part I initiates a wholesale reimagining of comparative Middle Eastern literary history. Chapter 6, ‘Between the Postcolonial and the Middle East: Writing the Subaltern in the Arab World’ by Juan R. I. Cole, sets the scene for this section by considering the circulation of the discourse of subalternity in the historiography of the Middle East from the 1960s to the present. Conceived by Cole as a point of intersection between postcolonial studies and Middle East studies, this discourse, he argues, has played a crucial role in expanding scholarly attention towards marginalised social groupings such as the peasantry, the working classes and the bedouin across the region. Subject to the overlapping forces of colonialism, postcolonial state formation and native elitism – to, that is, the region’s post/colonial modernity – the subaltern in the Middle East thus emerges in his account as an essential locus of postcolonial engagement. Nevertheless,

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he continues, subalternity there differs significantly from that of the South Asian contexts in which the subaltern studies school was originally invested. Via a thorough and wide-ranging literature review, Cole remaps the discourse of subalternity for critical approaches to ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. Chapter 7, ‘Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s Literary World’ by Wen-chin Ouyang, explores the role of Orientalism in the formation of a modern Arab literary, cultural and educational sphere in the latenineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. Epitomised by the pioneering Egyptian critic and reformer Taha Husayn, this sphere, Ouyang argues, was substantially inflected by the ‘East-West’ colonial encounter and the Orientalist ideas, concepts, bodies of knowledge and world views by which it was accompanied during this period. With reference to Pierre Cachia’s canonical literary biography of this figure, she seeks to draw out such hitherto underexplored cross-cultural influences on and models for Husayn and his cosmopolitan programme of cultural and educational reform. In so doing, Ouyang provides a new reading of the Arab cultural renaissance – or Nahda – that is attentive to its underpinnings in colonial history, and thereby of the emergence of attendant categories such as ‘nation’, ‘national identity’, ‘classical’ and ‘modern’, and ‘world literature’ in the Middle East more broadly. Chapter 8, ‘On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited’ by Ella Shohat, extends this emphasis on Orientalism by tracing the roots of contemporary discourses of ethnic and religious difference in the Middle East back to such as employed during the colonial period. In her genealogy critique, Shohat argues that current political and scholarly approaches to the region, premised on identity politics and nationthinking, cannot account for the deep-seated structural determinants of the violence that continues to be perpetrated upon minorities such as Assyrians in Iraq, Maronites in Lebanon, Berbers in Algeria and Kurds in Turkey. Rather, it is the system of ethnic and religious classification at the heart of Orientalism that instilled the violence of majority/ minority identifications and divisions in and, indeed, as the modern Middle East. With reference to the ‘Arab-Jew’ as a figure that paradigmatically exceeds Orientalism’s classificatory logic (in this case, its inscription of ‘Jews-as-West’ and ‘Arabs-as-East’), and tracing how this figure was systematically ‘split’ or ‘bifurcated’ in Orientalist literary and visual culture, Shohat aims to destabilise the crude differentiations that continue to be fixed by such. She concludes by drawing out the implications of this critique for a renewed consideration of the Israel/Palestine conflict in particular. Chapter 9, ‘Colonial Violence, Law and Justice in Egypt’ by Stephen Morton, focuses on the representation of the notorious Denshawai incident in British-occupied Egypt within Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love (1999) and Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s novel ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi (1906). Through comparative literary and cultural analysis of these texts, Morton exposes both contradictions and elisions in the liberal rhetoric of the British occupation that must be accounted for, while foregrounding colonialism’s resulting socioeconomic inequalities, which serve to produce discursive power imbalances even in these attempts to redress colonial histories. Ultimately, Morton’s analysis identifies a history of unlawful colonial violence that can be traced as the genealogical origins of present-day state violence in Egypt and the Arab world: a reading that sheds new light on contemporary governmental responses to protest, while also radically contesting neo-Orientalist framings of violence and terror as inherent and specific to ‘Middle Eastern’ state mentalities.

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Chapter 10, ‘Peripheral Visions: Translational Polemics and Feminist Arguments in Colonial Egypt’ by Marilyn Booth, turns to the vibrant debate about the role and status of women in the colonial nation within the context of 1890s Egypt, and the unexpected forms of transnational exchange that surface through such debate. Focusing particularly on the 1892 exchange in print between two Arabophone women born in Lebanon, Hanna Kasbani Kurani and Zaynab Fawwāz, Booth explores the hitherto unrecognised ways in which women within the Arab world interpreted ‘Western’ modes of feminist activism, including the British suffrage movement, in ways that rendered them locally resonant and expedient to their own liberationist causes. Booth’s chapter thus invites us to consider the conceptual and contextual as well as literal processes of translation implicit in transnational feminist exchange. In this analysis, Booth presents a radical contestation of feminist ‘imagined geographies’ which have sometimes positioned ‘Western’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ feminisms as antithetically opposed, and looks instead towards a model based on dialogue, exchange and coevality. Chapter 11, ‘Reimagining the Ottoman Legacy’ by Erdağ Göknar, turns to Turkey and explores how Turkish modernity was constituted during an early Republican era which saw the denigration and repression of the country’s Ottoman, Islamic heritage. Such ‘internalised orientalism’, Göknar argues, resulted in a far-reaching refashioning of Turkish social and cultural identity in the twentieth century, one that can be traced through an analysis of literary, especially novelistic form. In recent years, however, authors have sought to retrieve elements of the past in their literary writings and, in so doing, to expose and critique the Orientalist logic at the heart of Turkish modernity. Drawing on Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red (1998; trans. 2001) as an extended case study, Göknar demonstrates how the Nobel Prize-winning author appropriates the archival object of the Islamic miniature as a new model for literary form that re-inscribes the Ottoman legacy in a more positive light. He explores Pamuk’s rich but critically neglected investment in the Ottoman past, including the legacies of Sufism, Islamic tradition and Istanbul. Pamuk’s writings, Göknar concludes, suggest a critical and, indeed, ‘postorientalist’ reimagining of the discourse of Turkish modernity. Tracing the pathological upheavals of the modern Middle East back to a colonial encounter that has never ceased to take place, Part I also elucidates how, crystallised under the weight of such, the literatures and cultures of the region as well as their global correlates continue to imagine, negotiate and resist this conflicted heritage.

II. States of Post/Coloniality: Politics, Religion, Gender, Sexuality Part II is focused on the formation of the modern Middle Eastern state in the wake of colonialism, and examines the implications of this heritage for questions of politics, religion, gender and sexuality as well as of literary and cultural production in the region. Across the twentieth century and continuing into the present, the process of state formation in the Middle East has been diverse, multifaceted and ridden with conflict. The polities of the region, precarious, in constant flux, have by and large been constituted in what might be considered the attempted and ongoing negotiation of material, socio-cultural and ideological incommensurables. These include the European colonial heritage; the persistent imperial and neo-imperial influence of especially Britain, France and the United States after formal decolonisation; the demands of anti-colonial

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nationalism on a local and a regional scale; those of innumerable sub-national social and cultural groupings, whether rooted in local tradition or newly emergent in modernity; new political alliances and economic dependencies between states in the region and with others around the world; the pressures of international politics and of global capital; and the rise of ideologies alternate to nation, most notably Islamic Revivalism as a purported unifying agent across the region. From the maelstrom of these irreconcilable forces, a number of hegemonic forms of statehood have come to predominate in the post/colonial Middle East. Among the most prevalent are (European-modelled) parliamentary republic (e.g. Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, etc.); absolute or constitutional monarchy (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the Gulf states, etc.); military dictatorship (e.g. Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, etc.); radical theocracy (e.g. Iran, Afghanistan, the Islamic State, etc.); and what might be referred to as ‘failed state’ for its de facto negation of the functions of state (e.g. Lebanon, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc.). This section thinks through the dynamics of the post/colonial Middle Eastern state for its impact on expressions of politics, religion, gender and sexuality in the region. Specifically, it inquires into the politics and poetics of the post/colonial Middle Eastern state; international legal discourses and solidarity practices in relation to such; the Islamic Revival and its impact on notions of statehood; and the politics of gender and sexuality under these dominant forms of statehood. In so doing, it provides for a specifically Middle Eastern contribution to key topics in postcolonial studies such as authoritarianism and dictatorship, international law, cosmopolitanism, secularism/post-secularism, third-wave feminism, gender and sexual identity, and so forth, and thus another basis for postcolonial and global comparison with other regions. When considering the literatures and cultures of the Middle East, it is evident that the mechanisms of modern state formation there have played and continue to play a major structural role in their thematic and formal development, their modes of sociopolitical engagement and their institutional locations. At once a site of anti-colonial resistance, of national canonisation and of the repression and silencing of dissident voices, the post/colonial state both incorporates the literary-cultural sphere as the expression of a hegemonic imagined community and produces its own alternatives to such from the perspective of its margins. Traversing the liminal space between the state and its marginalised political, religious, gender and sexual positionalities through close attention to the literatures and cultures produced therein, this section aims primarily to demystify the occlusions of post/colonial modernity in the Middle East. In the process, it imagines a regional or transregional canonicity oriented not around the nation, but rather around its historically and geographically recurrent others, making for another new direction in comparative Middle Eastern literary history. Chapter 12, ‘Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories? (On Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert)’ by Réda Bensmaïa, positions itself by way of response to Fredric Jameson’s claim of the ‘necessarily allegorical’ status of ‘the third-world text’, which he views as an essentialist totalisation of the literariness of the Algerian postcolonial novel, particularly in its engagement with questions of language, audience, nation and ideology. Bensmaïa puts Jameson’s proposition to the test by scrutinising Tahar Djaout’s L’Invention du désert according to its classification as an apparently ‘third-world text’ that presents an ‘allegory of nation’. Engaging in a philosophical scrutiny of the desert as site of allegory within this novel, Bensmaïa argues that far

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from presenting a legible inscription of nation, Djaout’s desert instead presents a complexly deterritorialised zone of erased and rewritten histories that challenges the very possibility of producing or reading Algeria as ‘text’. Bensmaïa thus finds in the desert a powerful motif for the ongoing process of ‘becoming’ in which the post/colonial Maghreb finds itself. Chapter 13, ‘Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies and Millennial Palestine’ by Salah D. Hassan, turns to Palestine and charts what Hassan calls the ‘passing away’ of the once-hegemonic idea of an independent secular democratic Palestine within the 1967 borders alongside Israel (also known as the two-state solution). Coinciding with the deaths of Yasir Arafat, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish in the first decade of the new millennium, and aggravated by more recent political events including Israel’s wars on Gaza and President Donald J. Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, this demise, he argues, has prompted a widespread sense of despair in Palestinian politics even as Palestinians continue to resist the violence of the Israeli occupation. The first part of this chapter focuses on despair and hope as the affective structure that has conditioned Palestinian responses to Israeli expansionism. The second part examines how this affective structure is evident in eulogies written for Arafat, Said and Darwish. To extricate Palestinian politics from this predicament, Hassan concludes, we must retrieve these figures’ messages of emancipation from the mournful teleology within which their legacies have been inscribed. Chapter 14, ‘“They are in the right because I love them”: Literature and Palestine Solidarity in the 1980s’ by Anna Bernard, brings a global perspective to bear on questions of Palestinian literary and cultural representation. Noting the emergence of a contemporary metropolitan culture of engagement and solidarity with Palestine (as in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement), Bernard aims to contextualise its predominant civil society and humanitarian discourses in relation to the positionalities of post/colonial discourse. Bernard focuses on solidarity literature of the 1980s: a critical point at which, as Bernard puts it, ‘the future of the national movement appeared uncertain, and the humanitarian turn had not yet been consolidated’. She explores the distinctive constructions of solidarity assumed and incited in the work of Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh and French author Jean Genet, both of whom invoke discourses of ‘love’ within their work, but with the result of varying political positionalities. Palestine, Bernard concludes, thus brings to light an antagonism that continues to modulate postcolonial approaches to the Middle East, and, moreover, the field of postcolonial studies per se – that between liberationist and humanitarian modes of solidarity. Chapter 15, ‘Nikes in Nineveh: Daesh, the Ruin and the Global Logic of Eradication’ by Sadia Abbas, reads Islam and the Islamic Revival that has swept across the Middle East since the late 1970s/early 1980s not as the civilisational antagonist of the regime of global capitalism, but rather as a spectacular, intensified realisation of its inner impulses. In this powerful intervention, Abbas focuses on Daesh, the Islamic State, and argues that the logic of eradication deployed by this latest manifestation of Islamic Revivalism in Nineveh, Iraq and in Palmyra, Syria is an intensified version of that of global capitalism itself as witnessed around the world. Close-reading a range of primary Daesh sources such as its online magazine, Dabiq, and its recruitment videos, and drawing on theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, Faisal Devji, R. A. Judy and Achille Mbembe, she demonstrates Daesh’s characteristically late-capitalist fixations on the

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spectacle, the ruin, the Real, the Law and the necropolitical. She elaborates further with reference to Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu (2014). This film, she shows, traces how the socio-political upheavals caused by (US-led) globalisation and neoliberalism in the eponymous Muslim city create the conditions for the rise of jihadism there. Abbas concludes that in its establishment of a hegemonic, homogeneous ‘state’, Daesh extends the logic of global capitalism to one of its horrific ends. Chapter 16, ‘There was no “Humble Task” in the Revolution: Anti-colonial Activity and Arab Women’ by Anastasia Valassopoulos, reevaluates the postcolonial feminist narrative of Arab women’s involvement in the decolonisation process. While attentive to the existing literary and critical discourses surrounding women’s complex positions in these moments and movements, Valassopoulos identifies untheorised forms of resistance that, she argues, have tended to remain invisible but are worthy of our attention. Working comparatively across Palestinian, Algerian, and Tunisian contexts, Valassopoulos explores the revolutionary potentials of women’s intellectualism as an identifiable mode of struggle; of the category of the ‘veteran’ as one that offers a fresh way of conceiving of women’s solidarity and revolutionary inheritance; and of varied conceptions of ‘labour’, which help us think differently about how it might be possible to ‘work’ towards revolution. Through this creative and expansive process of rereading, Valassopoulos argues that ‘feminist recuperative work in the Arab world’ has the potential to ‘look deeper into some of the alternative stories, practices and histories, and to moments of the everyday and the uncelebrated’. She thus expands our understanding of the intersection between postcolonial and gendered liberation in the context of Arab anti-colonial struggles in vital materialist directions. Chapter 17, ‘The Queerness of Textuality and/as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter’ by Lindsey Moore, presents a considered and creative reading of Hoda Barakat’s 1990 novel in order to explore the critical and pedagogic issues that surface in the act of working with Arabic texts in translation. Via this consideration, Moore approaches the complexities that emerge around the particular task of translating desire, non-normative identification and sexuality at both linguistic and cultural levels. Drawing on pedagogical as well as textual evidence, Moore suggests that the reading and translation process presents an apt opportunity to destabilise ‘homo-hegemonic’ versions of national history, while simultaneously alerting us to the dangers of critical co-optation when reading sexuality within the cross-cultural arena. Moore’s chapter thus offers a vital engagement with both the politics of translation and the politics of ‘queer’ theorisation as these have been employed within the context of Arabic literature. By engaging with a text that, she argues, ‘contextualises “queer” in open-ended rather than “colonising” ways’, it becomes possible to appreciate the multidimensional refractions of positionality and interpretation that must be negotiated in the task of postcolonial reading, and indeed of postcolonial ‘queering’. Moore’s chapter brings Part II to a fitting close. This section embodies in its structure the value of making comparisons and establishing connections between those on the margins of both the national and the transnational imaginary of the modern Middle East. The alternative canon it models from the literatures and cultures of these margins transcribes a critical riposte to the ideologies of violent political, religious, gender and sexual disenfranchisement characteristic of the region’s post/ colonial modernity.

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III. The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context Part III is focused on the contemporary moment in the Middle East, a critical juncture at which questions of terror, war, revolution, neo-imperialism and transnationalism have come to dominate regional politics, scholarship and literary and cultural production alike. Given its colonial heritage and processes of state formation, it seems legitimate to claim that the Middle East today is defined by the dialectics of post/ colonial modernity. This account is further substantiated by the renewal of especially Anglo-American policies of diplomatic, economic and military intervention there in recent decades. Read in light of its modernity, the contemporary landscape of crisis in the region – most dramatically embodied by the Islamic Revival, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring, the rise of the Islamic State and the Middle Eastern refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe – manifests in terms of an eruption of antagonisms and contradictions inherent to a centennial and as yet incomplete historical unfolding. Yet recent generations have also witnessed an unprecedented surge in the visibility of issues of Middle Eastern politics, societies and cultures as well as of the rights and representations of immigrant Arab and Muslim communities on the global stage. Such developments are discernable in the resurgence of anti-Arabism and Islamophobia in Europe and the United States; in the rise of the global security state and its associated discourses and technologies; and in the mobilisation of a contestatory politics of dialogue, inclusion and multiculturalism oriented around the figure of the (immigrant) Arab/Muslim. Bringing the Companion to its methodological crux, this section addresses the regional and the transnational issues currently gravitating around ‘the Middle East’ – now conceived as a nexus of global entanglement in multiple layers and dimensions – alongside one another, as interrelated and, indeed, inseparable. Having – as per the preceding sections – in effect rendered the category of ‘the Middle East’ a point of intersection between those of ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘North’ and ‘South’, it thereby frames the topic of crisis as central not just to the critical consideration of this region at the present moment, but also to the practices of postcolonial and global comparatism writ large. Such a globalised conception of the region is borne out by this section’s approach to contemporary Middle Eastern literary and cultural production. On the one hand, it inquires into the impact of the contemporary landscape of crisis on the region’s literatures and cultures. Specifically, it assesses how novels, literary blogs, graffiti, popular music, political poetry, pictorial and conceptual artworks, documentaries and digital media sources from Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria have thematically and formally registered such over the last decade, making for a new, transmedial and transregional archive of the present. On the other, it examines how transnational forms and genres – including anglophone novels and autobiographies by Arab immigrants in Britain and the United States and European fictional, filmic and media treatments of Middle Eastern refugees – respond to cross-cultural discourses and representations of the region and provide counter-narratives of its multiple current conflicts. Typically read as distinct and incompatible, this section places these regional and transnational canons in dialogue for their overlapping and complementary engagements with, in a word, contemporary Middle Eastern globality. By adopting this approach, it posits what might be called a worlded Middle Eastern literary and cultural sphere as a critical counterpoint to such.

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Chapter 18, ‘Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar’ by Tahia Abdel Nasser, assesses the rise of anglophone Arab writing, specifically life-writing, in light of the regional conflicts of recent decades. Situating this field in relation to wider trends in global writing and publishing, Abdel Nasser starts with a survey of prominent anglophone Arab autobiographies by Palestinian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Lebanese and Libyan writers from the last twentyfive years. She argues that in their nuanced meditations on issues of exile, diaspora, dispossession, occupation and war, such narratives play a crucial role for international audiences in that they disrupt common assumptions and stereotypes about the politics of the Middle East. She then turns in more detail to two recent texts focused respectively on Palestine and Libya, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013) by the US-based Palestinian-American writer and actor Najla Said and The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between (2016) by the London-based Libyan novelist Hisham Matar. In her readings, she demonstrates that it is precisely through the intimacy and affective qualities of life-writing as form that such writers are able to successfully humanise the otherwise alien conflicts of the region for their audiences. Abdel Nasser concludes that when read alongside one another, such examples of anglophone Arab autobiography cumulatively suggest a new, post/colonial understanding of the Middle East. Chapter 19, ‘Bare Life in the “New Iraq”’ by Ikram Masmoudi, draws on Giorgio Agamben’s paradigmatic concept to address the fate of the Iraqi subject in the years following the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. In this chapter, Masmoudi demonstrates through close readings of literary texts produced in this period – including the novels The Green Zone (2009) by Shākir Nūrī and Baghdad Marlboro (2012) by Najm Wālī – how Iraqis have been reduced to a condition of ‘bare life’ where they are drawn to target both the occupier and their fellow citizens in suicide bombings. Focusing on the liminal figure of the Iraqi US Army translator – a figure who inhabits both sides of the (neo-)imperial divide, yet does not fully belong to either – she traces through these texts the occupier/occupied dialectic in the context of the ‘War on Terror’. Such texts, Masmoudi concludes, powerfully embody in both their thematic context and their form the violence, fragmentation and outright destruction brought about in Iraq and on Iraqis since 2003. Chapter 20, ‘Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature? Iranian Literary Blogs and the Evolution of the Literary Field’ by Laetitia Nanquette, turns to the twenty-first century phenomenon of the ‘literary blogosphere’ as an innovative medium through which it becomes possible to assess the impact of transnational technologies and formats on Iranian literature, and consequently, on the production of socio-political and cultural hegemonies. Through a contextual survey as well as case-studies of specific literary blogs, Nanquette presents a vital ‘counter-reading’ of the Iranian blogosphere that contests its arguably neo-Orientalist critical framing as an inherently ‘revolutionary’ realm of ‘Cyberutopia’. Instead, Nanquette produces a subtly contextualised reading of the literary blog as a realm in which formal and thematic innovation has occurred – though according to a process that must be understood as evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and which thus demands a reconfiguration of postcolonial assumptions about online discourse in the Middle East. Chapter 21, ‘Popular Culture and the Arab Spring’ by Caroline Rooney, proposes literature and culture as active, participating agents in liberatory and/or revolutionary

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movements, as well as sites of critical reflection and/or colonial appropriation. Tracing a trajectory between the importance attached to popularist national culture in the work of African liberation theorists such as Aimé Césaire, Amícal Cabral and Frantz Fanon and the central role of popular cultures and grass-roots creativity in the development and articulation of revolutionary discourse during the Arab Spring, Rooney explores a range of forms including graffiti, film and popular music as they have surfaced within and between the Egyptian and Syrian revolutionary struggles. Through her analysis, Rooney pushes towards a renewed and reinvigorated postcolonial understanding of revolution that places the creativity of the people at its heart, while alerting us to the dangers of appropriation that may occur when the Arab Spring is mistranslated within Western intellectual frameworks. Her chapter thus powerfully resituates the Arab Spring within a narrative of post/coloniality. Chapter 22, ‘The Syrian Revolution, Art and the End of Ideology’ by miriam cooke, comprises an inspiring meditation on the Syrian Revolution of 2011. The locus of perhaps one of the most devastating humanitarian catastrophes of modern times, the Revolution, though continuing to this day, is often dismissed as having descended into crisis and failure. cooke rejects the finality of such accounts. In the creative works of Syria’s writers, artists, filmmakers, digital media practitioners, and others, both at home and abroad, she sees not only an enduring revolutionary momentum, but also the expansion of such into a new transnational terrain of engaged cultural praxis. In this chapter, cooke surveys this terrain. She covers local and emigrant/exiled writers, artists and documentarians, as well as the gallery and the website as transnational physical/digital spaces. She argues that having created the circumstances for the global dissemination of its cultures, the Revolution has also laid the groundwork for a global mobilisation through which it might be addressed, and identifies the work of artistactivists as central to the production of a new style of revolutionary ‘organic intellectual’. A resounding expression of faith in this project and of hope in the future of the country, cooke’s archive of the Syrian Revolution and its transnational imaginary provides an apt riposte to pessimism. Chapter 23, ‘Biopolitical Landscapes of the “Small Human”: Figuring the Child in the Contemporary Middle Eastern Refugee Crisis in Europe’ by Anna Ball, rounds off this section by examining one of the outcomes of the conflicts addressed in previous chapters: namely, the Middle Eastern refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe. Focusing on the overdetermined but frequently silenced figure of the child within contemporary media and literary discourses, Ball presents a fresh reading of the European response to the ‘crisis’ as underpinned by neo-Orientalist imagined geographies, which, she argues, have been reconstructed in biopolitical and necropolitical terms rendered particularly visible through the discourse of ethical exceptionalism attached to ‘the refugee child’. Drawing on postcolonial and human rights discourses, Ball seeks to read against the discursive construction of the child in these hierarchical and dehumanising terms by turning to the resistant voice of Syrian ‘child refugee’ Nujeen Mustafa. In Mustafa’s waywardly childish, childishly wise and critically playful voice, Ball finds an alternative representational mode that radically contests the neo-Orientalist biopolitical hierarchisation of human life, and thus transcends the residual coloniality rendered visible within the mobile landscape of the post/colonial present. In the ‘Afterword’, the editors Anna Ball and Karim Mattar bring the volume to a close by articulating its urgency against the backdrop of present-day events. They

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identify future areas of postcolonial inquiry into the Middle East (such as globalisation, human rights, environment, digital humanities, pedagogy, etc.), and reflect on the volume’s wider implications for the future of postcolonial studies per se. They suggest that the model of a ‘post/colonial Middle East’ developed throughout the volume opens exciting new possibilities for the field as it continues to expand its attention to other hitherto overlooked historical and geographical contexts, political issues and debates, and literary and cultural canons. Forward-looking, the ‘Afterword’ thus makes for a provocative concluding note. *

*

*

It is perhaps in its as yet unfolding history of global entanglement that the Middle East – its conflicts and crises, its all-too-human devastations, its very idea – might most effectively be addressed. This Companion delineates a strand of this history through the literatures and cultures of post/colonial modernity in the Middle East, and, in so doing, makes for an important contribution to the humanistic understanding of a region under duress. Along the way, it crafts what the editors and contributors hope will be a powerful, flexible and influential framework for postcolonial critical inquiry into this region as scholars and students across the academic disciplines continue to engage the predicaments of globality.

Notes 1. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 2. See Alfred Mahan, ‘The Persian Gulf and International Relations’, The National Review, XL, (1902), pp. 27–45. 3. See Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Zachary Lockman, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016). 4. The term ‘Greater Middle East’ was first used in a working paper the George W. Bush administration submitted to the G-8 Summit in 2004. A leaked draft of the paper was acquired and published by the newspaper Al Hayat. See ‘President Bush’s “Greater Middle East Partnership Initiative”: U.S. Working Paper For G-8’, Al Hayat, 15 March 2004, http://english.daralhayat.com (last accessed 1 June 2016), n.p. 5. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 2. Also absent from this list as a synecdoche of the remit of early postcolonial studies, and likewise subject to complex colonial and imperial histories, are East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. As with the Middle East, postcolonialists have started to direct the field towards these regions and their diverse linguistic and literary traditions in recent years. 6. See Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons of Application’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 33:1 (2002), pp. 45–64 and Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘Introduction’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1&2 (2003), pp. 18–31. 7. Anna Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies’. Talk delivered at the ‘London Debates 2010: How does Europe in the 21st century address the legacy of colonialism?’, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 13–15 May 2010, http://events.sas. ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/postgraduate/Papers_London_Debates_2010/Bernard__ Palestine_and_postcolonial_studies.pdf (last accessed 1 June 2016), n.p.

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8. Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies’, n.p. For the first book-length study of controversies involving Palestinian or pro-Palestinian scholars in especially the US academy, see Matthew Abraham, Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 9. See Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986). In this monograph, Harlow reads the lauded Palestinian novelist and critic Ghassan Kanafani for his contributions to this genre alongside comparable African and Latin American authors. She is one of the first scholars to introduce (and later translate) Kanafani and Palestinian literature more generally to the English-speaking world. 10. Edward W. Said, ‘In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba, New Delhi, 16 December 1997’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1:1 (1998), pp. 81–96; p. 82. 11. Said, ‘In Conversation’, p. 82. 12. Ella Shohat, ‘Notes on the “Post-Colonial”’, Social Text, 31/32 (1992), pp. 99–113; pp. 104, 99, 104. 13. Joseph Massad, ‘The “Post-Colonial” Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel’, in Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (eds), The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 311–46; p. 312. Elsewhere, specifically in his work on Jordan, Massad has applied the colonial model to national contexts within the Middle East. See Joseph Massad, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 14. Neil Lazarus, ‘Introducing Postcolonial Studies’, in Neil Lazarus (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–16; p. 4. 15. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton and Jed Esty, ‘Beyond What? An Introduction’, in Loomba et al. (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–40; p. 13. 16. Loomba et al., ‘Beyond What?’, pp. 13, 1. 17. Neil Lazarus and Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Editorial’, new formations, 59 (2006), pp. 7–9; p. 7. 18. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, ‘Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial’, in Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (eds), Terror and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 1–24; p. 7. 19. A number of the volume’s contributors participated in a seminar organised by the editors on ‘The Postcolonial Middle East: Theory, Politics, Culture’ at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Convention at Harvard University in 2016, at which discussion of this and many other issues took place. 20. In Middle East studies, scholars such as Jaafar Aksikas, Michael Allan, Tarek El-Ariss, miriam cooke, Hamid Dabashi, Nergis Ertürk, Erdağ Göknar, Homa Katouzian, Stephan Meyer, Timothy Mitchell, Muhsin al-Musawi, Wen-chin Ouyang, Kamran Rastegar, Jeffrey Sacks and Stephen Sheehi, among many others, have in recent years all started to reexamine the history, practices and implications of (literary and cultural) modernity/modernisation in the region. Indeed, the question of modernity might well be considered a key critical nexus for the field moving forwards. In developing the concept of ‘post/colonial modernity’, this volume takes its cue from such scholarship, while also hoping to contribute productively to it via its unique ‘post/colonial’ emphasis. 21. See Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Which Languages?’, Comparative Literature, 65:1 (2013), pp. 5–14 and Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Arabic and the Paradigms of Comparison’, in Ursula Heise et al. (eds), ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline 2014–2015, http://stateofthediscipline. acla.org/entry/arabic-and-paradigms-comparison-1 (last accessed 1 June 2016), n.p. 22. See Said, Orientalism.

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Chapter 2 Edward Said and the Institution of Postcolonial Studies Karim Mattar

Introduction

E

dward Said is commonly acknowledged to be one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. In books like Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1994), he developed a uniquely influential methodology for addressing how imperial relations of power, authority and inequality undergird historical and contemporary representations of non-Western cultures. He correspondingly helped set the scene for a reflexive critical interrogation of colonial discourse and postcolonial engagement throughout the anglophone academy, especially in the literary disciplines, in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet in this period, scholars who identified themselves with the rapidly emerging field of postcolonial studies paid little or no heed to the politics, history and cultures of Palestine or the Middle East, both central points of departure for Said as he developed the very theoretical foundations on which the field was built. Such repression, whose consequences include a still widespread anglophone bias as well as a celebratory prioritisation of the ‘politics of hybridity’, was effected in order to facilitate the canonisation – or institutionalisation – of the postcolonial within what at that point remained the traditional disciplinary remit of English. By virtue of killing its father, then, the field became what I call the institution of ‘Postcolonial Studies’. In this chapter, I seek to expose the occlusions of ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as institution. I argue that by repressing its Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins, the field dissevered itself from the material and historical framework that grounded what it consequently misread, misappropriated as Said’s theory of colonial discourse for other, mainly British imperial contexts. It thereby rendered itself susceptible to accusations of theoretical abstruseness, culturalism and political impotence. Such institutionalisation, I continue, must be overturned in order to adapt the field to the Middle East and to revive its once radical critical intent. This project necessarily begins with a reinstatement of Said’s understanding of Palestine, the materiality of exile, exilic consciousness, the contrapuntal method and secular humanism as a cornerstone of the postcolonial. In undertaking such a project, I propose a new genealogy of the postcolonial that locates the Middle East at its very heart. A new genealogy of the postcolonial is particularly urgent because postcolonial studies remains a central site of globally attuned, geopolitically engaged critique within the academy. Often considered the locus of radical thought and scholarship, the field has risen to a position of near-insurmountable institutional standing and prominence. An essential area of specialisation within English departments across the Atlantic and further

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afield, it is supported by a large and expanding network of specialised academic appointments; specialised research grants from sources such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the British Academy (UK), the Leverhulme Trust (UK), the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA); specialised academic organisations such as the Postcolonial Studies Association and the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, along with their related conferences, symposia and other events; and specialised publications, including monograph series such as Routledge’s ‘Research in Postcolonial Literatures’ and journals such as Interventions, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. While the institutional foothold acquired by postcolonial studies has to a large extent been premised on its taming or management of Said, the professional benefits conferred by the field’s now-established status must not, however, be disregarded or underestimated in attempts at renegotiation. For in times of increasingly uncertain academic futures, when higher education is undergoing a process of corporate restructuring and the humanities are in the throes of an epochal decline, the employment, funding, networking and publishing opportunities provided by ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as institution need more than ever to be protected. Rather, then, than dismiss ‘Postcolonial Studies’ wholesale for its neglect of Palestine and the Middle East, I feel that given the state of professional insecurity in which we now live and breathe, it is incumbent upon those working in the field to recalibrate its foundational priorities and prejudices from within precisely for these contexts. Hence, the new genealogy that I am proposing. The chapter unfolds across three sections: ‘Said in the Postcolonial Academy: Mis/ Readings and Mis/Appropriations’, ‘Said, Palestine and the Middle East: Towards a New Genealogy of the Postcolonial’ and ‘Said and the Postcolonial Middle East’. In the first section, I argue that the field of postcolonial studies was consolidated in the 1990s via the misreading and misappropriation of Said, as in the work of Aijaz Ahmad, Homi Bhabha and Bill Ashcroft. I show that oriented around anglophone literary production, British imperial history and geography and the politics of hybridity, the hegemonic institution that resulted naturally precluded attention to Palestine and the Middle East. In the second, I develop my new genealogy of the postcolonial by tracing the Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins of Said’s theory of colonial discourse. Covering an extensive range of his texts, I show that Said’s mature understanding of exile, contrapuntalism and secular humanism is inseparable from these contexts. Retrieved in their contextual specificity, these concepts might therefore act as cornerstones for the postcolonial in its approach to the Middle East. In the third, I draw out the implications of Saidian theory for scholarship on or around what the editors of this volume are calling ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. I explore Said’s own engagement with the question of Palestine; new issues in the politics, history and cultures of the Middle East that might be productively addressed through a Saidian framework; and the work that has already been accomplished by postcolonialists in this direction. I conclude by reasserting the pivotal importance of Said, Palestine and the Middle East for the future of postcolonial studies.

Said in the Postcolonial Academy: Mis/Readings and Mis/Appropriations As the editors of this volume note in Chapter 1, Said notoriously dismissed the term ‘postcolonialism’ and the field he in large part spawned, suggesting in a 1997 interview for Interventions, ‘I do not think I belong to that’.1 In a useful recent essay on ‘Edward

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Said: Opponent of Postcolonial Theory’ (2012), Robert Young lists a number of reasons why this was the case. These reasons include what had become by the mid-1990s the ‘initiation ritual of criticizing Said’ in postcolonial studies, as prompted especially by Ahmad’s critique in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992); the field’s penchant for unworldly abstractions and the jargon of theory, as in especially the writings of Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak; and its post-Fanonian ‘retrospective analysis of colonialism [as] predicated on and written from the positive achievement of the anticolonial movements’, a ‘story from which the Palestinians have been left out’.2 In this section, I argue that Said responded so negatively to the ‘Postcolonial Studies’ of the 1990s because its institutional manifestation in this period was based on the misreading and misappropriation of his own work. Discussing the afterlives of Orientalism as ‘traveling theory’ in an article of 2000, Timothy Brennan makes a similar point. He suggests that ‘A good deal of postcolonial studies drew on Orientalism without being true to it’; by which he means that the field was not true to Orientalism’s American intellectual and political milieu, its ‘intellectual generalism’ rather than its fashionable Foucauldian and thus high-theory allure, and its critique rather than its advocacy of third-world identitarian politics.3 Without seeking to undermine Brennan’s argument, I wish to foreground distinct aspects of Orientalism and of Said’s thought more generally to which ‘Postcolonial Studies’ was not faithful in its quest for institutional legitimacy; namely, the Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins of such. As I demonstrate in the following accounts of Ahmad’s, Bhabha’s and Ashcroft’s attempts to negotiate Said’s weighty heritage for the field, this signal, defining feature of his thought was indeed explicitly misread, and often for cynical or political as well as more justifiable interpretive reasons. It is crucial to make this case because, as I conclude, the parameters of ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as institution came to be defined and enforced precisely through such readings of Said.

Aijaz Ahmad Ahmad is best known as a critic rather than a proponent of postcolonial studies. In his most famous work, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, he brings his rigorous Marxist sensibility to bear on the categories of ‘Third World Literature’ and ‘Colonial Discourse Analysis’ as increasingly deployed in metropolitan (read: Western, or British and American) intellectual cultures in the 1980s and 1990s.4 Although he also targets Fredric Jameson, Salman Rushdie and the Subaltern Studies group, among others, the centrepiece of Ahmad’s analysis here is very much his critique of Said, specifically the Said of Orientalism. In his chapter on ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’, he deconstructs the theoretical, methodological and historiographical underpinnings of this text for what he considers to be Said’s cosmopolitan and liberal-humanist priorities (see pp. 159–219).5 For Ahmad, such priorities are symptomatic of postcolonial studies per se, a field which in his account has come to project a homogenised ‘Third World’ and which correspondingly obscures the complexities of political, social and economic life in the nations of the non-Western world. While Ahmad explicitly sought to distance himself from this field and from the intellectual culture in which it was generated, his intervention was nevertheless foundational to a new wave of Marxist postcolonial criticism that started to emerge from the mid-1990s, as in the work of Arif Dirlik, Neil Lazarus and Benita Parry, among others. His reading of Said is therefore key to understanding how

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postcolonial studies continued to develop in this period – its evolving self-image, its theoretical and political objectives, its limits. Ahmad’s critique of Said and Orientalism hinges on his identification of what he calls the author’s ‘humanist liberalism’ (p. 164). He sees this ethos set in as early as the first few pages of Said’s text, where, in Ahmad’s paraphrase, Said explains that Orientalism is in part ‘an attempt at coming to terms with what it meant for him to be a Palestinian living and teaching in the USA’ (p. 161). Despite Ahmad’s sincere praise for Said’s efforts to ‘do honour’ to his origins (p. 160) – indeed, he elsewhere suggests that ‘Said’s most enduring contribution will be seen . . . in his work on the Palestine issue’ (pp. 160–1) – he continues that in Orientalism itself, this focus is inconsistently maintained. Why, he asks, should Said’s celebrated claim to be compiling an ‘inventory’ of the traces left upon himself as an ‘Oriental subject’ take the form of ‘a counterreading of the Western canonical textualities . . . from Greek tragedy onwards’ (p. 162)? According to Ahmad, the answer to this question lies not in Said’s ‘being a Palestinian’, but rather in his training in ‘Comparative European Literatures’, in the scholarship of figures who – like Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius – had ‘given to the discipline its stamp of High Humanism of a very conservative kind’ (p. 162). It is precisely from such figures and the tradition they represent that Said derived the ‘values’ and form of ‘agency’ – his own – that might contest the complicity of European literature, ‘from Aeschylus to Edward Lane’, in Orientalism; namely, the values of ‘tolerance, accommodation, cultural pluralism and relativism’ as associated with liberal humanism (p. 164). Thus, Ahmad concludes, Said rejects ‘humanism-ashistory’ in favour of an idealised, almost Kantian notion of humanist value, what he calls ‘humanism-as-ideality’ (p. 164). The problems with this reading of Said’s purported liberal humanism are manifold. Firstly, Ahmad’s reading is premised on a false delinkage between Said’s avowed Palestinian self-identity and his wider project in Orientalism. While Palestine was admittedly not as central to Orientalism as it was to others of his contemporaneous writings, most notably The Question of Palestine (1979), it was certainly the central focus of Said’s identity during this period. As I demonstrate in the next section, Said’s awareness of ‘being a Palestinian’ motivates and structures the entirety of Orientalism. We must take his claim that his discourse analysis of Orientalism is coterminous with his inventory of the traces left upon himself as a Palestinian by such seriously. Secondly, Ahmad’s misrecognition of the Palestinian origins of Orientalism leads him to misrecognise the specific form of humanism that Said develops in Orientalism and elsewhere. Again, it is important to admit that the nature of Saidian humanism can only be fully grasped when taking into account others of his texts, especially in this case The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) and ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984). But, although he refers to (one of) them only in passing, Ahmad did have access to these texts during the writing of In Theory. As I demonstrate in the next section, a more complete reading of Said reveals that his humanism – what he calls ‘secular humanism’ – is intimately related to and derived from his experience as a Palestinian-in-exile. As this experience is firmly grounded in a history that is both particular and traumatic, it is simply incorrect to define the humanism that stems from it as ‘ideality’ or to identify such with the ‘High Humanism’ of the Enlightenment tradition. Ahmad’s reading is therefore a misreading, one which has placed a significant bar on the comprehension and reception of Said in postcolonial studies.

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Ahmad discusses a number of other issues he has with Orientalism. Among the most prominent of these are: Said’s ‘mutually incompatible . . . definitions of the term “Orientalism”’, which lead to major difficulties in periodisation (p. 179); his ‘impossible’ attempt to reconcile Foucauldian discourse theory (derived from Friedrich Nietzsche, this is anti-humanist in orientation) with his broadly humanist framework (p. 164); his lack of attention to the ‘non-West’ itself, to how Orientalist discourse ‘might have been received, accepted, modified, challenged, overthrown or reproduced by the intelligentsias of the colonized countries’ (p. 172); and, citing Sadek el-Azm, his ‘Orientalis[m]-in-reverse’, his essentialised projection of a ‘unified, self-identical, transhistorical, textual’ notion of the West (p. 183). For Ahmad, these issues in the text did not hinder, but rather precipitated Orientalism’s wide appeal in metropolitan intellectual cultures. They provided the justification for the turn in the Western academy to the category of ‘Third World Literature’ – against the ‘bad faith and imperial oppression of all European knowledges’ as diagnosed by Said, such literature would thereby be posited and manifest as the countervailing (and likewise false, or ahistorical) universal, as ‘the narrative of authenticity, the counter-canon of truth, good faith, liberation’ (p. 197). In other words, Orientalism created the conditions for the rise of postcolonial studies – the ulterior object of Ahmad’s ire and contempt – in the West. In the present context, I lack the space to attend to all of Ahmad’s objections to Orientalism in detail.6 Suffice it to say that his identification of Said’s liberal humanism is not just the central of these objections, but also in fact implicitly or explicitly subtends his remaining commentary. As I have shown, this is a deeply flawed reading of Orientalism, one which undercuts the Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins of the text. But as Ahmad’s critique of Said and by extension of postcolonial studies was hugely influential on what I have noted as the Marxist turn in the field from the mid-1990s, it seems fair to say that this turn and the development of postcolonial studies more generally from this period was likewise to some degree premised on the misreading of Said.

Homi Bhabha Unlike Ahmad, Bhabha is very much of the postcolonial academy. Currently Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, he, with Said himself and Spivak, is included among what Young calls ‘the Holy Trinity’ of postcolonial studies – the preeminent and most influential scholars in the field.7 Singularly productive in developing the concepts and even ethos on which the field has come to rely (keywords in his thought include ‘hybridity’, ‘mimicry’, ‘difference’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘third space’), his reading of Said is thus of particular consequence for our understanding of how Said came to be framed for the field. Bhabha’s most substantial theoretical engagement with Said is found in his landmark work, The Location of Culture (1994).8 What we find in this text is a critique that is surprisingly, and ironically, similar to Ahmad’s (ironic because it is directed towards the exact opposite end, to promote rather than to denigrate postcolonial theory). Like Ahmad, Bhabha focuses on Orientalism and starts off by praising Said’s ‘pioneering’ theory of Orientalist discourse.9 Also like Ahmad, he continues by taking issue with Said’s deployment of Michel Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse in his analysis of Orientalism. ‘The productivity of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge’, he

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explains, ‘lies in its refusal of an epistemology which opposes essence/appearance, ideology/science’ (p. 103). This creates an immediate and unresolved problem for Said, in that his theory of Orientalism seems to require a more ‘instrumentalist notion of power/knowledge’ that stresses ‘the intentionality and unidirectionality of colonial power’ for its internal coherence and consistency (p. 103). In other words, Said, against the spirit of the Foucauldian model that structures his text, presupposes a ‘unif[ied] . . . subject of colonial enunciation’ (p. 103), an ‘unproblematized notion of the subject’ (p. 104). Naturally, the presupposition of such a unified (European, colonial) subject – itself a product and function of the Enlightenment tradition – not only undermines Said’s attempted discourse analysis of that same tradition, but is also anathema to Bhabha given his poststructuralist inclinations. For Bhabha, the European, colonial subject is always-already infected and inflected by the object of his (political, military, cultural, discursive, representational) domination, so that subjectivity per se occurs not in one or other pole of the coloniser/colonised interface, but rather in the third, liminal space between them. Bhabha’s critique of Said, then, further facilitates his development of and advocacy for a postcolonial theoretical and political framework oriented around hybridity, one which is widely regarded as a central pillar of postcolonial thought throughout the 1990s and beyond. The postcolonial framework Bhabha fleshes out in The Location of Culture has come to mediate his approach to others of Said’s texts and to (Said’s perspective on) the Palestine question elsewhere in his writings, leading to a series of misreadings of similar significance to postcolonial studies. For instance, in a 1991 essay on Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), he attempts to force Said’s evocation of Palestinian national identity in that text into his own preferred post-nationalist paradigm. Discussing this essay, Anna Bernard summarises the issue well: as she explains, Bhabha translates the figure of the Palestinian articulated by Said into one of ‘forlornness’, who ‘“disrupts” metanarratives of nation’.10 As I show in the next section, this is a flawed reading of After the Last Sky that in effect seeks to domesticate the Palestine question for (Bhabha’s version of) the postcolonial. Further, Bhabha’s rather disparaging obituary, ‘Untimely Ends’ (2004), suggests something of his personal antipathy to Said as well as the extent of his misunderstanding of both Said and Palestine. There, he identifies the ‘moral passion’ that saturates his passed peer’s writings as ‘Said’s rage’, and proceeds to dismiss this body of work for ‘sometimes sacrific[ing] analytical precision to polemical outrage’.11 More seriously (and rather distastefully in the context of an obituary), he then takes issue with Said’s portrayal of Palestinian resistance as ‘the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people’ (p. 19). Reflecting Said’s ‘dark two-dimensionality’, this perspective, he continues, ignores Hamas’s ‘perilous strategies of political control’ and ‘internally destabilizes . . . any representative Palestinian leadership that could have the power to negotiate a just and lasting peace’ (p. 20). The problem with this account is that it equates Palestinian resistance, whose terroristic manifestations Said also criticised, with Israeli human rights abuses while ignoring the causal priority of Zionist colonisation (and its own historically documented terrorist practices) in the emergence of said resistance. Bhabha’s misreading of Said and of Palestine is characteristic of and further fed into a postcolonial studies that has been systematically unable to reconcile Palestine to its predominant frameworks of analysis, notably including those forwarded by Bhabha himself.

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Bill Ashcroft In the context of the present inquiry, Ashcroft might be regarded as one of the architects of what I have designated as the institution of ‘Postcolonial Studies’. Co-authored with Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin, and as further discussed by the editors of this volume in Chapter 1, his landmark work in this regard is The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989). This book in effect provided a blueprint for the study of postcolonial literatures within the anglophone academy. Its canon of such literatures was comprised exclusively of those originally written in English (and that are thus legible within English departments), and its model of ‘writing back’ to Empire relied upon familiar, Bhabha-esque notions of discursive and representational resistance.12 As the editors note, the book is now considered a classic example of the early self-constitution of postcolonial studies via the neglect or repression of Palestine and the Middle East. Rather than look into this work at any greater length, I would like to use this space to examine a more recent piece by Ashcroft, an essay entitled ‘Representation and Liberation: From Orientalism to the Palestine Crisis’ (2010). This essay is noteworthy for attempting, through a reading of Said, especially Orientalism, to bring Palestine back into the fold of postcolonial studies. Yet in so doing, and due to similar misreadings and misappropriations as witnessed in Ahmad and Bhabha, it ends up reproducing precisely the same theoretical and political limitations that led to the exclusion of Palestine from Ashcroft’s earlier work and, by extension, from the field. Ashcroft starts the essay with what seems like an innocuous overview of Said’s aims in Orientalism vis-à-vis Palestine. According to him, Orientalism provides a specific methodology for resisting ‘the hegemonic discourse that propels [Israeli] colonization’, and to effect what he calls a ‘postcolonial transformation’ of the representational paradigm to which and by which Palestinians have been subjected.13 Yet the problems with Ashcroft’s account are evident even from this early stage. Apart from eliding the question of Said’s own abhorrence for the term ‘postcolonial’, it is clear that Ashcroft premises his reading on just the sort of rejection of Palestinian resistance in any realm but the discursive that we have already seen in Bhabha. This broadly anti-Fanonian attitude has certainly been dominant in and has perhaps even been necessary for postcolonial studies as the field came to institutional prominence, and has, moreover, been largely responsible for the invisibility of Palestine as a legitimate or acceptable object of study therein. Ashcroft elaborates further by distinguishing between discursive and material resistance, and then disavowing the latter in order to, in effect, make Palestine palatable for the field: ‘The key difference’ between ‘the Palestinian people’ and other colonised societies, he argues without any justification or evidence (p. 298), ‘is that liberation does not lie in resistance to its actual colonizers – the Israelis’, but in ‘resistance to the hegemonic discourse’ (p. 299). This move not only negates the rich and important history of Palestinian military resistance to Zionist colonisation as an appropriate area of postcolonial inquiry; not only brushes aside the evolving tapestry of nonviolent resistance to actual colonisation in the form of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and so forth; but also, and most importantly here, contradicts what Said has himself repeatedly said about resistance.

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As Said unequivocally explains in his ‘Introduction’ to The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (1994): In sum, we need to move up from the state of supine abjectness with which, in reality, the Oslo Declaration of Principles was negotiated . . . into the prosecution of parallel agreements with Israel and the Arabs that concern Palestinian national, as opposed to municipal, aspirations. But this does not exclude resistance against the Israeli occupation, which continues indefinitely. So long as occupation and settlements exist, whether legitimized or not by the PLO, Palestinians and others must speak against them. One of the issues not raised by the Oslo Accords, the exchange of the PLO-Israeli letters, the Washington speeches, is whether the violence and terrorism renounced by the PLO includes largely nonviolent resistance, civil disobedience, self-defense, etc. These are the inalienable right of any people denied full sovereignty and independence and must be supported.14 In order, then, to pry open a space for Palestine within his conception of the postcolonial, Ashcroft must proceed by way of a cynical misreading of Said.15 The result is a distortion not only of Said’s own writings on this issue, but also of the very reality of Palestinian politics, history and culture. Rather than accept these sorts of distortions, also seen in Ahmad and Bhabha, surely the challenge is to renegotiate the foundational prejudices of postcolonial studies so that that field might be able to properly encompass Said, Palestine and the Middle East and thereby to make itself relevant to the realities of the contemporary world? * *

*

In the foregoing analysis, I have shown that Ahmad’s, Bhabha’s and Ashcroft’s influential framings of the postcolonial were in no small measure derived from or at least mediated by their misreadings and misappropriations of Said, specifically the Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins of Said’s work. In Ashcroft, it is the outright neglect of these pivotal contexts of Said’s theory of colonial discourse that enables his projection of a postcolonial studies defined by and organised around anglophone literary production from around the world, one which is thereby rendered legible within the disciplinary remit of English. In Bhabha, it is the inability to comprehend the enormity of Palestine’s colonial predicament, its colonial present, as emphasised by Said that allows him to retain a notion of the postcolonial infused by the theory and politics of hybridity.16 In Ahmad, it is the myopic uncoupling of Saidian theory from the contexts of Said’s life that leads him to reject Orientalism and the field to which it gave rise as inappropriate to the realities of the non-Western world, including those of Palestine and the Middle East. In sum, what we see in these attempts to negotiate Said for the field is the definition and enforcement of the parameters of ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as institution; a hegemonic institution whose remit is the anglophone and whose ethos is one of hybridity, one which has had no time or space for Palestine and the Middle East. Precisely, that is, the institution with which we are all familiar, that which has been the object of such stern reproach from, not least, Said himself. In order to set the record straight for postcolonial studies and to expand its theoretical and political horizons for Palestine and the Middle East, it is therefore necessary to begin by setting the record straight with Said. This is the task to

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which I now turn – by excavating Said’s concepts of exile, contrapuntalism and secular humanism in their full contextual specificity, I propose a new genealogy of the postcolonial that locates the Middle East at its heart.17

Said, Palestine and the Middle East: Towards a New Genealogy of the Postcolonial Palestine and the Middle East only became central to Said’s self-identification as an engaged intellectual after 1967. By his own account, the Arab defeat at the Six Day War of that year – which Palestinians refer to as the Naksa, or Setback – shook the young Columbia professor out of what had been until that point his career-oriented complacency. Said was born to an affluent Christian family in Jerusalem in 1935, and emigrated with his family to Cairo upon the United Nations resolution for the partition of Palestine in December 1947. The Nakba or Catastrophe that befell Palestine in 1948 when between 714,000 and 744,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes; 418 of their villages destroyed, depopulated, or occupied; and eleven urban centres depopulated, certainly left a deep wound on the young boy’s psyche.18 Decades later, close to his death, he recalled his first encounter after the Nakba with members of his extended family, ‘all . . . greatly reduced in circumstances, their faces stark with worry, ill-health, despair’, to conclude that they, like the Palestinian refugee more generally, ‘had their lives broken, their spirits drained, their composure destroyed forever in the context of seemingly unending, serial dislocation’.19 But this foundational trauma was not to resurface for Said, ‘completely caught up in the life of a young professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University’, until the events of 1967.20 Then, and for ‘the first time since [he had] come to the United States’, Said was ‘emotionally reclaimed’ by Palestine and by the Arab world more generally (p. xiii). What happened in the Middle East began to concern him personally and ‘could no longer be accepted with a passive political disengagement’ (p. xiv). As a result of this epiphany, Said was to become a mediator and occasional advisor for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); an indefatigable proponent of Palestinian rights in the American media; and the foremost scholar of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Palestinian culture and Zionism in the American academy. As Ardi Imseis neatly summarises, Said played at least three distinct roles in advancing popular and scholarly discourses of Palestine – he acted as a narrator of Palestinian experience, as a secular critic of Arab as well as of Western power and politics, and as a remarkably insightful visionary of long-term solutions to the conflict.21 Further, Said’s newfound recognition of his responsibilities as an exiled Palestinian intellectual in the United States was to feed directly into his mature conceptualisations of exile, contrapuntalism and secular humanism, with momentous consequences for numerous fields of scholarly inquiry, especially postcolonial studies.22 Said’s exilic Palestinian identity produced a series of subtle structuring effects in two of the most influential and indeed foundational books in postcolonial studies, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Although critics have recently and with the qualifications discussed above started to note such effects – against the grain of his earlier work, for example, Ashcroft concedes in the aforementioned essay that ‘Palestine was at the center of the writing of Orientalism because it had become . . . the

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pressing focus of Said’s identity’ – they, as I have argued, had been largely repressed as the field adopted the critical model of Orientalism while marginalising Palestine and the Middle East.23 Apart from effectively effacing the most crucial horizon of his theoretical work, the failure to fully integrate Said’s exilic consciousness into various postcolonial appropriations of this work for other political, historical and cultural contexts has resulted in the institutional manifestations of the postcolonial that I have outlined. By now demonstrating the centrality of Palestine to the writing of both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, I wish to intervene in this trend and retrieve a more materially and historically grounded model of exile for the postcolonial. At the outset of the book, Said describes how ‘The personal dimension’, alongside other aspects of his contemporary political and intellectual scene, led him to a particular course of research and writing that resulted in Orientalism.24 This personal investment, Said explains, derives from his ‘awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies’, so that his study of Orientalism has, in many ways, been ‘an attempt to inventory the traces upon [himself], the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals’ (p. 25). More specifically, it is his experience as ‘an Arab Palestinian in the West’ that had such a formative impact on the writing of Orientalism, that to a large extent necessitated it: There exists here [in the United States] an almost unanimous consensus that he [the Palestinian] does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. (p. 27) Although Said only occasionally, and not at great length, returns to Palestine in this book, this brief passage unambiguously establishes its personal, political and cultural significance throughout, framing his geographically and historically wider-ranging critiques of power, discourse and representation in crucial ways. Apart from suggesting a deeper history of Orientalist misrepresentation of the Palestinians than that of Zionism – an important theme Said returns to in The Question of Palestine and elsewhere – this passage pinpoints the immediate political stakes and motivations of Said’s intervention into all forms of discursive othering, whatever their objects, in literature, the media, popular culture, scholarship and politics. Likewise, Culture and Imperialism does not dwell on Palestine in any extended way. But, as in Orientalism, Said’s experience as a Palestinian, specifically here his exilic consciousness, frames and structures the book from the outset. As he explains, Culture and Imperialism ‘is an exile’s book’.25 As an experience of belonging to ‘both worlds’, the Middle Eastern and the Western, yet ‘without being completely of one or the other’ (p. xxvi), exile has enabled Said to understand ‘both sides of the imperial divide . . . more easily’ (p. xxvii). He later concludes that this dual perspective afforded by exile is the foundation of intellectual engagement: [I]t is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its

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unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see ‘the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally. (p. 332) Before turning to this, Said’s mature theory of the exilic intellectual, it is important to understand in detail the Palestinian basis of his approach, and, correspondingly, his interpretation of Palestinian literature and culture in terms of exile. For Said, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 represents the single most important event not just of modern Palestinian history, but also of modern Middle Eastern history more generally. As he explains in an essay on ‘Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948’ (1974): To say that 1948 made an extraordinary cultural and historical demand on the Arab is to be guilty of the crassest understatement. The year and the processes which it culminated represent an explosion whose effects continue to fall unrelentingly into the present. No Arab, however armed he was at those and later moments with regional or tribal or religious nationalism, could ignore the event. Not only did 1948 put forth unprecedented challenges to a collectivity already undergoing the political evolution of several European centuries compressed into a few decades: this after all was mainly a difference of detail between the Arab East and all other Third World countries, since the end of colonialism meant the beginning and the travail of uncertain national selfhood. But 1948 put forward a monumental enigma, an existential mutation for which Arab history was unprepared.26 The success of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, Said continues, brought forth the spectres of disunity, fragmentation and extinction throughout the Arab world. Now fractured at its core, torn from the flow of historical time and thrust into a vicious modernity that threatened it with dissolution, Arab national consciousness was forced for the first time to encounter its own existential fragility. Arabs had therefore to strive to restore their historical continuity, heal their wounds and reclaim their present (see pp. 47–8). The engaged cultural agent, Said concludes, had a pivotal role to play in forging this new national consciousness – ‘as a producer of thought and language’, his was a task of ensuring ‘survival to what was in imminent danger of extinction’ (p. 48). Of course, nowhere was and is this task more pressing than in Palestine. I now turn to After the Last Sky to investigate in detail Said’s most intimate and extended account of the Nakba and its resonance in Palestinian literature and culture. After the Last Sky is comprised of a series of more than 100 photographs of ‘Palestinian lives’ – ordinary, everyday lives caught within an extraordinary political landscape – taken between 1979 and 1986 by the Swiss documentary photographer and activist Jean Mohr in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, in Israel proper, and in the refugee camps that scatter the Middle East. These haunting yet resilient images are accompanied by Said’s commentary, which amounts to a moving meditation on the individual lives – their society, culture and relentless exile – often lost in the balance of the high politics of the Israel/Palestine conflict. The aim of juxtaposing image and text

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in such a way is to call into question the dominant (Zionist, Western) representational paradigm by which Palestinians are ‘visible’ only as ‘fighters, terrorists, and lawless pariahs’.27 The book thus seeks to ‘replace’ such reductive visual tropes with ‘something more capable of capturing the complex reality of [Palestinian] experience’ (p. 6). And what results is an ‘unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary’ form of expression that reflects the fundamental dispossession and dispersion of the Palestinian people and that inscribes the dialectics of Palestinian exile (p. 6). Although the image/text interplay is certainly fascinating, and formally embodies the content of Palestinian experience in a unique way, I concentrate here on the written text for its equally unique analysis.28 At the heart of Said’s approach to Palestine in After the Last Sky, as throughout his oeuvre, is the Nakba of 1948. From the outset of the book, Said frames the Nakba as the singular defining event of modern Palestinian history, one that has caused both the fragmentation, dispersal and destruction of Palestinian society and the formation of a new, exilic national identity – ‘every Palestinian’, he writes, ‘knows perfectly well that what has happened to us over the last three decades is a direct consequence of Israel’s destruction of our society in 1948’ (p. 5). He later expands on this insight to describe the Nakba as ‘the loss of place and of history’, as a severance from the past that, symptomatic of the impossibility of Zionism, has been ‘periodically and ritually’ repeated in the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (1967) and the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1982) (p. 149). To extend Said’s account, we might also consider the humiliations of the Oslo Accords (1993–5) and the abuses of continued settlement construction, the Gaza blockade, the recent wars on Gaza, and so forth, in terms of a ritual repetition of originary trauma. In the Palestinian context, as Said makes clear, history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as more tragedy.29 Given the foundational trauma of the Nakba, the question for Said then becomes how to best interpret, to understand its cyclically recurring impact on Palestinian experience. And Said is equally certain that ‘no clear and simple narrative is adequate to the complexity of our experience’, that no ‘clear, direct line can be drawn’ from the past to the present (p. 5; see also p. 129). While, as explained above, the dialectical form of After the Last Sky itself provides an alternative logic for interpreting such complexity, it is Said’s evocation of the content of Palestinian experience after the Nakba that primarily interests me here. ‘Palestine’, writes Said in one of the many passages in After the Last Sky of his most passionate, poetically charged prose, ‘is exile, dispossession, the inaccurate memories of one place slipping into vague memories of another, a confused recovery of general wares, passive presences scattered around in the Arab environment’ (p. 30). Exiled not only from place and history, but also from the possibility of telling that history, Palestinian life is thus ‘scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time’ (p. 20). Having been jostled from the map, ‘the experience of dispossession and loss’ has paradoxically become ‘the essence of Palestinian identity’ (p. 120), and the ‘truest reality’ of the Palestinian, always ‘a person in transit’ (p. 164), ‘is expressed in the way [he crosses] from one place to another’ (p. 130). ‘This’, Said concludes, ‘is the deepest continuity of our lives as a nation in exile and constantly on the move’ (p. 164). As Said emphasises throughout After the Last Sky, such Palestinian reality is expressed in its exilic culture, especially the literary works of figures like Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habiby to which he regularly alludes. As the lived experience of exile has, by dislocating the Palestinian from his own society and

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history, shattered the possibility of integrated, continuous narrative, the ‘characteristic mode’ of Palestinian literature has become ‘broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations’ (p. 38). Most pointedly suggested by Habiby’s classic novella The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist (1974; trans. 1982), its forms are thus ‘outrageous’, replete with ‘mock-epics, satires, sardonic parables, absurd rituals’ (p. 20). But, and this is the main point Said wants to convey, Palestinian literary form never descends into vacuous postmodernist play. While its fragmentary nature embodies the fragmentations and dislocations of exile, its very existence marks an attempt to ‘patch things together’, to forge a dialectic or non-linear constellation that connects past and present, inside and outside, presence and absence out of the ruins of history and against the deafening silence imposed by history upon the Palestinian narrative (p. 23). As Said puts it, taking his cue here from Darwish, Palestinian literature comprises an attempt ‘to transform the mechanics of loss into a constantly postponed metaphysics of return’ (p. 150). Itself embodying the exilic form of Palestinian literature, After the Last Sky thus not only contributes to this canon, but also, by reflexively engaging with the political, historical and cultural conditions that necessitate such a form, sets out a strong and compelling paradigm for interpretation – what I call the exile paradigm in Palestinian literature. It is only with a thorough understanding of Said’s approach to his own as well as to Palestinian exile more generally that the significance of his widely appropriated, and often decontextualised, notion of the exilic intellectual fully comes through. Passages such as the one cited above from Culture and Imperialism, where the ‘exilic energies’ of artists and intellectuals are celebrated, perhaps lend themselves to this sort of decontextualisation. However, Said always makes sure to underscore that his articulation of exile as an intellectual temperament is grounded in his experience of exile as a traumatic, human condition of irrevocable uprooting and displacement. In his 1993 Reith Lectures, collected as Representations of the Intellectual (1996), for instance, he provides his fullest statement of exile as a ‘metaphorical condition’ of ‘the intellectual as outsider’.30 Immediately following this well-known passage, though, he reminds the audience that his ‘diagnosis of the intellectual in exile derives from the social and political history of dislocation and migration’ (p. 53). Likewise, in his ‘Introduction’ to Reflections on Exile (2000), he clearly situates his personal experience of Palestine in terms of ‘dispossession and exile’, of ‘dissonance’, as a basis for his formulation of exile as an ‘intellectual vocation’ which ‘refuses the jargon of specialization, the blandishments of power, and . . . the quietism of non-involvement’.31 I now turn to the title essay of that collection for Said’s most detailed discussion of the relationship between critical and material exile. ‘Reflections on Exile’ opens with a passionate plea to distinguish the contemporary experience of exile with that celebrated through early-to-mid twentieth-century figures like James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov as ‘a potent, even enriching, motif of modern [or modernist] culture’ (p. 173). Given the exponentially greater scale of exile in ‘our age’, which has become the ‘age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’ due to ‘modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers’, exile can no longer serve ‘notions of humanism’ (p. 174). To extrapolate from Said’s early identification of the social and material consequences of globalisation and neo-imperialism here, one might say that contemporary exile also gives the lie to empty discourses of a free-flowing, hybridising transnationalism, that it reorients our attention towards the lives lost in the balance of untrammelled capitalist expansion. As

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Robert Spencer argues, ‘nothing could be further from Said’s work than Homi Bhabha’s insouciant endorsement of the conditions of dispersal and homelessness’, or the rhetoric of ‘breathless transnationalism’ and ‘departure lounge internationalism’ in postcolonial theory.32 For Said, exile is anything but ‘a privilege’ (p. 184). Taking his cue from Theodor Adorno’s opposition to the ‘administered world’ of ‘ready-made forms, prefabricated “homes”’ (p. 184), Said defines exile, ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ where subjects are cut off from ‘their roots, their land, their past’, as ‘an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life’ (p. 177). Exile teaches that ‘homes are always provisional’, that nationalisms and languages are orthodoxies of thought that can become prisons, and that beneath the enclosures of familiar geographic and ideological territories, the world is ‘secular and contingent’ (p. 185). It thus demands the cultivation of a ‘scrupulous . . . subjectivity’ that sees ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ (p. 184) – ‘most people’, Said writes, ‘are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions’ (p. 186). And Said calls this awareness ‘contrapuntal’ as he describes the revolutionary critical potential afforded by an otherwise bleak and very real contemporary condition (p. 186).33 So then, a clear, if complex, line of derivation from Said’s exile, to Palestinian exile, to exile as a critical temperament, to the contrapuntal method. I would like now to extend this line towards Said’s notion of secular humanism as the final horizon of intellectual engagement. As argued most incisively by Bruce Robbins, the meaning of the term ‘secular’ as it resonates throughout Said’s work is ‘as an opposing term not to religion but to nationalism’, when nationalism is understood as, in Said’s words, a ‘narrative form’ with its ‘founding fathers, . . . basic, quasi-religious texts, . . . historical and geographical landmarks, [and] official heroes and enemies’.34 Although Robbins is absolutely correct to pit Saidian secularism against nationalism, it is important not to jump from this premise towards the sort of ‘contentless cosmopolitanism’, as Aamir Mufti puts it, vigorously rejected by Said.35 In his important and influential essay ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture’ (1998), Mufti, drawing on Said’s reading of Erich Auerbach in The World, the Text, and the Critic as a locus of ‘the minority problematic’, resolves this contradiction by firmly situating the Saidian secular within the experience of exile (p. 96). In order to make an important link between Said and Hannah Arendt, who describes the Jews of Europe as ‘the minorité par excellence’, and thus between postHolocaust Jews and post-Nakba Palestinians as parallel communities of stateless refugees, Mufti prefers the term ‘minority’ over ‘exile’ here (p. 103). But as the definitions of both closely overlap – Mufti describes minority as ‘a permanent condition of exile’ (p. 105), and even hyphenates the terms as ‘minority-exile’ (p. 107) – I will stick to the more literally Saidian ‘exile’ as I proceed. As Mufti explains, the ‘loss and displacement’ characteristic of exile as a material, embodied experience give rise to secular criticism as an ‘ethical imperative’ (p. 105), as ‘a critique of nationalism as an ideology of hearth and home’ that exile shows is always provisional, contingent, delusionary (p. 107). In other words, secularism is the critical complement to exile as mediated material and historical experience, and, as such, it is comprised of humanistic opposition to the ideologies of nation, identity and belonging. Such a resolution seems apt for a Palestinian intellectual who refused to allow his experience of exile to lead him into the temptations of an exclusionary nationalism; who, moreover, crystallised that experience to define not only an essentially exilic

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Palestinian culture, but also a mode of secular humanist thought as a foundation for political engagement. As I hope to have shown, tracing Said’s thought back to its Palestinian and Middle Eastern origins reveals a theory and a politics of engaged critical praxis that is uniquely equipped to attend to these contexts. This is in itself a postcolonial praxis, one whose circuitous course in the field is corrected by the new genealogy that I have proposed.

Said and the Postcolonial Middle East The implications of Saidian theory for postcolonial studies in its incipient engagement with the Middle East – for ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ – are many. We might start by considering Said’s own writings on and engagement with Palestine as a platform for continued postcolonial inquiry into this issue. Accentuated by his human investment in the Israel/Palestine conflict from both sides of the imperial divide, Said’s worldly ethico-political understanding of such provides an invaluable perspective that postcolonialists would be well-served to recall as the conflict continues to mutate in new and mostly disturbing ways. Further, we might also consider the value of a multi-layered, geographically and historically expansive critical sensibility derived from these contexts for addressing the range of new issues that have arisen in the politics, history and cultures of the Middle East in recent years. Sharply principled, and always attentive to the multiple dimensions and entanglements of a given issue, the conceptual apparatus developed by Said across his career provides a grounding and an inspiration for the necessary postcolonial project of interpreting, comprehending and intervening in the ongoing crises and upheavals of the region. Certainly, an entire generation of scholarship especially in the field of Middle East studies has in some senses been born of Said’s pivotal influence. But for the reasons discussed above, this influence has been less pronounced in postcolonial studies (though some scholars who identify with the field have started to reread Said as they have turned their attention towards the Middle East, especially Palestine, in the last decade or so). By retrieving Said’s thought and positing it as central to the postcolonial, as I have attempted to do, such might well be regarded as the linchpin between the postcolonial and the Middle East. Regarding Palestine, the particular value of Said’s thought for postcolonialists lies in his development of an ethics and a politics of engagement oriented around his (eventual) recognition of the single-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. As early as the first, 1979, edition of The Question of Palestine, it is evident that Said’s secular humanist impulses act as the basis for his political vision of ‘the only possible and acceptable destiny for the multicommunal Middle East’: the notion of a state based on secular human rights, not on religious or minority exclusivity nor . . . on an idealized geopolitical unity. . . . The ghetto state, the national security state, the minority government, were to be transcended by a secular democratic polity, in which communities would be accommodated to one another for the greater good of the whole.36 However, as Avi Shlaim summarises in his useful account of the ‘four main phases’ of Said’s thought on the political solution, ‘Two major events in the 1980s led Said to reexamine his position and to move from a one-state to a two-state solution’, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987.37

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The ideal of a single, bi-national and democratic state comprised of all of Mandatory Palestine; containing both Jewish and Arab communities on the basis of political, civil and social parity; and unconditionally, as Said stressed throughout his writings on the issue, affirming the right of Palestinians exiled in 1948 to return to their original homes, was not to resurface for Said until the signing of the Oslo I Accord in 1993.38 Said met this agreement, ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles’, with utter outrage and disgust.39 He felt that it amounted to a monumental denial of Palestinian rights – to statehood, to self-determination, to an end to settlements and occupation, and to return – in exchange for nothing but meagre Israeli recognition of the PLO as ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’ (see pp. xxxiv–xlviii). Said thus reverted to his original position, reconciling for the final decade of his life his ethical vision of secular humanism and his political vision of a single bi-national state, one where ‘the two peoples can live together in one nation as equals’, as ‘the only long-term solution’.40 Since Oslo, history has proven Said’s misgivings about the Accords and about their promise of an independent Palestinian state justified. This period has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of settlement construction in the West Bank; the fragmentation and bantustanisation of the Palestinian community there; the establishment of elaborate, draconian systems of roadblocks, checkpoints and closed roads by which Palestinian freedom and mobility have been severely curtailed; regular incursions by the Israeli Defence Forces targeting the population and civilian infrastructure of the West Bank; the imposition by Israel of a comprehensive land, sea and air blockade on the Gaza Strip; and a series of wars launched by Israel on Gaza, resulting in thousands of deaths and the devastation of Gaza’s infrastructure and economy. Of course, no Palestinian State has been forthcoming. Given the velocity, the fluctuations of a conflict which ‘keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, it is easy in the Palestinian case to lose sight of Walter Benjamin’s immediately preceding dictum that history is indeed ‘one single catastrophe’.41 Said’s thought importantly focuses our attention on such, on the Nakba as the originary moment of the current Palestinian predicament and thereby on the deep time and ethno-nationalist underpinnings of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Furthermore, Said’s thought reminds us of the essential ethical dimension of any possible resolution, of the necessity of what I have in another context called an ‘ethics of affiliation’ between Israelis and Palestinians based on the recognition of shared traumatic histories.42 In their continued efforts to broach this issue, postcolonialists would be well-served to follow Said’s example, and the example set by other scholars who have adopted a more or less Saidian approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict (such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Ammiel Alcalay, Gil Anidjar, Ariella Azoulay, Joe Cleary, Gil Hochberg, Nur Masalha, Joseph Massad, Mufti, Jeffrey Sacks, Ihab Saloul and Ella Shohat, among others). Regarding the new issues in the politics, history and cultures of the Middle East that might be productively addressed through a Saidian framework, these are many and diverse. As the editors discuss at length in Chapter 1, such issues include the politics of neo-imperialism, terror and warfare in the Middle East; the continuities between historical and contemporary manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and Orientalism there; the region as a theatre or laboratory of contemporary neo-imperial warfare; the post-9/11 invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in particular; the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring and its aftermath; the Islamic Revival and Islamic fundamentalisms in contexts both regional and diasporic; the shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality in the region; and national, regional and transnational Middle

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Eastern literary and cultural production in response to such and other issues. Indeed, as the editors elaborate, it is part of the intention of the present volume to develop a coherent postcolonial framework for precisely these sorts of issues. Guided by Said, they might be addressed in a way that is relevant, incisive and engaged both theoretically and politically; in a way, that is, from which the field of postcolonial studies might greatly benefit.

Conclusion Ultimately, the injunctions and prohibitions imposed by what I have discussed in this chapter as the institution of ‘Postcolonial Studies’ against Said, Palestine and the Middle East are insignificant when weighed against the gravity of the circumstances that motivated Said’s mature thought and work. For postcolonial studies to live up to its early promise, and reclaim its radical critical potential from the limitations of its institutional form, it must surely now prioritise Palestine and the Middle East as central to its remit. Given its powerful theoretical armature and institutional resources, its established standing within the academy, the field has too much to offer not to be considered a primary site for addressing these contexts. As I have argued, Said is a necessary starting point for this project, one that might very well come to determine the future and even survival of the field.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, ‘In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba, New Delhi, 16 December 1997’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1:1 (1998), pp. 81–96; p. 82. 2. Robert J. C. Young, ‘Edward Said: Opponent of Postcolonial Theory’, in Tobias Döring and Mark Stein (eds), Edward Said’s Translocations: Essays in Secular Criticism (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 23–43; pp. 25, 35. 3. Timothy Brennan, ‘The Illusion of a Future: “Orientalism” as Traveling Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 26:3 (2000), pp. 558–83; pp. 577, 578. 4. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 2008), passim. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 5. Young suggests that in the act of dismissing Said for his supposedly cosmopolitan inclinations and his position within the Western academy, Ahmad concealed his own background in this environment, specifically as a member of the English faculty at Rutgers University. In the first edition of In Theory, Young writes, ‘the only information the reader was given about [Ahmad] . . . was that he was currently a fellow of the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi’. Young, ‘Edward Said’, p. 26. 6. For early responses to In Theory in relation to Said, Orientalism and postcolonial studies more generally, see especially Arjun Appadurai, Lauren Berlant, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dilip Gaonkar (eds), ‘Controversies: Debating In Theory’, Public Culture, 6:1 (1993), pp. 3–191 and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997). 7. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 163. 8. While many of the individual chapters of The Location of Culture originally appeared as journal articles or chapters in edited volumes before the publication of Ahmad’s In Theory in 1992, the chapter most relevant to my discussion – ‘3. The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism’ – first appeared in the same year. See

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9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

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introduction Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’, in Mandy Merck (ed.), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 312–31. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 102. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Anna Bernard, ‘Palestine and Postcolonial Studies’, talk delivered at the ‘London Debates 2010: How does Europe in the 21st century address the legacy of colonialism?’, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 13–15 May 2010, http://events.sas.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/postgraduate/Papers_London_Debates_2010/Bernard__Palestine_and_ postcolonial_studies.pdf (last accessed 1 June 2016), n.p. Homi Bhabha, ‘Untimely Ends’, Artforum International, 42:6 (2004), pp. 19–22; pp. 19, 20. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffith and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). Bill Ashcroft, ‘Representation and Liberation: From Orientalism to the Palestine Crisis’, in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (eds), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 291–303; pp. 299, 298. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xlv (emphasis added). It should be noted, however, that in his and Pal Ahluwalia’s co-authored Routledge Critical Thinkers introduction to Said, Ashcroft (or at least his co-author) does address Said’s engagement with Palestine more faithfully than elsewhere in his work. See Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 115–34. The term ‘colonial present’ is borrowed from Derek Gregory’s book of the same title. See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). This task is doubly pressing due to the systematic institutional, professional and political hostility that scholars of Palestine have faced and continue to face in especially the United States. Said himself was of course subject to one of the most vicious campaigns of academic discrediting and intimidation since the McCarthyite 1950s for his views on Palestine, including character assassination, hate mail, death threats, the vandalism of his office at Columbia, and an investigation directed against him by the FBI from 1971 to his death. For his most extensive discussions of these issues, see Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1998) and Said, The Politics of Dispossession, pp. xiii–xxiii. Although, due certainly to his own efforts as well as growing public consciousness of the abuses of the Occupation, open discussion of Palestine seems to be occurring more regularly in American academia since Said’s death in 2003, the culture of intimidation, harassment and exclusion remains de rigueur. Exemplary recent cases of such include the 2004 ‘Columbia Unbecoming’ scandal at that university, when the David Project, a pro-Israeli student activist organisation, accused the then Assistant Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History Joseph Massad of anti-Semitic prejudice in the classroom and unsuccessfully called for his dismissal; the 2006 Yale controversy, when Juan Cole, apparently for pro-Palestinian views expressed in his Informed Comment blog, was denied a Professorial position by the Senior Appointments Committee after being approved by both the Sociology and History departments; the 2007 DePaul controversy, when the university’s Board on Promotion and Tenure denied Norman Finkelstein tenure due to a vicious campaign launched against him by Alan Dershowitz for his criticisms of Israel and the ‘Holocaust industry’, leading to Finkelstein’s resignation; and the 2014 ‘Steven Salaita Affair’, when the Chancellor and Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ‘de-hired’ Salaita from a tenured position already granted him by that University’s American Indian Studies Program due to the allegedly ‘controversial’ nature of his tweets during the 2014 Gaza

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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War. For the first book-length treatment of such cases, see Matthew Abraham, Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and the Question of Palestine (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). Given the avowedly engaged nature and remit of postcolonial studies, its critical investment in issues of global political and cultural import, it is necessary for its self-definition and continued relevance that the field forge an institutional space for the support and protection of such scholars and their work. Again, this begins with an expansion of theoretical and political horizons for Palestine and the Middle East. Estimates of the extent of the Nakba vary quite considerably among the major historians of Palestine due to a number of methodological, statistical, definitional and ideological differences. The total number of displaced Palestinians have been counted as low as 700,000 and as high as 935,000, and the total number of destroyed, depopulated or occupied villages as low as 369 and as high as 531. Here, I use the estimates reached by Walid Khalidi in All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (1992), widely regarded as the most authoritative and methodologically sound historical source on the Nakba. See Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: The Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992), pp. xv–xx, xxxii–xxxiii, 585–94. Edward W. Said, ‘Afterword: The Consequences of 1948’, in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 206–19; p. 206. Said, The Politics of Dispossession, p. xiii. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. See Ardi Imseis, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: On Edward Said and the Palestinian Freedom Struggle’, in Iskandar and Rustom, Edward Said, pp. 247–79; p. 248, passim. For further detail on Said’s biography, his political engagement and his intellectual trajectory, see especially Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. vii–xlv; Said, The Politics of Dispossession, pp. xiii–xlviii; Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999); and Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), pp. xii–xxxv. For excellent secondary accounts of the personal underpinnings of Said’s politics and criticism, see Rashid Khalidi, ‘Edward Said and Palestine: Balancing the Academic and the Political, the Public and the Private’, in Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Başak Ertür (eds), Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 44–52; Ilan Pappé, ‘The Saidian Fusion of Horizons’, in Gürsoy Sökmen and Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 83–92; Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, ‘Introduction: Emancipation and Representation’, in Iskandar and Rustom, Edward Said, pp. 1–22; Joseph Massad, ‘Affiliating with Edward Said’, in Iskandar and Rustom, Edward Said, pp. 23–52; Imseis, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’; and Avi Shlaim, ‘Edward Said and the Palestine Question’, in Iskandar and Rustom, Edward Said, pp. 280–90. Ashcroft, ‘Representation and Liberation’, p. 291. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 25. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xxvi. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 46. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p. 4. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. For further discussion of form in After the Last Sky, see Said’s interview with Salman Rushdie in Said, The Politics of Dispossession, pp. 107–29 and Joseph Massad, ‘Beginning with Edward Said’, in Gürsoy Sökmen and Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 121–36. While in the interview both Said and Rushdie recapitulate the ‘form reflects experience’ formula

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29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

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introduction expressed in the book, Massad’s essay takes After the Last Sky as a jumping-off point for a wider investigation of ‘the dialectics of seeing and blindness’ throughout Said’s oeuvre, and of the visual as it pertains to Orientalism (Massad, ‘Beginning with Edward Said’, p. 123). For further discussions of the Nakba elsewhere in Said’s work, see especially Said, The Question of Palestine and Said, The Politics of Dispossession, pp. 137–44, 156–74. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 52. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Said, Reflections on Exile, p. xxxiii. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Robert Spencer, ‘“Contented Homeland Peace”: The Motif of Exile in Edward Said’, in Iskandar and Rustom, Edward Said, pp. 389–413; p. 393. As might be expected, the secondary literature on Said’s notion of the exilic intellectual is extensive. For some of the strongest, most detailed discussions, see Hamid Dabashi, Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) and William Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). Bruce Robbins, ‘Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s “Voyage In”’, Social Text, 40 (1994), pp. 25–47; p. 26; Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 176. Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture’, Critical Inquiry, 25:1 (1998), pp. 95–125; p. 96. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Of course, Robbins’s work on cosmopolitanism itself criticises the universalising tendencies prevalent in that discourse, and seeks to ground contemporary cosmopolitanism in well-defined political, historical and cultural contexts. For his now canonical statement of a situated contemporary cosmopolitanism, see Bruce Robbins, ‘Introduction Part 1: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, in Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 1–19. Said, The Question of Palestine, p. 220. Shlaim, ‘Edward Said and the Palestine Question’, pp. 283, 284. For Said’s unconditional affirmations of the Right of Return, see, for example, Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 46–55 and Said, The Politics of Dispossession, pp. xliii–xlv. All such affirmations are in strict accordance with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which, adopted by majority vote in December 1948, decrees that ‘the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property’ (United Nations General Assembly, ‘A/RES/194 (III) – Palestine – Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator, 11 December 1948’, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/ C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A (last accessed 1 March 2017), n.p.). Said, The Politics of Dispossession, p. xxxiv. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Gauri Viswanathan (ed.), Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), p. 434; Edward W. Said and David Barsamian, Culture and Resistance: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003), p. 63. For extended analyses of Said’s politics, see Imseis, ‘Speaking Truth to Power’ and Shlaim, ‘Edward Said and the Palestine Question’. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 249. See Karim Mattar, ‘Gaza and the Limits of Metropolitan Solidarity: Affiliation Under Duress’, boundary 2 (forthcoming 2018).

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Chapter 3 Postcolonialism and Modern Arabic Literature: Twenty-first-century Horizons1 Waïl S. Hassan

Mortuary Rhetoric

I

n a curious and persistent kind of critical wishful thinking, postcolonialism’s epitaph has been written many times. Detractors on the Right and on the Left were quick to attack the new academic field inaugurated by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a book that has impacted almost every field in the humanities and social sciences. Ironically, critics with a Marxist orientation such as Abdul Jan Mohamed, Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik and Vivek Chibber found themselves in league with unlikely allies, from Orientalists like Bernard Lewis to neoconservatives like Stanley Kurtz, who alleged on the floor of the US House of Representatives that postcolonial theory was somehow responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11.2 Both groups have seen the field as a threat, whether to materialist critique or to Western civilisation tout court. Others, including many sympathisers with the project of decolonising knowledge, have also severely scrutinised postcolonialism, on the suspicion that it was not radical enough or that its radicalism was a sham, a kind of imperialist wolf in Third World clothing.3 The astonishing success of the field probably invited this kind of criticism, due to the proliferation of postcolonialist modes of reading, not all of them progressive, as too many people seemed eager to jump on the bandwagon. This eventually led to disavowals even by Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak – two of what Robert Young has called ‘the Holy Trinity of colonial discourse analysis’, the third being Homi Bhabha.4 By the late 1990s, Said distanced himself from postcolonial studies for its insufficient attention to neo-colonialism,5 while Spivak gathered her foundational essays into A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), three years before she described Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s Lying on the Postcolonial Couch (2002) as ‘giv[ing] postcolonialism a decent burial’ – and incidentally also four years before writing the obituary of Comparative Literature in Death of a Discipline (2003).6 But the monster they created refused to die. My small contribution to those debates consisted of two interrogations of the limits of postcolonial theory from the perspectives of Arabic and Comparative Literature. Neither intervention was intended as an obituary but rather as an attempt to revitalise the field, implying not so much a decline as a narrowing of horizons that took place over the course of the first two decades of its life. The first essay focused on the place of modern Arabic literature specifically, serving as an invitation to scholars of Arabic to bring the insights of postcolonial theory to bear on their object of study, while at

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the same time pointing to some of its limitations so as to warn against a wholesale appropriation of a critical apparatus that had evolved to serve the needs of other fields, mainly English studies. The central question was about ‘how postcolonial studies and Arabic studies can expand one another’s horizons’ by illuminating each other’s shortcomings and blind spots.7 Differently put, how can Arabic studies incorporate postcolonial critique and be transformed by it, the way English studies had done? This would surely also transform postcolonial theory itself through the Derridean logic of the supplement. The second project, larger in scope, extended the same logic in a more broadly comparative direction: given the increasingly Anglocentric focus of the field as it took root in English departments and seemed to have become synonymous with the history of the British empire, how can postcolonial theory broaden its purview through insights gained from dialogue with literary traditions other than the Anglophone, and the histories of other colonial empires such as the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and so on?8 As the question of Arabic and the postcolonial seems to linger more than fifteen years later, I will be making three related arguments here: first, that the rhetoric of death, birth, resurrection and haunting that has intensified around postcolonialism as an academic phenomenon is a sign of radical disciplinary transformation, one that has yet to overtake Arabic studies; second, that such transformation involves rethinking Arabic literary history and the theory of modernity to which it is wedded; and third, that such a project necessitates revamping the concept of comparison inherent as much to Arabic literary history and criticism as to postcolonial studies. If the content of some of the critiques referenced above was that postcolonial studies were not sufficiently comparative, the latest epitaph was written from within English studies. It took the form of a roundtable discussion published in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) under the title, ‘The End of Postcolonial Theory?’.9 The question seems to have been a rhetorical one insofar as all of the seven participants seemed to imply that postcolonial theory had, in fact, ended, and the brief position papers attempted to explain how and why it had. For example, Jennifer Wenzel sees postcolonial theory as a kind of ‘peace dividend’, the expression of optimism during the decade or so between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when major conflicts that resulted from the colonial era (South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine) seemed to be on the verge of resolution, making it possible to think beyond empire; but the field was ‘caught politically flat-footed’ after 9/11, unable to respond to neoconservative apologists for empire like Niall Fergusson (p. 634). For his part, Simon Gikandi argues that rather than a mere stopping or decline, the end of postcolonial theory signifies ‘the completion of a theoretical project, whose work has become ensconced as another authorized version of literary and cultural analysis’ (p. 635). As a critique of the place of the other in Western narratives of modernity, argues Gikandi, postcolonial theory was never intended to account for ‘“other” geographies and their cultural traditions’ (p. 635). As such, ‘postcolonial theory emerged as a reaction against the institutionalization of English as a discipline of empire’, and its phenomenal success in English departments is not so much a sign of its Anglocentrism or of the imperialism of English, but of autocritique within English studies (p. 635). For postcolonial theory to succeed in other fields, it would have to be similarly transformed in their image. The charge that it has failed to account for non-English traditions represents, for Gikandi, ‘an imperative for a critical project of the future: a rethinking of the relation between theory and literature and a reflection on postcoloniality as an epistemological project’ (p. 635).

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Another critic within the English field takes Gikandi’s argument a step further, explicitly in the direction of Middle East studies. In his response to the PMLA roundtable, Robert Young insists that the ‘Postcolonial Remains’.10 Young’s argument hinges on a pun. On the one hand, remains (noun) signifies that the postcolonial has died, hence its ‘mortal remains’ call for burial or cremation before its legacy can be examined and divided, as some participants in the PMLA forum claim. On the other hand, Young also asserts that the postcolonial itself remains (verb); it survives its obituaries, undead, as it were, and haunting those who wish not to think about it any more: The desired dissolution of postcolonial theory does not mean that poverty, inequality, exploitation, and oppression in the world have come to an end, only that some people in the U.S. and French academies have decided they do not want to have to think about such things any longer. (p. 19) Young distinguishes between postcolonialism as an academic field with a specific institutional history and identifiable with a set of methodological procedures, and what he describes as ‘a wide-ranging political project – to reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below’ (p. 20). The latter, he notes, neither begins nor ends in the academy, and it ‘has never involved a singular theoretical formation, but rather an interrelated set of critical and counterintuitive perspectives, a complex network of paronymous concepts and heterogeneous practices that have been developed out of traditions of resistance to a global historical trajectory of imperialism and colonialism’ (p. 20). As such, the only criterion that could determine whether ‘postcolonial theory’ has ended is whether . . . imperialism and colonialism in all their different forms have ceased to exist in the world, whether there is no longer domination by nondemocratic forces . . . or economic and resource exploitation enforced by military power, or a refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of non-Western countries, or whether peoples or cultures still suffer from long-lingering aftereffects of imperial, colonial, and neocolonial rule, albeit in contemporary forms such as economic globalization. Analysis of such phenomena requires shifting conceptualizations, but it does not necessarily require the regular production of new theoretical paradigms: the issue is rather to locate the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach, of what remains invisible, unseen, silent, or unspoken. (pp. 20–1) Young’s response to the morticians of postcolonial theory bears directly on the question of the Arab-Islamic in relation to imperialism, and as such serves as a conduit to the topic of this book: the relationship between postcolonial and Middle East studies. In his explanation of the role of postcolonial studies in the twenty-first century, Young points to what he calls ‘the politics of invisibility’, a prime example of which is the unreadability of Islam in Western discourse. Taking his cue from Said’s Covering Islam (1981), a book that focuses on the representation of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and which Said researched as part of his work on Orientalism, Young points out that the unreadability of Islam affects not only Western media and political discourse but also postcolonial critics, whose ideological commitment to secularism begets a refusal to see the diversity of Islamic responses to colonialism and neo-colonialism. This invisibility

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of Islam – or the blindness of its observers – is due to postcolonial theory’s investment in the concept of absolute Otherness that it inherited from the hegemonic discourses it meant to oppose. The concept of the Other as absolute difference is rooted, as Young notes, in nineteenth-century racial theory, but it has survived well beyond that, often implicitly positing a Western modernity against unknowable, non-Western or premodern Others (see pp. 38–9). Evoking the work of Johannes Fabian, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Derrida’s critique of Levinas, all of which refutes the concept of the absolute Other, Young points to the alternative notion of tolerance as practiced under Muslim rule throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. The political practices of toleration acknowledge (make visible) the presence and the rights of others within the polity, and as such provide a framework for the struggles of ethnic and religious minorities, migrants and indigenous peoples – groups whose struggles for recognition ought to remain the focus of postcolonial critique. In framing his argument in this way, Young effectively shifts the centre of gravity of postcolonialism from English back to Middle East Studies, the field that constituted Said’s primary object of criticism and which was, as a result, radically reconstituted. From that perspective, Middle East Studies remains the only field equipped to provide the kind of nuanced knowledge of Muslim societies and of Islamic history that can provide alternative theoretical knowledge and serve as a basis for an informed postcolonial perspective at the present time. Before turning to the relationship between postcolonial and Arabic literary scholarship specifically, as a subset of Middle East Studies, it is necessary to conclude this discussion of the status of the former with an important clarification. Postcolonialism has always been an umbrella label that is sometimes used to mean different, and differently valid, things. For example, Young and Gikandi patently disagree on the question of postcolonial theory’s ‘death’, the one denying and the other celebrating its passing, respectively. Yet they are not talking about the same thing. For Gikandi, as for other participants in the PMLA forum, postcolonialism is an academic field that they are trying to historicise. It is a ‘period’ in the history of literary criticism, in the sense that New Criticism, structuralism or poststructuralism were periods, each beginning with a certain key publication that had a transformative methodological impact on the study of literature. The question, then, for the forum participants is whether that period has ended and, as Gikandi puts it, what its legacy is for the field it has transformed. It is also, for Gikandi, a matter of literary history, in that certain authors or works lend themselves to certain reading strategies: R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) are not strictly postcolonial, whereas Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1988) and Salman Rushdie’s novels are. Gikandi argues that postcolonial narratives dating from the era of the anti-colonial struggle and decolonisation demand ‘a powerful accounting of the politics of time and postcoloniality and a recognition of the epistemological moment that created these texts, which must now be recognized as its horizon of meaning and expectation’.11 In other words, postcolonial theory coincides with a specific period in literary history, one in which certain modes, themes and motifs prevailed. We could say that a literary-historical analogy to postcolonialism would be the coincidence between Romantic poetry and Romantic criticism: both ‘ended’, chronologically, but one still reads the preface to Lyrical Ballads and Biographia Literaria along with the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge as part of literary history.

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For Young, by contrast, postcolonialism is a critical perspective on hegemony and oppression that predates, coincides with and survives academic interest (fashion or fad) – hence the ambivalence, intentional or not, of its mortal or ghostly ‘remains’. This kind of postcolonialism lasts for as long as there is colonialism, imperialism and exploitation, and it plays itself out in the raw politics of activism, liberation movements and material struggle, to which literary scholars may or may not respond. In an earlier formulation, Young defines ‘the postcolonial . . . as coming after colonialism and imperialism, in their original meaning of direct-rule domination, but still positioned within imperialism in its later sense of the global system of hegemonic economic power’; as for ‘postcolonialism – which I prefer to call tricontinentalism – [it] names a theoretical and political position which embodies an active concept of intervention within such oppressive circumstances’.12 The reference to Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement implicit in Young’s notion of ‘tricontinentalism’ makes clear that literary history and theory are a small part of this much larger programme of action and its shifting conceptualisations. As the case of Arabic literature makes clear, both Gikandi’s and Young’s definitions of the postcolonial are valid, despite their seeming contradiction. The kinds of reading strategies that Gikandi describes as befitting to the texts produced during a particular period of literary history are applicable to certain Arabic works. By the same token, imperial history in the Arab world has literary echoes that predate and outlast those kinds of texts, and its implications for Arabic literary studies are yet to be fully understood. In fact, I will be arguing below that postcolonial theory has yet to transform Arabic literary studies in the way it has transformed the English field, where it is said to have died.

Arabic and (Post)Colonial Comparison With or without explicitly deploying postcolonial concepts, scholarship on modern Arabic literature today is more heavily informed by postcolonial theory and attentive to questions of power, resistance and empire than it was at the turn of the present century. This can be attributed to younger scholars having been exposed to greater doses of literary and cultural theory than in the past, in an academic culture that has been saturated with the insights of postcolonial studies. But so long as Arabic literary scholarship remained within the sphere of area studies, this development lagged behind other literary fields; when Arabic made its way into American Comparative Literature in the 1990s, at a time when postcolonial studies began to transform that discipline, Arabic literary studies began to be transformed as well. Not surprisingly, given the colonial status of Palestine, the exception had been scholarship on Palestinian literature. The first book-length studies to take the question of imperialism seriously during the first full decade of postcolonial studies were Muhammad Siddiq’s Man is a Cause: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassān Kanafānī (1984), which squarely places Kanafānī in the context of Third World liberation struggles,13 and Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature (1987), a comparative study of Palestinian, Nicaraguan and South African literatures. However, those studies were perhaps equally if not more indebted to Kanafānī’s own literary criticism than to postcolonial studies in the North American academy, for it was Kanafānī himself who wrote the first book on Palestinian literature, Adab al-muqāwama fī

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Filasṭīn al-muḥtalla (1966, The Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine), from which Harlow borrowed the concept of ‘resistance literature’ and developed it into a paradigm of Third World, or tricontinental, comparatism.14 Other than the obvious case of Palestinian literature, it was not until the end of the following decade that the first major attempt to unhinge modern Arabic literary history from Orientalist categories was published – Terri DeYoung’s Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq (1998) – which challenged the still powerful division of modern Arabic poetry into periods that repeat those of British poetry: Neoclassical, Romantic, Modernist.15 The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (2017) represents the culmination of similar efforts on the part of many critics over the past two decades to revise the historiography and theory of the Arabic novel.16 Efforts are also underway to dislodge Orientalist historiography of Arabic literature as a whole, especially in relation to the period from the eleventh to eighteenth centuries that came to be known as ‘the Age of Decadence’ (by analogy to Europe’s ‘Dark Ages’), sandwiched between a ‘classical’ period (sixth to eleventh centuries) and the ‘modern’ period marked by a Nadha (rendered inaccurately, though significantly, as ‘Renaissance’), which is said to have come about thanks to an innocuous ‘encounter’ with modern Europe. The logic by which such terms and categories were borrowed uncritically from European history betrays a Hegelian teleology that sees Arabic and other non-European literatures repeating the phases of their European counterpart, only belatedly and imperfectly.17 Younger scholars are increasingly contributing to this kind of critical excavation and revision, although it will be some time before that project is completed, due to the entrenchment of the Eurocentric premises of the established narrative of Arab modernity and of Arabic literary history. The fact that modern Arabic literary studies is now much more heavily informed by postcolonial theory than before is due to a fundamental shift in the nature and purpose of comparative approaches. In one sense, the increasing numbers of graduate students focusing on Arabic in programmes of Comparative Literature in the 1990s, and the hiring of Arabic literary scholars in those departments, something that intensified in the following decade, added another disciplinary home for the field to the more traditional setting of Near/Middle East Studies departments. In the new setting, graduate students were not only actively studying other literary traditions in addition to modern Arabic (predominantly English and French), but their programmes of study included greater emphasis on modern critical theory than did area studies, at a time when Comparative Literature was itself undergoing significant transformation under the influence of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. That generation of scholars has been inserting modern Arabic literature into the wider conversations about literary and cultural production taking place in other literary fields represented, for example, at the annual meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association, and in academic journals not exclusively devoted to Arabic literature or Middle East studies. This development has helped to mainstream Arabic literature within the US academy by bringing the concerns of contemporary cultural theory to bear on modern Arabic literature for the first time, thereby also allowing Arabic literary scholarship to participate in setting the agenda of theory. It was that shift in methodology that has impacted modern Arabic literary studies the most, rather than the fact of comparison per se, for older approaches were also comparative, explicitly or implicitly. Orientalist scholarship, of course, was inherently

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comparative in that it measured non-European cultures against that of Europe, which it assumed to be superior. Comparison of that kind assumed a developmental logic by which European culture was advanced and those of colonised peoples lagging behind at various degrees of evolution. Such was the logic of William Babington Macaulay’s comparison of ‘a single shelf of a good European library’ to ‘the entire native literature of India and Arabia’, a judgement that his Orientalist consultants could not deny.18 Bluntly expressed here in order to drive home a partisan argument about colonial policy, this was nonetheless the implicit logic of much Orientalist scholarship, however dressed in objectivity and scholarly decorum. Indeed, the very constructs of Orient and Occident, or East and West, are comparative in their mutual exclusivity, the one making sense only in relation to the other. They pretend to name cultural and historical entities, and depending on the speaker, one is deemed superior to the other, although in the final analysis they are conjoined twins, the offspring of colonial ideology.19 Sorbonne and Oxbridge-educated Arab intellectuals of the late Nadha adopted that ideology. Unlike their predecessors in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Rifā‘a al-Ṭahṭāwī, who assumed a posture of critical comparatism that aimed at selective adaptation of certain aspects of modern European civilisation deemed beneficial while rejecting others considered flawed or incompatible with Arab Islamic societies, leaders of Arab thought in the first half of the twentieth century believed that wholesale appropriation of European norms was the only way to progress. For example, 103 years after Macaulay called on the colonial authorities in India to implement a programme of education intended ‘to form a class of persons who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indians in blood and colour, but English is tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’,20 Ṭāha Ḥusayn wrote, ‘we [need to be] educated like the European in order to feel as he feels, and to judge things as he judges them, then to do as he does and to conduct the affairs of life as he conducts them’.21 This attitude manifests itself in the historiography and theory of modern Arabic literature as a whole: from the felt need to adopt genres like the novel and theatre, in their recent European forms, because they were found to be ‘lacking’ in Arabic literature, which was therefore deemed to be deficient; to the heated debates surrounding the classical forms of Arabic poetry versus Romantic and modernist European forms; to the criteria developed for the evaluation of modern Arabic literature, often based on European models. One such influential critic was Ṭāha Ḥusayn’s disciple ‘Abd al-Muḥsin Ṭāha Badr, whose Taṭawwur al-riwāya al-‘arabiyya al-ḥadītha fī Miṣr (1870–1938) (1963, The Development of the Modern Arabic Novel in Egypt, 1870–1938) continues to set the terms of the discussion of the Arabic novel.22 Combining the premises and methodology of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) with Ṭāha Ḥusayn’s Eurocentric vision of progress, Badr saw the imitation of the European novel as the only way for the genre to evolve in Arabic, and that required the elimination of any influence from the numerous narrative genres that animated Arabic literature since pre-Islamic times.23 The underlying assumption, not only for Badr but also for major writers such as Najīb Maḥfūẓ (Naguib Mahfouz) in the first half of his career, was that a true Arabic novel must be a faithful copy of its European model (see Badr p. 35). This kind of approach is dramatically illustrated in two contrasting judgements on the most canonical of postcolonial Arabic novels, Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl (1966, Season of Migration to the North) by al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ (Tayeb Salih). As late as

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1985, a major journal like Comparative Literature Studies could publish an article in which Ṣāliḥ’s novel is compared to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the premise that all the structural and thematic parallels between the two works were intended by the Sudanese author merely to ‘produce a similar profound effect’ to that of Conrad’s text, then to conclude that Season represents ‘Tayeb’s [sic] unsuccessful attempt to integrate . . . Conradian elements’.24 A few years later, the same author, writing in Arabic, would reverse this judgement in a book in which Ṣāliḥ’s novel is favourably compared to Heart of Darkness, Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, and to conclude this time around that ‘Season of Migration reminds us of those glorious attempts in the world of the novel, and its comparison to world novels acquaints us with the extent of its authenticity’.25 Whatever may have caused this critical about-face, the two opposing valuations issue from the same premise: that the measure of an Arab writer’s skill, and of the ‘authenticity’ of the Arabic novel, is the relative success or failure of his or her imitation of great European masters – imitation that ‘Abd al-Muḥsin Ṭāha Badr saw as the condition of the modern Arabic novel. From this standpoint, comparison constitutes ‘a value judgment’.26 Resemblance to a European masterpiece is a mark of distinction, and a favourable comparison becomes the highest form of praise to which a non-European writer can aspire. In fact, the very act of comparison, even when negative, becomes a compliment made to a lesser author, better than neglect that befalls the majority of Arab writers who do not bear ‘a family resemblance to European literature’ (p. 15). The idea that an Arab or any Global South author can contest colonial discourse or undermine its authority is inconceivable from this standpoint. Such contestation is precisely what a postcolonial perspective allows us to see. Nevertheless, the point that needs emphasis now is that postcolonial criticism is as inherently comparative as Orientalism. It changes the aims of comparison without shifting its axis. To continue with the example of Ṣaliḥ’s novel, postcolonial readings of it, starting with Edward Said’s in Culture and Imperialism (1993),27 to Spivak28 and Hassan,29 also begin with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, seen now as an imperialist tale to be debunked rather than a model to be slavishly emulated. Ironically as well, part of Season of Migration to the North’s status as the most canonical Arabic novel in postcolonial studies rests on the fact that it ‘writes back’ to Conrad’s text, one of the most canonical narratives of empire. In this way, the centrality of imperial narratives and canons remains untroubled, and the logic of empire asserts itself, even in its reversal. Postcolonialism has changed the aims of comparison without modifying its underlying structure.

Arabic Re-comparativised It is at this juncture that Gikandi’s observation about literary history can help us salvage postcolonial critique from the charge that it re-inscribes the metropolitan canon in a kind of reverse Eurocentrism. In the case of Ṣāliḥ, the postcolonial is a period in literary history in which literature responds to the political imperatives of decolonisation and independence, a period that comes to a close with the materialisation of new conditions and imperatives. This is a call for rigorous historicisation and contextualisation of literary works that does not exhaust the critical potential of postcolonialism as an ongoing interrogation of hegemonic structures in the service

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of liberation. Rigorous historicisation demands that a reading of Sudanese writers of the generation following Ṣāliḥ’s, such as Jamal Mahjoub (a half-Sudanese, half-British Anglophone writer who revisits from another perspective the colonial history covered in Ṣāliḥ’s novel), Leila Aboulela (an Anglophone Sudanese-Scottish immigrant concerned with Muslim minorities in Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century) or Amīr Tāj al-Sirr (an Arabophone novelist preoccupied with contemporary Sudan with its hybridity, inner migrations and history) should follow different protocols, and presumably different trajectories of comparison. Rigorous historicisation would reveal that even when dealing directly with colonialism and its ongoing legacy, those novelists’ concerns respond to realities that are significantly altered from those of the 1960s, realities that nevertheless call for anti-hegemonic critique. However, the fact is that Ṣāliḥ’s Sudanese successors do not enjoy anything resembling his visibility, and not only because of all-too-easy explanations based on comparative talent. The agenda of comparison remains Eurocentric. Texts that dialogue with European works, themes and motifs enjoy greater visibility than those less, or not at all, oriented toward Europe. This is as true with Arab readers as with the paradigms of Comparative Literature as an academic discipline. American Comparative Literature has so far accommodated three major paradigms of comparison: a dominant NorthNorth (or West-West) paradigm, which represents the mainstay of comparative work in inter-European and North American relations; a more recent North-South paradigm represented by postcolonial studies, with its focus on relations between Europe and its former colonies; and a much smaller and more recent domain, albeit with a vast potential, of South-South relations – for example, Arabic literature studied in relation to Asian, African and Latin American literatures.30 As such, postcolonial studies has enabled the entry of modern Arabic literature into the realm of comparison, of dialogue with other literary critical fields through the metalanguage of theory, and with that has come increased sophistication and attention to questions of method. At the same time, however, this has confined Arabic literary studies to the North-South, or centre-periphery, paradigm that defines the postcolonial (in its literary-historical sense), foreclosing questions relevant to more recent periods, strictly local conditions or cultural, historical and political ties among regions of the Global South. For example, with its interest in reinterpreting the colonial as well as the strictly local past, and its seeming preoccupation with constructing coherent narratives of national and cultural identity, the growing phenomenon of the historical novel in many Arab countries is something that escapes postcolonial and Comparative Literary paradigms. Historical novels by writers as diverse as ‘Abdallah al-Ṭā’ī (Oman), ‘Īsā ‘Abdallah (Qatar), Ibrāhīm Naṣrallah (Palestine/Jordan) or Binsālim Ḥimmīsh (Morocco) neither participate in the critique of nationalism and grand narratives so central to postcolonial critique, nor do they lend themselves to the kinds of comparative reading strategies that organise the circuits of world literature. Moreover, the exponential growth of the novel in almost every Arab country since the 1970s calls for serious examination of the role of the nation state in the development of national canons and its implications for contemporary Arabic literary history. And if we look beyond the preeminent postcolonial genre of the novel to the thriving poetry scene, especially the altogether untranslatable Nabaṭī poetry whose perennial popularity in the Gulf region has recently been redoubled with the tremendous success of televised talent shows, we realise that the great majority of modern and contemporary Arabic literature simply eludes the North-South paradigm.

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As for the South-South paradigm, it allows for comparison of modern Arabic literature with East and South Asian, African and Latin American literatures, all of which offer rich opportunities for the investigation of alternative modes of thinking about modernity. Comparative work in this area is quite new, although historical relations and their literary echoes among Asia, Africa and Arabia are millennial. Ronit Ricci’s Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (2011), which focuses on the translation of a tenth-century Arabic text, has scratched the surface of an enormous field of cultural exchange, one that begins with Islam’s spread eastward and continues to the present.31 Not focusing on Arabic but exemplary of South-South relations is also Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (2013), which examines the life writings of South Asians in East Africa.32 Arab-African relations require little elaboration. The spread of Islam in East and West Africa since the seventh century makes for comparable trajectories of exchange to those found in South Asia. Several Arab countries are located in Africa, the division between North and Sub-Saharan Africa being a product of colonial knowledge systems, and the recent emergence of Arabic novels written by non-Arab African writers from Eritrea, Chad, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal further destabilises that division.33 The history of British, French and Portuguese colonialism and decolonisation in Africa, the Arab world and South Asia is also rich ground for comparative studies among the three overlapping regions – ‘horizontal’ links that are often overlooked in studies that re-inscribe European primacy in ‘vertical’ relations that radiate unidirectionally between the metropolitan centre and each of its colonies. This verticality has been the operative model in postcolonial studies, Comparative Literature and area studies. Moving westward across another ocean, we can identify at least four kinds of relations between Arabic and the literatures of Latin America – and indeed the Americas as a whole. First, Muslim rule in Iberia had a direct and lasting impact on the languages and cultures of Spain and Portugal, and through them on Latin America. That history has had important implications for literature: from Borges’s writings on Averroës and The Thousand and One Nights to the flying carpets in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and the crucial element of the fantastic in Magical Realism more generally, to powerful conceptualisations of national identity as something marked by Moorish culture, as in Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (first published in 1933).34 The second type of relations is the impact of North and South American literatures on modern Arabic literature, particularly poetry, via the work of the Mahjar, or immigrant writers in the early twentieth century. Third, the writings of Arab immigrants and their descendants in the languages of the Americas – English, French, Portuguese and Spanish – are ripe for comparative study, both within the emerging field of American hemispheric studies and with Arabic literature. Fourth, there are prominent Latin American writers with no Arab ancestry who have taken interest either in Arab culture or in Arab immigrants or both, and who can, therefore, be studied in this context. In addition to Borges and García Márquez, prominent authors include João Almino, Jorge Amado, Ana Miranda, Verónica Murguía, Malba Tahan (Júlio César de Mello e Souza), Angela Dutra de Menezes and Alberto Ruy-Sánchez. I have made reference in the previous paragraph to the United States and Canada, which obviously do not belong to the Global South and, in fact, the former of which

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has become the centre of the current unipolar imperial order. The reason for this is that the position of Arab diasporic communities in North America, as in Western Europe for that matter, fragments the old North-North paradigm by, first of all, demonstrating that the ‘West’ as such does not exist in the unitary form that originated in imperial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which gave us the essentialist concept of the absolute Other and the East/West dichotomy based on it. Second, the literary productions of those Arab minorities multiply the directions of comparison: among them and Arabic literature as written in the Arab world (such as Egyptian and Egyptian American), among themselves (Arab minorities in various countries of the Americas and Europe), and among them and the literatures of other minorities (such as Arab American and African American).35 Indigenous Studies, the flipside of the diaspora coin, allows for comparative studies of Palestinian and American Indian literatures, a path opened by Steven Salaita in The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (2006) and Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016), as well as among various other indigenous traditions around the world, as Chadwick Allen has shown in Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (2012).36 Those kinds of South-South relations and their triangulations via the North do not underwrite the centrality of Europe and the United States. However, they require the reconceptualisation of Middle East studies and Comparative Literature in ways that allow for the development of expertise in an area such as the relations between Arabic and Latin American studies. This requires an Arabic field that is bounded neither by the traditional parameters of Middle East studies nor by comparative practices that place it exclusively within a North-South postcolonial model premised on the centrality of English and French. Here we come up against an institutional horizon that has limited the range of languages available to Arabists (English, French and German) and circumscribed comparison within the postcolonial paradigm. Rarely, for example, does one encounter Arabists who can competently work in Turkish, Persian, Urdu or Malay, languages and cultures with historical ties to Arabic and sharing many contemporary concerns. Connections among Arabic and African and Latin American literatures, while rich in potential, are also ignored, the latter demanding knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish, no less foreclosed in the construction of Arabic programmes of study than Asian and African languages. Colonial history and the institutions it has begotten, area studies being their contemporary avatar, continue to govern the production of knowledge. They have shaped the contemporary realities of Global South societies in comparable ways but foreclosed direct comparison among them, favouring instead knowledge systems that tie imperialised societies separately and vertically to metropolitan centres. A reconstructed Middle East studies may disavow its historical affiliation with imperialism and take an oppositional stance toward it, but the field remains dependent on government funding and vulnerable to political pressure. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have selected their Middle East advisors from among scholars who are happy to put their expertise in the service of US dominance in the region. As the American continuation of European Oriental studies, area studies was conceived at the onset of the Cold War as a collection of ‘national resource centers’ charged with studying the rest of the world as parcelled out in light of US geopolitical interests. As such, the operative duality

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that justifies its existence in the eyes of lawmakers has the US occupying the central position: ‘the US and Latin America’, ‘the US and Africa’ or ‘the US and the Middle East’, but rarely ‘the Middle East and Latin America’, ‘Japan and Brazil’ or ‘India and Africa’. This area studies model has not changed under the influence of postcolonial theory, which is similarly governed by the North-South paradigm.

Horizons as Limits and Possibilities The attempt in the forgoing discussion has been to identify some of the epistemological, disciplinary and institutional limits of Arabic literary studies today. Those limits include ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’.37 The deconstruction of that duality began with Said’s Orientalism, but has not been accomplished yet, given that despite the idea of the Orient or the East being now discredited, that of ‘the West’ remains. Its astonishing resiliency animates not only hegemonic discourses of Western superiority or exceptionalism, but also the discourses of many who see themselves as opponents of imperialism, yet who embrace the principle of absolute Otherness that animates its ideology. The discipline of Comparative Literature, which originated in assumptions of diversity within a constructed unity of European or ‘Western’ literature, is still largely bounded by that logic, both in the North-North and in (post)colonial varieties of the North-South paradigm. This has also been the case with area studies generally, and Oriental-turned-Middle-East studies in particular. The dualistic logic of those identity formations is jealously guarded by disciplinary, institutional and political stakeholders who often control funding for Near or Middle East studies programmes.38 But identifying the limits takes us at least halfway toward charting the possibilities, which are seen here as residing less in attempts to reverse dualistic logic than to elude it: both in bypassing the hegemonic centre in work that focuses on South-South dimensions of global relations, and in triangulating those relations in ways that debunk essentialism and exceptionalism. This is difficult work, epistemologically and disciplinarily, and it may be impossible for foreign policy actors to support it, because it requires Middle East studies, but also Comparative Literature and postcolonial studies, to be re-centred and re-configured. It requires overcoming inertia, unlearning persistent habits of mind that divide the world between the West and the Rest, and restructuring programmes and curricula. As for Arabic literary studies, it is no longer a question of ‘importing’ concepts, ‘applying’ new theories or ‘inserting’ Arabic literature into pre-existing norms, but of critical rethinking that results from the confrontation of Arabic studies with those formations. It is the work of supplementation, or the expansion of mutual horizons.

Notes 1. This chapter was originally published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 9 November 2017, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13698 01X.2017.1391711, pp. 1–17. Minor edits have been applied here. 2. See Stanley Kurtz, ‘Statement of Stanley Kurtz. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Select Education, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives’, Committee on Education and the Workforce, 19 June 2002, http://archives.republicans .edlabor.house.gov/archive/hearings/108th/sed/titlevi61903/kurtz.htm (last accessed 16 March 2017), n.p.

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3. For an overview of the field and the controversies surrounding it up to the mid-1990s, see Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 1–33. 4. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 163. 5. See Edward Said, ‘Edward Said in Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul and Ania Loomba, New Delhi, 16 December 1997’, Interventions, 1:1 (1998), pp. 81–96; p. 82. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, jacket blurb, in Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 7. Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Postcolonial Theory and Modern Arabic Literature: Horizons of Application’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 33:1 (2002), pp. 45–64; p. 47. 8. See Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders (eds), ‘Comparative (Post)colonialisms’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 23:1–2 (2003). 9. See Sunil Agnani et al., ‘Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger and Susie Tharu’, PMLA, 122:3 (2007), pp. 633–51. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 10. See Robert J. C. Young, ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, 43 (2012), pp. 19–42. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 11. Agnani et al., ‘Editor’s Column’, p. 636. 12. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 57. 13. See Muhammad Siddiq, Man is a Cause: Political Consciousness in the Fiction of Ghassān Kanafānī (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), p. xi. 14. See, Ghassān Kanafānī, Adab al-muqāwama fī Filasṭīn al-muḥtalla 1948–1966 (Beirut: Dār Al-Ma‘ārif, 1966) and Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 2–30. 15. See Terri DeYoung, Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 16. See Waïl S. Hassan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 17. See Roger Allen and D. S. Richards (eds), Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Muhsin Al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2015). 18. William Babington Macaulay, ‘Indian Education: Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835’, in Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (eds), Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), pp. 56–62; p. 58. 19. See Waïl S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 7–14. 20. Macaulay, ‘Indian Education’, p. 61. 21. Ṭāha Ḥusayn, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-Ma‘ārif wa Maktabatihā bi-Miṣr, 1938). Translation from original Arabic mine. 22. See ‘Abd al-Muḥsin Ṭāha Badr, Taṭawwur al-riwāya al-‘arabiyya al-ḥadīth fī Miṣr (1870–1938) (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1963). 23. See Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Toward a Theory of the Arabic Novel’, in Hassan, The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, pp. 19–47; pp. 29–34. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 24. Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Tayeb Salih and Conrad’, Comparative Literature Studies, 22:1 (1985), pp. 156–71; pp. 167–8.

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25. Muḥammad Shāhīn, Taḥawwulāt al-shawq fī Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl: Dirāsa naqdiyya muqārana (Beirut: Al-Mu’assassa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasāt wa-l-Nashr, 1993), p. 19. Translation from original Arabic mine. 26. Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, trans. Waïl S. Hassan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 15. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 27. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 211–12. 28. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 54–65. 29. See Waïl S. Hassan, Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), pp. 82–113. 30. See Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Arabic and the Paradigms of Comparison’, in Ursula Heise (ed.), Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 187–194; pp. 191–2. 31. See Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 32. See Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 33. See Hassan, The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, chapters 12 and 24. 34. In an unpublished interview with the author, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ contended that he used Magical Realism in ‘Urs al-Zayn (1962, The Wedding of Zein), five years before the publication of García Márquez’s novel. Aside from complicated questions of genealogy and influence, such varieties of Magical Realism clearly demand comparative attention, especially in South-South directions. 35. See Hassan, The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, chapters on the Arab Diasporic novel in Part III. 36. See Steven Salaita, The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006) and Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 37. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 2–3. 38. Incidentally, American Comparative Literature departments, too, were first funded by the National Defense Education Act of 1958, since the study of European literatures was believed to promote understanding among European nations and help avert another world war.

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Chapter 4 Interview with Ahdaf Soueif Anna Ball

Introduction

I

n CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM, Said writes that the liberationist ‘intellectual mission’ has evolved from its nationally resistant roots to be borne today by ‘the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages’.1 As a writer, cultural commentator and political activist, Ahdaf Soueif both embodies this powerful interstitiality and enacts its liberationist potential. Born in Cairo, educated in Egypt and England, and politically active in many countries, Soueif’s work spans histories, cultures and contexts, always operating at the vital intersection between the lived and imagined, creative and political. In her fictional writing, she is admired for her nuanced and humane construction of characters and relationships that navigate the complex historical and geographical territories demarcating ‘West’ and ‘Middle East’; in her cultural commentary and her political activism, meanwhile, Soueif is renowned for her vocal and creative advocacy of Egyptian democracy, and Palestinian rights. Small wonder, then, that Soueif’s creative, critical and cultural activities have received prolific attention from scholars of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’.2 Soueif was born in 1950s Cairo, and spent portions of her childhood in both Cairo and London, where her mother, who would later go on to become professor of English Literature at Cairo University (a post she could not take up ‘until the British had left’)3 undertook a PhD on the influence of the Oriental tale in English fiction. The effects of these early cultural traversals reverberate throughout Soueif’s first collection of short stories, Aisha, which are united by the voice of a young Egyptian girl who tells of her travels between Cairo and London.4 Writing in her essay collection Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, however, she also traces this hybrid transcultural awareness back to her Cairene upbringing in the 1960s, which she describes as ‘a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions’.5 In her adulthood, she would come to traverse this terrain more literally: having undertaken BA and MA degrees in English Literature in Cairo, she moved to Lancaster, UK, to undertake a PhD in literary semantics, before moving back to Cairo to enter, relatively briefly, into academia at the university there;6 later, after marrying the writer Ian Hamilton, with whom she would have two sons, Ismail Richard Hamilton and Omar Robert Hamilton (now an author and cultural activist himself),7 she would move again to London. A sojourn of two years in Riyadh saw her start her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1992): a work that, while attentive to female consciousness and desire, is also about the act of teaching and reading across languages.8 As of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011,

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however, Soueif has come to assume permanent residence in the city of her birth, and to continue her transcultural activities from this base. Given the recurring themes within her writing, it is hardly surprising that Soueif’s work has drawn the attention of scholars of the ‘postcolonial Middle East’. Her fiction has received acclaim for intervening within the territories of Orientalist stereotype, and while attentive to difficult historical detail, her works ultimately locate a redemptive potential in humans’ capacity to connect above and beyond cultural dissonance. In her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Map of Love,9 for instance, the encounter between the English Lady Anna Winterbourne and Egyptian nationalist Sharif al-Baroudi results in a marriage that radically contests the power imbalances and national affiliations that would seem to divide them. Indeed, echoes of a ‘common ground’ are to be found not just in their meeting of true minds, but in ludic linguistic references to the connections that can be traced between seemingly disparate words, within and across languages. (It is interesting in light of this to note that The Map of Love remains the only one of her novels to have been translated into Arabic – by her mother, Fatma Moussa Mahmoud.) Soueif’s literary consciousness is never simply utopian, however. Indeed, in her earlier collection of short stories, Sandpiper (a selection of which were later collected together alongside stories from Aisha in I Think of You), she also demonstrates a keen awareness of the fragility of human and cultural bonds, and of the sometimes devastating pressures exerted by distance and displacement on individuals’ lives.10 Subtle as her literary treatment of these themes may be, Soueif’s career is also defined by a powerfully liberationist impulse. She is a renowned cultural commentator for publications including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Al-Jazeera and Al-Ahram Weekly, among others; much of this work, from 1981 to 2004, is collected together in Mezzaterra: a volume that offers insight on topics ranging from the imprisonment of Nawal el-Saadawi to the harassment of British Muslims shortly after 11 September 2001. What unites these diverse interventions, however, is what Soueif has described as a sense of responsibility based on her position as cultural representative and representor of ‘the Arab world’, to contest the ‘fashioning of an image [of Arabs and Islam] that is so at variance with the truth’ and that, ‘in promoting a picture of the Arab world that is essentially passive, primitive and hopeless . . . validates the politicians’ dreams of domination’.11 Soueif’s own cultural commentary from this period can therefore perhaps be described as inflected by a postcolonial desire to debunk Orientalist stereotype and to instigate discursive agency. Since 2000, however, it is possible to note a shift towards a more directly articulated activist consciousness. In this year, Soueif was sent for one week to report from Palestine for The Guardian. During this visit, she wrote of a ‘world turned upside down’ and observed, in searing, poignant detail, the keen injustices and tragedies of the Israeli Occupation.12 Eight years later, Soueif would come to establish ‘PalFest’, the ‘Palestine Festival of Literature’, in partnership with her son, Omar Robert Hamilton (as well as the British writers Brigid Keenan and Victoria Brittain), with the aims of ‘showcasing and supporting cultural life in Palestine, breaking the cultural siege imposed on Palestinians by the Israeli military occupation, and strengthening cultural links between Palestine and the rest of the world’.13 Ten years on, the festival has gone from strength to strength, hosting over 200 authors and industry professionals; this year has seen the publication of commentary on the festival by numerous participatory authors, including prominent ‘postcolonial’ voices such as Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee and Kamila Shamsie in This Is Not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature.14

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The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 marks the most recent expression of Soueif’s cultural activist consciousness. With the first burst of the uprising, Soueif travelled to Egypt in order to join the protests in Tahrir Square. She reported on the protests for The Guardian and for the next three years, wrote a weekly column for the Egyptian national daily, Al-Shorouk.15 Her memoir of the revolution, first published as Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) has just been reprinted with additional material.16 Despite the setbacks that campaigners for political reform have experienced in Egypt, Soueif remains a vocal advocate of democracy and justice, and, as she reveals in the following interview, continues to employ cultural expression as a mode of activism: she is currently working on a new novel tied to this context, and it will indeed be fascinating to see how she chooses to ‘speak truth to power’ within this next creative work. The following interview took place on 5 January 2018, by telephone. Our conversation sought to explore the intersection between the core creative, critical and cultural activist components of Soueif’s career that have been so instrumental in connecting lived and written worlds. It also sought to shed light on some of the mental and technical processes that underpin the formation of Soueif’s writing – of tremendous interest to literary postcolonialists in particular. What emerges from this conversation – in parallel with Soueif’s warm, reflective and generous tone – is her passionate belief in writing as a mode of resistance, and in the urgency of the cultural task for the deeply challenging times in which we live. *

*

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Anna Ball: Ahdaf, location is important within your writing and so I thought we might begin by describing where both of us are sitting as we’re speaking to one another. I’m in Nottingham in the UK; I’m sitting at my desk in my study and it’s a very dour day outside, with mauve clouds on the horizon and a light drizzle: a typically English January scene, the kind I’m sure you’re familiar with. Ahdaf Soueif: I’m in Cairo and I’m in my son’s study, in our old family flat in Zamalek; that’s the island in the river in central Cairo. It’s pleasant – not as sunny as I would like but very good for this time of year. I’ve got all the windows closed because it’s time for Friday prayers and I can hear three sermons being shouted out from three different mosques. AB: You mentioned you’re in Cairo at present. Is that a permanent location for you now? You also mentioned to me you’ve returned to writing fiction. Are those two connected in any way? AS: In answer to the second part of your question: no, they’re not connected. As you know, I lived from 1984 to 2011 in both London and Cairo but with the larger part of the year in London. I always knew that one day I’d swap that balance and would be more in Cairo. That day came in 2011, with the revolution. So, no, it isn’t to do with fiction: it’s to do with the revolution, and – in the end – Cairo is home. AB: I wonder whether your decision to move might be understood as a new kind of political commitment in your cultural life, and if this has created a new connection to Cairo as a city for you. I’m also interested in whether your feelings have altered towards it at all since you moved there, or since you published Cairo: A City Transformed (2014).

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AS: I’ve always been committed to Cairo; I make that statement in my memoir of the revolution [A City Transformed]. But perhaps this is a new expression of that commitment. In the years 2011–2012, it felt as though here, in Cairo, we were creating something very big and very important – something that could change the world. Then, in 2013, with the military take-over, the defeat of the revolution and the coming to power of the counter-revolution, leaving would have been like running away. And there is still something happening at the moment. As we learn to live with defeat it’s vital to continue to encourage any bit of radical activity that still has the spirit of revolution and looks towards the new. I need to be available for that and part of it. AB: It’s interesting to hear you use the term ‘defeat’: that seems a very definitive way of characterising what might also be understood as part of an ongoing process of political development. It’s interesting to hear, too, that you believe there are aspects of revolutionary activity still taking place. I want to ask you about the role of culture, and of the writer, and also of the ‘public intellectual’ which to an extent you have come to embody. How do you feel that revolutionary drive is still being enacted within the worlds of culture, thought and creative activity, and what is your role within it? AS: Living with defeat is something we have to deal with and try to respond to in various ways: by documenting and bearing witness to what is happening, and also, encouraging and being part of continuing efforts to change things, to resist. Of course the arenas that actually have to change are the political and economic. The contribution of people in the cultural sphere is to try to keep ideas and memories alive, and to insist that something different is possible. Nothing needs to be blatant or direct; it just needs to remain outside and in counter-point to the official discourse. An exhibition of paintings, for instance, can be important; new music or performances are important. One of the very important art forms that really flourished and developed in front of our eyes during the revolution was graffiti art. So just recirculating examples of this in order for them to remain in the public memory is important and gets a huge response. Of course, writing matters. But maybe some genres matter more immediately than others? Poetry – particularly in the vernacular – is what most speaks to people and what is most immediately accessible. One of the things I did during the revolutionary period was I started writing in Arabic. Reportage, commentary, polemic: I had a weekly column in a national newspaper. It got a really wide following and as the population of young people in prison grew, my column became important to them. It was very much part of my contribution to what was going on. It was stopped about two years ago so that forum isn’t available to me anymore – but that would have been a good thing to carry on doing. AB: I would also like to know how your location in Egypt might have altered your attitude to the role of the author, and the opportunities available to you in terms of alterations in readership, publication avenues and censorship pressures. Does it feel that your location has changed what it means for you to be, or operate as, an author? AS: Of course, the difference is writing in Arabic, and writing in a newspaper. While for my English writing I had a Western readership in the West, I also had a big readership among English-reading Arabs. But writing a column rather than a book reaches a different audience. That was important in view of what was happening.

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I’d never thought of myself as a journalist. Then in September 2000, Map of Love was shortlisted for the Booker. That gave me a bigger platform than I’d had before, so when the second intifada broke out a couple of months later, The Guardian asked me if I would go and write about it, and I did. That week I was in Palestine, and every night writing down what I had seen and heard, I felt that I was putting the skills that I had to an immediate and incontrovertibly good use. Everything was aligned: my ethics, my political position and my skills as a writer. And I guess I kind of hijacked myself into that type of writing – where you use your skills as a novelist in order to communicate something that is actual in the world; to make it felt by the reader. And then in 2005, serious protests started up in Egypt and I started writing about those, also for The Guardian and a couple of Western papers. Then the natural progression was that in 2007, I and my son and some friends created the Palestine Festival of Literature, in the belief that writing and culture matter, and that they can reach people’s hearts and perceptions in a way that other things can’t – and can actually effect change on the ground. We ran PalFest for ten years (last year was the tenth anniversary) and out of that came the book This Is Not a Border, and really with all that, I didn’t find it possible to have the space and distance that you need in order to write fiction. AB: I’m going to return to asking you about PalFest a little later on – but I’d like to explore this shift that is taking place in your work back towards fiction a little further. It is inspiring to hear you talk about the ways in which your writing ‘came alive’ when located against the backdrop of fraught political contexts. These are also facets of your work that many postcolonial scholars have found energising about your work. Please can you therefore tell us more about this shift from politically located, journalistic work to fiction that is taking place for you now? Why do you think this shift is taking place? AS: In 2007 I started a new novel. We had initiated PalFest, and so it was OK to try to devote some time to fiction. But then events took over, the most important of which was that my mother died at the end of that year. I think that for me to write fiction I have to be unafraid to go into any corner of my heart, unafraid to be wide open, and I couldn’t be that after my mother died. For quite a while. So that novel was put to one side, which is a bit of a shame. The thing is that I’ve only written two novels – but with both of them, the only way I could begin was by isolating myself from the world for a couple of months, so that whatever landscape was being formed inside me had a chance to emerge; for the world of the novel to be created. After a couple of months, the world would be there and I could access it – as long as I didn’t stay away from it for longer than two or three days at a time. With 2011, of course, that isolation just wasn’t possible, and continues to be extremely difficult. Another change that has happened – with writing articles and public speaking and so on – it always feels as though this next piece you’re writing will be the one that makes a difference. And so you put fiction to one side because not only does it need this semi-isolation, but also, it takes a long time. But then, with the revolution, I found that we’d be in the protest and there’d be tear gas, and somebody would say to me, ‘and when’s the next novel?’ And I’d say ‘come on now, is this a moment for novels?’ and they’d say, ‘yes, when’s the next novel?’ We were in a sit-in once and a young woman showed me a copy of the Arabic edition of Map of Love, which was so annotated, and with bits of paper stuck to it – and she said that during a sit-in, people were reading this together and making their own comments on it. That was incredibly moving and humbling. My sons keep telling

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me that my actual job is to write fiction. And then of course, with our defeat here, and all the terrible things happening in Palestine, well a direct engagement over seventeen years has not really changed anything, has it? So maybe I’ve come to the end of direct engagement – for the moment. And maybe the really brave and different thing to do will be to try to engage with what’s happening at the level of fiction. But, you know, I was talking of a world being created inside you – but that assumes that this ‘inside you’ remains more or less the same; that your emotional terrain is consistent to a large extent. And of course what’s happening now and has been happening for a while is not that at all. In fact your emotional landscape is so volatile that you hardly have access today to the person you were yesterday. I guess what I want is to produce something that will reflect this state of volatility. But there also needs to be something of the classic novel in what I do: characters the reader cares about. Somehow that needs to be done in a way through which the reader feels the changed landscape that we are living through. AB: It’s interesting to hear that you consider there to be different literary and cultural forms suited to different purposes, and that the novel therefore has a distinctive role to play within this landscape. I am very struck by the story of the young woman activist with her annotated copy of Map of Love; the novel clearly assumed a sense of urgency during the revolution, perhaps because of the question it poses about the potential for cultural identities to be negotiated and remade. It is therefore pertinent to reflect on the way that texts assume different lives and truths depending on where and when it is read. It is also significant to note, though, that you’re now seeking to grapple with the new political environment in which you live through fiction. Whereas The Map of Love takes place across historical and geographical contexts, you seem to be turning towards a landscape much closer and more personal to you. I wonder if this will influence the way in which you’re able to construct that imagined landscape in your work. Because this is such an important topic to your literary scholars in particular, I want to ask how you go about building these political and cultural contexts within your work. AS: With Map of Love, I worked out I wanted to situate the book somewhere between 1882 and 1919. Also at that time I was interested in exploring cross-cultural relations, particularly love and friendship. And in language: when did it help people know one another better, and when was it used as a means of deceiving or dividing? I was also interested in the nineteenth century Western women who travelled in Egypt and the Middle East. Some of them were simply the product of imperialism, and some of them, like Lucy Duff Gordon, for example, achieved an open heart and open mind, and saw things for what they were. I started writing Anna’s and Sharif’s story – and then I found that I didn’t want to pretend we were in 1901; I wanted to be in the ‘now’ – looking back. So the contemporary story of Omar and Isabel was created. And then the two stories needed a device to link them – so Amal, the narrator, emerged. With the old story, I discovered how much detail, texture I didn’t know – like did people turn on electricity or gas? So I had to do research and I ended up with a month by month chart of the years I was dealing with. It listed what was going on in Egypt and England and Palestine – political and cultural, civic events; the opening of a bridge, or the publication of a book everyone was talking about. So in the end, I had a scaffolding of real

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history – and real characters within that history – and then against that background, my invented characters found their places and their lives. AB: It’s clear from what you say that an incredible amount of research goes into your writing, and this is one of the many reasons that it’s so rich and fruitful for scholars to engage with Map of Love in particular – because it has a strong ‘worldly’ connection, as Said would have it. It’s also clear that colonialism is a force that shapes the world of that text. To what extent has a consciousness of colonialism influenced your work and your consciousness? AS: Well, I have dealt with this more extensively in the introduction to Mezzaterra. I suppose the first political thing I became aware of as a child was the Suez Crisis of 1956. We were in London at the time – my mother was doing a PhD and my father a postdoctoral, and the war broke out. I knew it was a war waged by England, the country I was in, against Egypt, my home, but I was also taken to protests by my parents’ English friends against that war. My parents’ friends were all Left, many of them Communists. I guess it was a very early lesson; that the State is one thing, and the people are another. A valuable lesson. Back in Egypt growing up, the discourse was strongly anti-imperialist: this was the moment when colonialism was being ejected from Africa and the Eastern South. And at the same time, colonialism was not a burden we in Egypt had to bear: it was bad and it was gone and we were free. We could be angry about it historically and on behalf of other people, but mainly we could help. I grew up believing in Egypt’s liberationist role in the region, in justice for Palestine, and in Positive Non-Alignment. It was back in England, and with the blossoming of anti-Islamic sentiments after the Khomeini revolution, that I started to see that the divide was not over; that even if colonialism in its traditional forms was receding, it very much had the energy and the desire to reinvent itself. This, I guess, was me waking up to the fact that a great schism was still very much there – and then realising that not everyone wanted peace and friendship, and not everyone wanted to strive for a better world. And as time went by, I guess one realises that the big players in the world – power, money, arms – see their interests in continued conflict and division – until we reach neoconservatism at the start of this century, where people actually work towards Armageddon. So it’s a global thing that isn’t simply to do with the Middle East or colonialism; it is really to do with larger forces in conflict across the world, in different manifestations. AB: It is pertinent to hear you talk in these expansive terms because it strikes me that the broad and connected ethical underpinnings to your work reflect key characteristics of much postcolonial discourse; the commitment to ethical humanism also of course underpins the work of thinkers including Said. Departing for a moment, I wonder if I might ask whether this influence is direct? To what extent have you been influenced by the work of postcolonial authors or scholars in your own writing? AS: I must say that I only read Said after I got to know him as a friend. I loved his work and I loved how Orientalism pulled together and made a case for what I had already had glimpses of. My mother’s work was on the influence of the Oriental tale on British Romantics. She had worked on William Jones and Beckford, and had a great interest in

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Byron. And looking at a couple of her essays (‘Hajji Baba in Isfahan’ was one), I found some of the same ideas as Said. So what he had done was to take this thing that we knew but hadn’t articulated and put it cogently and forcefully in a book that changed the world. I mostly read fiction so I really can’t claim to know a great deal about the discourse. What influenced us all was the lived reality and our experience of living that reality in different places. AB: The question of real-world influence leads me neatly to your work on PalFest. You are of course the Founding Chair, alongside your son Omar Robert Hamilton. You’ve written extensively about this work, particularly in the introduction to This Is Not a Border, but I wanted to ask you specifically about what you consider to be the major successes of this work, and what you now view as its major challenges – perhaps particularly in light of the landscape of renewed conflict and antagonism that we now find ourselves in, following Trump’s declaration of his intention to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and ensuing conflict. AS: Well, it’s been very heartening to see the response of our Palestinian friends to the festival – and to witness people coming in and engaging and working with them and learning from them. When I first went to Palestine in 2000, and then in 2003, I saw how the Palestinians’ very strong sense of their own culture has enabled them to survive as a people with a recognisable identity. Culture is tremendously important in this situation – and so is a connection to the world. They need to continue to belong to large conversations happening in the world. PalFest helped to make that possible. The people who’ve travelled with PalFest have said it was a life-changing event. We’ve repeatedly seen people on, say, day three of PalFest saying it was like science fiction; that everything they’d learned about the situation from the media was upside down. So I guess there are some 150 cultural practitioners out there who have been enabled to have an experience and to absorb really important information that they would not have otherwise; that has an impact on their life and their work. And they are opinion-formers. So what we can hope for is that PalFest is part of altering the discourse around Palestine in the UK and in the West. And the changed discourse contributes to the wider solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians that is taking shape in, for example, the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] campaigns, and that is the best, maybe the only, hope we have – we supporters outside Palestine – of changing anything on the ground. It is a tiny, tiny contribution but it’s what’s available to us. AB: This is again a manifestation of you considering the wider lived role of the author, and of the potential for writing and culture to incite dialogue. AS: ‘Dialogue’ and ‘bridge-building’ and so on are really bad words now. In Palestine, ‘dialogue’ has been a smokescreen. They put an imam and a rabbi on stage talking to one another; meanwhile the State is demolishing Palestinian houses and turning people out of their homes. So the word we’re looking for is ‘justice’ and a decent and human life for everybody. AB: How, then, do you move towards that goal of justice through culture?

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AS: The only thing you can do is to carry on upholding ideas of justice. We’re living in a period that is becoming flagrant in its denial of these concepts themselves: history, truth, justice. As in people speaking of ‘alternative facts’, for example. So this is where you dig your heels in and insist that there are such things as truth and justice and history and context. You say this is what happened and this is what needs to happen. You need to keep saying that in as many different and effective ways as possible, because you have no instruments or tools except your words. It’s the only thing you can do – to refuse to take part in any falsification of history, in any dilution of what you know is right. If it’s a losing battle, it’s a losing battle – but you die fighting it. AB: It’s very powerful to hear how you visualise the cultural task as one of seeking justice and truth. This takes me right back to the very start of the interview, where you spoke about the different potentials held by different cultural forms – in particular, the novel as a vehicle for a particular way of engaging with the world. Here, I’m reminded of the author Azar Nafisi’s statement that ‘what we search for in fiction is not so much reality as the epiphany of truth’. Fiction may, then, have an exceptional value within the landscape that you describe. Bearing this agenda in mind – I would like to conclude by asking you to look ahead and to describe your hopes for the future of Egypt, and more broadly, for the region we might term ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. AS: The problem is that anything I say now will sound like a pipe dream – but what can one hope for except a system that actually works for the good of the people and that sees this country and region as part of the world, and a world that is really struggling to find new ways of running itself? We have obligations to the planet itself – to the environment. We need to remember that. I would want to see the people who make the decisions, demonstrating efficiency and shaking off the interests which are really bad for them and for the country. A country should be run in a way that tries to fulfil the needs of all its citizens, while taking account of the region, the planet, the future generations. But I should also say that I don’t see anything coming right for Egypt independently of what’s going on in the region and the rest of the world. I think the wars and the brutalities and the refugees of the last few years show us that new systems and new relationships and new ideas are essential if life on earth is to stand a chance.

Notes 1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 403. 2. Soueif’s work has received prolific postcolonial attention too extensive to list exhaustively here; a good indication of the postcolonial reach of her work, however, is the range of critical engagements that have been produced by contributors to this volume, which include Waïl Hassan, ‘Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, PMLA, 121:2 (2006), pp. 753–68; Lindsey Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 146–58; Stephen Morton, ‘Colonial Violence, Law and Justice in Egypt’, Chapter 8 of the present volume; Caroline Rooney, ‘Ahdaf Soueif in Conversation with Caroline Rooney, Cairo University, 12 April 2010’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:4 (2011), pp. 477–82; Caroline Rooney, ‘Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Unconscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46:1 (2011), pp. 139–55; and Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 111–32.

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3. Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 6. 4. See Ahdaf Soueif, Aisha (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983). 5. Soueif, Mezzaterra, p. 6. 6. Rooney, ‘Ahdaf Soueif in Conversation’, p. 478. 7. See for instance, Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins (London: Faber and Faber, 2017). 8. See Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun (New York: Random House, 1992). 9. See Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 1999). 10. See Ahdaf Soueif, Sandpiper (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) and I Think of You (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 11. Soueif, Mezzaterra, p. 18. 12. Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Under the Gun: A Palestinian Journey’, The Guardian, 18 December 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/dec/18/politicsphilosophyandsociety.books (last accessed 29 January 2018), n.p. 13. Palestine Festival of Literature, ‘Mission Statement’, Palestine Festival of Literature, http:// palfest.org/about/mission-statement (last accessed 29 January 2018), n.p. 14. See Ahdaf Soueif and Omar Robert Hamilton (eds), This Is Not a Border: Reportage and Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Soueif’s enduring solidarity with the Palestinian cause can also be seen in her acclaimed translation from Arabic to English of Mourid Barghouti’s memoir of his return to Palestine, I Saw Ramallah. See Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 15. See for instance Ahdaf Soueif, ‘Tahrir Square Protests: For Everyone Here, There’s No Turning Back’, The Guardian, 1 February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/ feb/01/ahdaf-soueif-egypt-protests (last accessed 29 January 2018); and for an archived version of one of Soueif’s articles for Al-Shorouk in English translation, see Ahdaf Soueif, ‘To Work’, Al-Shorouk, 16 November 2011, http://www.ahdafsoueif.com/Articles/To_ Work.pdf (last accessed 29 January 2018). 16. See Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), reprinted with additional material as Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: A City Transformed (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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Chapter 5 Interview with Sinan Antoon Karim Mattar

Introduction

S

inan Antoon is an acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, scholar and public intellectual. He was born and raised in Baghdad, and he graduated from Baghdad University with a BA in English in 1990. After the Gulf War (1990–1), he emigrated to the United States and undertook advanced degrees at Georgetown and Harvard Universities. He completed his PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Harvard in 2006 and is currently Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Antoon has come to be regarded as ‘one of the most acclaimed authors of the Arab world’.1 Throughout, his work is marked by a deep and abiding engagement with the city of his youth. At once an existential space of life and death, a phantasmagoria of dictatorship and war, and a palimpsest of (neo-)imperial history in the Middle East at large, Baghdad emerges in his writings as an ‘abyss’ that threatens to engulf everything in its vicinity but that must nevertheless be traversed.2 This sense of personal and political responsibility to the ‘broken icon’ of Baghdad, to the memory of its lost civilisational grandeur as well as to its present-day crises and catastrophes, is reflected in Antoon’s poetry and fiction (p. 2). Antoon has published three collections of poetry – Mawshur Muballal bil-Hurub (Cairo, 2003), Laylun Wahidun fi Kull alMudun (Dar al-Jamal, 2010) and The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007); and four novels – I‘jaam (Dar al-Adab, 2004; trans. as I‘jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, City Lights, 2007), Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (Dar al-Jamal, 2010; trans. as The Corpse Washer, Yale University Press, 2013), Ya Maryam (Dar al-Jamal, 2012; trans. as The Baghdad Eucharist, Hoopoe Books, 2017) and Fihris (Dar al-Jamal, 2016). He was the recipient of the Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation in 2013 and of the Prix de la Litterature Arabe in 2017 for Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman; he was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013 for Ya Maryam; and he was longlisted for the same in 2017 for Fihris. In 2003, he returned for the first time to his native city to co-direct, co-produce and feature in a documentary, About Baghdad (InCounter Productions, 2004), about everyday life in an Iraq ravaged by war, occupation and sectarian violence. Finally, Antoon has sought to bring international attention to the fate of his country in the tumultuous years since 2003 through articles and media appearances in venues such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Al-Akhbar and Al-Hayat, among many others. In addition to his multifaceted engagement with Baghdad in particular and Iraq more generally, Antoon is also an award-winning translator and noted scholar of

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Arabic literature, especially poetry from the classical period to the present. He has translated collections of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish and Saadi Youssef, and he was the recipient of the National Translation Award in 2012 for his translation of Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago Books, 2011). His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), a monograph on the critically neglected genre of sukhf (obscene and scatological parody) in the Arabic literary heritage, as well as numerous essays on Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus and contemporary Iraqi culture. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Arab Studies Journal, and co-founder and co-editor of the cultural and political e-zine Jadaliyya. This interview was conducted via email in December 2017. It draws on Antoon’s considerable expertise as both a writer and a public intellectual to consider the dynamics of literary and cultural engagement with the Middle East in the context of his adoptive home in the United States. Issues discussed in the following include the role and responsibilities of the engaged Middle Eastern writer-intellectual in relation to an often hostile host culture; the burden imposed by personal as well as political history on creative practices; literary and cultural responses to the ongoing crises in Iraq and Palestine; the politics of language and translation in international literary production, circulation and reception; the academy and other institutional venues where such work is pursued; and the significance of the category of ‘the postcolonial’ in and for this work. As such, this interview focalises the core concerns of the present volume around the practice of a writer-intellectual whose work – very much like his life – has been shaped by and is intimately engaged with ‘the postcolonial Middle East’.

Between East and West: The Role and Responsibilities of the Public Intellectual Karim Mattar : In his 1993 Reith Lectures, collected as Representations of the Intellectual (1996), Edward Said describes exile as a ‘metaphorical condition’ of ‘the intellectual as outsider’.3 Seeking to come to terms with his own condition as an exiled Arab and Palestinian intellectual living in the largely antipathetic environs of the United States, unhomed and out of place, he elsewhere elaborates that the exile’s ‘plurality of vision’ – his or her contrapuntal awareness of multiple cultures, settings and homes – may act as the basis for an engaged, worldly and secular critical sensibility that intervenes in prevailing structures of power and that disrupts their discourses and representations.4 Professor Antoon, I’d like to note, if I may, a parallel or overlap between Said’s and your own trajectories. Like Said, you came to the US from the Middle East at a moment of intense regional upheaval, you proceeded to complete your graduate studies at Harvard University, and you have since lived and worked in that most cosmopolitan of cities, New York. Furthermore, your work has to a large extent also sought to complicate and contest the sorts of media and political discourses of the contemporary Middle East to which international audiences are exposed by providing counter-narratives of lives and histories often occluded in official representation. While your focus has fallen chiefly on Iraq before and after the US-led invasion of 2003 rather than, as in Said’s case, Palestine, it seems to me that you have in your literary writings, your translations and indeed self-translations (of your novels into

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English), your documentary film, and your political journalism and other media appearances also gone out of your way to speak truth to the specifically American form of (neo-) imperial power that undergirded the invasion and occupation of your country. I wonder, then, if you have found any special affinity with Said’s notion of the exilic intellectual. Or whether you might reflect more generally on what you consider to be the role and responsibilities of the engaged Middle Eastern public intellectual in the US. Sinan Antoon: I never describe myself as an ‘exile’ and I must confess I have always felt a certain discomfort when being described as such. The reason is that I think of those other exilic cases, situations and categories that were and are much more visceral and painful than mine. Perhaps it also has to do with my desire to leave Iraq early on (when I was a teen), before the country was bombed (‘back to the pre-industrial age’ as James Baker said) and destroyed by the US in the first Gulf War (1991). As a citizen and as an aspiring writer I felt suffocated living under dictatorship. I am reminded of what the great Iraqi/Saudi novelist, Abdulrahman Munif, wrote once about the dilemma of many Arab writers (and that applies to many others from countries of the Global South). The equation is as follows: a homeland without freedom, or freedom without a homeland. I was already an ‘outsider’ of sorts in my homeland. I came of age during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–8) when cultural production was fully under the control of the state, institutionally and otherwise. Makers of culture were expected if not coerced to reproduce the sanctioned discourse of war and to celebrate the culture of war. My first novel, I‘jaam, deals with that atmosphere. I was against the war and the regime’s ideology and its practices because I saw at a young age what it did to fellow humans. I wasn’t willing to write ‘mobilisational’ literature or to become another member in the chorus. That meant not being part of any group or ‘generation’ of poets or writers, because I shunned the official circles and gatherings. My first poems and short stories were published in al-Yawm al-Sabi‘, a Paris-based pan-Arab journal whose literary editors were progressive and welcoming of new writers. (I was elated, too, because it also published letters exchanged between Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim.) I relate all this to stress that there was already a sense of estrangement and alienation even before leaving Iraq. I was already inhabiting a ‘metaphorical condition of exile’. But this position of marginality provides a critical distance and perspective that enhances one’s awareness of hierarchies and power structures, as well as strategies and practices of exclusion and their sociopolitical and cultural effects. Said’s works opened a horizon for so many of us and bequeathed a most eloquent critical vocabulary to understand our world. He was and remains a beacon. So ‘speaking truth to an American form of neo-imperial power’, as you put it, is what one should engage in whenever one can. I have tried to do that in various fields and genres. Silence and inaction is not an option, nor is being a ‘native informant’. There are those who play that role. When living in a big city in the US in the age of its permanent wars, it is hard not to think of Rome. Being from Iraq and living in the US while it was occupying Iraq, together with the way most of the population deals with the wars its army and country is conducting abroad, i.e. total oblivion, the figure I found myself inhabiting was that of a barbarian in Rome. To me, it was the most meaningful way of filtering the torrent of the imperial discourse and the ignorant and racist questions and comments one confronts. The barbarian is the one who always feels like an outsider, a stranger, and who has to observe the Romans obliterating his original home, his people, and plundering what

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remains of his culture. I must add that fifteen years after the invasion there is an amnesia. Moreover, in the reigning narrative in American culture the veterans who fought the war and were part of the imperial machine become victims and the Iraqi civilian victims disappear. One is left to wonder: who perpetrated the war? The barbarian intellectual has to keep asking disturbing questions about Rome and what it does in Rome and out there!

The Burden of Personal and Political History KM: I would like to ask now about your personal background and how this has influenced your creative practices, and more generally about your understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. You grew up in Baghdad during the period of Saddam Hussein’s immensely brutal and repressive dictatorship (which you cover most extensively in your first novel, I‘jaam), when you also witnessed the Gulf War and its fallout first-hand, and you witnessed the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq (covered in your second novel, The Corpse Washer, as well as your documentary, About Baghdad) in the US at a time of resurgent anti-Arabism and Islamophobia across the country.5 These circumstances appear to have strongly shaped your literary writing, from your choice of thematic subject-matter, modes of characterisation and settings to your often highly experimental forms. How so? Do you conceive of poetry and fiction as platforms to work through such personal background, as means to address traumas that are profoundly collective as well as intimate, as sites of historical counter-narrative that fill the silences imposed by official history and give voice to those who are marginalised by such, as practices of remembering and memorialising, or as some combination of the above? What is it about your own as well as Iraqi political history that renders their expression in literary form so urgent? SA: I started reading early on and quite voraciously and fantasised about being a poet and a writer. I often joke by saying that growing up under a dictatorship has one advantage. One intuitively understands the relationship between politics and culture and the power of words before reading any theory. There is a poem by Anna Akhmatova that has stayed with me since I read it first. I will reproduce it here as it crystallises what writing is for me: During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can’. It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face. [The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]6

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The suffering of Iraqis in the 1980s was nowhere to be found in state-sanctioned war literature that was published inside Iraq. As I mentioned in answering the previous question, I did not partake in the state’s cultural circus and refused to celebrate the war. I was intent on writing our stories once I left the country. And that is what I‘jaam was about. I lived in the US in the 1990s as it continued to bomb Iraq and impose genocidal sanctions on its people and wage yet another colonial war in 2003. By and large, throughout those years, Iraqis disappeared into a black-hole called ‘collateral damage’. My desire and priority has always been to narrate their stories. To mourn and memorialise. To save the memory of the dead and the defeated before they are buried under the rubble and consigned to oblivion.

Engaging the Middle East KM: Baghdad might be identified as the epicentre of your creative imagination, as the theme and indeed even protagonist of your literary writing and other work. Like James Joyce vis-à-vis Dublin, Naguib Mahfouz vis-à-vis Cairo or Orhan Pamuk visà-vis Istanbul, your city – its people, streets and buildings; its labyrinthine history; its tragedy – seems to draw your work ineluctably within its orbit, even or especially when you are situated at the haunting distance of Boston or New York. Furthermore, such engagement, due to the demands of recent history, must almost by definition be highly politicised. In I‘jaam, you satirically and with great pathos depict what your imprisoned narrator-protagonist Furat describes as the ‘absurd carnival’ of life in Baghdad under Saddam, a life whose oppression and brutality has reached such Kafkaesque proportions that it can only be interpreted as absurd.7 In this novel, you have your narrator-protagonist compose his prison memoir in an Arabic script that lacks dotting, or ‘i‘jaam’, leading to ironic ambiguities of interpretation whereby, for example, ‘Our leader calls on us/And tucks us into bed’ might be read as ‘fucks us into bed’ (p. 3), and ‘so that we could participate in this celebration of Democracy’ may read as ‘simulation of Democracy’ (p. 20). In The Corpse Washer, you present Baghdad as a hellscape of sorts, one whose inhabitants are overwhelmed both figuratively and literally by the culture of death that has pervaded from the times of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–8) and the US-imposed economic sanctions of the late-1990s to that of the 2003 invasion and beyond. Due to the enormity of these circumstances, Jawad, your narrator-protagonist in this novel, cannot escape his ancestral duty of tending to the dead despite his aspiration of celebrating the living through sculpture. Like Jawad, and like the mother in one of your poems from The Baghdad Blues, these and others of your literary works appear to ‘weav[e] a shroud’ for your broken, devastated city.8 Yet at the same time they are so pointed in their critiques of the political forces both internal and external, both local and global that led Baghdad to this precipitous fate that one cannot help but read them as acts of resistance to such. Do you see writing as an act of resistance? Given your overarching focus on Baghdad, do you see the city as a microcosm of the conflicts and contradictions of Iraq and even the Middle East more broadly in recent times? And given your work relating to the 2003 invasion in particular, what – if anything – do you intend your literary engagement with Baghdad to tell your international audiences about the contemporaneity of imperialism in the Middle East?

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SA: In thinking about your question I was reminded that laments and elegies for cities are some of the oldest extant forms of literary expression. Iraq’s culture, in particular, is rich in this respect, since the first cities appeared there. From the ancient Mesopotamian laments (e.g. ‘The Lament for Ur’) to the Arabo-Islamic period where we have the poetic genre of ritha’ al-mudūn (city elegies). I am not suggesting that Baghdad is dead of course. There are many Baghdads and many of them have been murdered in recent decades by dictatorship, wars – foreign, imperial and ‘civil’. Right after the 2003 invasion I wrote a prose-poem, entitled ‘Necropolis’, about the many Baghdads, both imaginary and real, that existed and/or have ceased to exist.9 The lines between the two are often blurred and porous of course. But cities do live on, even if deformed, wounded and disfigured. Baghdad was severely disfigured, especially after the American invasion of 2003 whose immediate effects changed the city both spatially and demographically. To better explain this, I would have to say a few things about the Baghdad I grew up in in the 1970s and 1980s. The Ba‘ath had seized power and Saddam was consolidating his grip. The manifestations of the institutionalised personality cult of Saddam Hussein could be seen around the city (in the 1980s). As you mention, this features heavily in my first novel. However, it was still a relatively open city for its inhabitants (a few military zones and palace areas notwithstanding). One could experience the city and roam around relatively freely. There was no sectarian segregation and there were no concrete barriers. I spent long hours as a youngster walking the streets of the city. I used to skip classes in high school to roam around old Baghdad with my classmates. This continued during my college years. I was fascinated by the city’s rich history and its many layers and subcultures. But I was always aware of the gap between the real Baghdad we inhabited and the idealised, textual Baghdad of the ‘golden age’. The memory and icons of that Baghdad, of the ‘Abbāsid age, were also being exploited and mobilised by the regime back then for political purposes. I was and still am trying to disentangle the various Baghdads. (Not that this process will ever end!) The Baghdad of the 1980s was being disfigured by Saddam’s image and by Ba‘athist ideology. During the 1991 Gulf War, the US carried out an extensive bombing campaign that was designed to ‘bomb Iraq back to the pre-industrial age’ and I was still in Baghdad back then. The genocidal sanctions that were imposed from 1990 to 2003 further destroyed Iraq’s economy and its social fabric. Then came the 2003 invasion and its destructive aftermath. Baghdad is my hometown and I lived my formative years, the first twenty-three years of my life, there. And although I left it in 1991 it still inhabits me. My latest novel, Fihris, which is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2019 as The Book of Collateral Damage (trans. Jonathan Wright) tackles a number of themes that have to do with the destruction visited by war on Baghdad. There are two main characters, one is an Iraqi bookseller who lives in Baghdad and is obsessed with books and with writing the history of the defeated. The other is an Iraqi who lives in New York and is grappling with how to write about his hometown from afar and from the heart of empire. Writing is an act of resistance. Resistance against amnesia and against the triumphalist discourse of empire which erases the being and history of countless humans and objects. It is also a resistance against ‘the bulldozers of history’ to borrow a sentence from Darwish. In the Iraqi context, the disintegration of Iraq, not only politically and spatially, but as an idea, is a crucial issue for me. There has been discursive and epistemic violence committed against Iraq. Writing is one way of countering it. There is always the danger of uncritical nostalgia, or what is termed ‘restorative nostalgia’, and I try not to fall into

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that trap. I prefer ‘reflective nostalgia’ instead. To remember and reflect on the past, but not doing so uncritically or to salvage something from it. One of the characters in my last novel, Fihris, thinks his writing can change the past! KM: One of the ironies of warfare and political oppression is that these circumstances always seem to produce a rich culture of engagement. Iraq since 2003 is no exception. In this period, Iraqi writers such as ‘Awwād ‘Ali, Shākir al-Anbārī, Aḥmad Sa‘dāwī, Burhān Shāwī and Najm Wālī – most of whom have not been translated into English – among many others, have sought in their new novels to depict the brutality of life in their country as, under occupation, it rapidly spirals into chaos and fragmentation. I wonder what you make of the contemporary Iraqi literary and cultural scene. Do you see your own work as part of this trend? And what might you say does this recently emerged Iraqi imaginary of war and occupation contribute to the field of contemporary Arabic literature more broadly, a field that – as in writing from Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere – has been to some extent dominated by these themes? SA: The contemporary Iraqi literary scene is fragmented and chaotic. Cultural production inside Iraq suffered a great deal, not only because of the censorship and chokehold of totalitarianism, but because of the horrible effects of the economic sanctions. In the 1990s, hundreds of writers were part of the large exodus of almost three million Iraqis who left the country. They joined the large number of poets and intellectuals who had left Iraq in previous decades. A disproportionate number of Iraqi writers live outside Iraq. This has both advantages and disadvantages, depending on the host country and its milieu and cultural dynamics. The surge in literary production post2003 is often attributed to the supposed ‘freedom’ that writers have after the fall of dictatorship. But this increase in output does not always or necessarily mean quality. The cultural field is also plagued with the chaos and corruption that has marked the post-occupation period. I chose ‘Debris and Diaspora’ as the title for an article that tried to give a bird’s eye view of the situation.10 Nevertheless, there are important works being produced. As for the dominance of certain themes, it is expected that writers living or writing about a society that has suffered so much destruction address these themes. We are dealing with the disintegration of entire countries (Yemen and Syria), the destruction of entire cities, and the displacement of millions. Let alone the destruction of social fabric and the rise of new identities and social formations. And it is not that any of this has ended. The wars are ongoing as I write this. The desire to write about this is natural and the demand is enormous. However, some writers rush and end up sacrificing the aesthetic aspect to produce topical works. Alas, the prospect of landing on the long and shortlists of the prizes financed by Gulf States (whose general impact is negative for a host of reasons), and/or being translated into European languages, is producing a disproportionate number of hastily written novels. Many of these are written with an eye to translation (one can tell from the titles!) and end up engaging in quite a bit of self-Orientalisation. There are exceptions of course. Moreover, the decline of higher education in most of the Arab world and the dearth of serious literary criticism, coupled with the demise of spaces for serious literary reviews, adds to the chaotic situation of book culture and reception. Time will tell.

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The Iraqi novel is a primary site where the country’s complicated history and its agonies are explored and reconstructed. It has been an important tributary to the larger pool of novels written in Arabic. Alas, most of the scholarly attention in the academy and in cultural circles in the Global North is overdetermined and limited by what gets translated. And the percentage is miniscule and never sufficiently representative, but rather responsive to market forces. KM: Mahmoud Darwish has played a major role in your creative as well as critical imagination. As well as producing award-winning translations of works such as Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence, you have also reflected substantially on his poetics and his politics – inseparable as these are – in your critical writings.11 Furthermore, it might be said that it is primarily through your readings of Darwish’s poetry – as in, for example, your article on ‘Mahmud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo’ – that you have addressed the question of Palestine.12 What is it that has drawn you so strongly to Darwish in particular? Has he acted as a model or inspiration for your own comparably experimental, highly symbolic and historically attuned poetics? In addition to his status as a master craftsman whose poetry has, in your words, firmly secured its place in the ‘archive and . . . collective memory of Arabs’, Darwish is also widely considered as the Palestinian national poet, as, indeed, the voice of Palestinian national consciousness (p. 66). Has your affinity with Darwish been precipitated or maybe consolidated by the comparably colonial situations of Palestine since (at least) 1948 and Iraq since (at least) 2003, and thus by his lifelong mediation on the role of the poet in forging a voice, a language for those dispossessed and disenfranchised by the violence of colonial history? Do you seek to bring out a historical connection between Palestine and Iraq through your work on Darwish? SA: I started reading Darwish at a very early age when I was still a teenager in Iraq. He is my favourite poet for many reasons. Very few poets have been able to mine the Arabic language and its rich poetics the way he has. His experimentation and innovation with forms and meters is brilliant. What is also fascinating and inspiring is his ability to navigate a very complicated set of challenges and demands. He once said ‘It is difficult to be a Palestinian. It is difficult to be a poet. It is difficult to be a Palestinian poet.’ I heard him say this at a poetry reading I attended at the American University in Cairo in 2003. This simple, yet powerful statement crystallises the challenges and demands of being a poet from a nation under siege, or under occupation. The challenge of fulfilling the natural desire to find one’s unique poetic voice and persona, but also fulfilling ethical and political demands, yet without sacrificing the aesthetic dimension. Darwish became the national poet at an early age and proceeded to construct a homeland in language and to assert the presence of Palestine and Palestinians at a time when they were being driven out of geography and history and when the Zionists were attempting to erase them and negate their identity. But being the national poet can itself be crippling as a poet is often imprisoned within a fixed persona and poetic voice that make it difficult to develop. Darwish realised this early on and was intent on transcending the constraints of this role. He reinvented himself several times and continued to develop his project without shirking the difficult burden of being a national poet. He transformed this challenge and burden itself into a topos. Fusing the individual voice with the collective seamlessly. I have also been

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interested in the last decade or so in studying how poets grapple with writing for and about a disintegrating or effaced homeland. Darwish (together with the Iraqi poets Saadi Youssef and Sargon Boulus, both of whom I have translated and written about) is a primary example and model. Darwish was influenced by Youssef (they were both together in Beirut, but left after the 1982 Israeli siege) and acknowledged that on several occasions. Another related theme is that of return or the impossibility thereof. In the Palestinian case this is perhaps the most crucial political question, more so than in the Iraqi case. While not considered a/or the national poet of Iraq, Youssef is the most important living Iraqi intellectual and a pioneering Arab poet with a very prolific and rich legacy. There are many parallels between the two. Darwish is also fascinating in how he grapples with history in his poetry. One of the projects I have been working on is entitled ‘When Benjamin met Darwish’. It reads a series of poems in which Darwish channels some of Walter Benjamin’s ideas in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. I hope to publish it soon.

The Politics of Language and Translation KM: Language, naturally, plays a central role in your work. As discussed above, you play with the ambiguities of the Arabic language in I‘jaam for comical and satirical effect, and this is brilliantly transposed into English in an edition that was co-translated by yourself. You have also written poetry in both Arabic and English, translated the poetry of others, and single-handedly translated your own second novel, The Corpse Washer. Also bilingual myself (though I am more comfortable writing in English), I find English and Arabic to resonate in distinct affective and conceptual registers, to tap into and evoke distinct literary and cultural heritages. What do you find to be the possibilities opened and the challenges posed by writing in each of these two languages, and in thereby engaging with the sedimented cultural history that each uniquely carries? Why did you decide to switch to English for your third poetry collection, The Baghdad Blues, when the majority of your other literary works were originally written in Arabic? And what has driven your desire to (self-)translate? Is this a matter of aesthetic interest in the dialectics of cross-lingual and, by extension, cross-cultural exchange? Or is it more one of reaching and engaging with wider international audiences and markets, of familiarising them with otherwise inaccessible texts by yourself and others, in the context of a global publishing industry that is dominated by English? SA: This is an important question and not so easy to answer. Most of my creative texts are written in Arabic, and I then translate them myself, when I can. The great majority of the poems in The Baghdad Blues were originally written in Arabic, but that is not mentioned in the book. The publisher and I cheated! One’s voice and subjectivity is not the same when writing in a different, second language. I am more at home in Arabic and that feeling of ‘at home’ has acquired added importance in recent years. A friend asked me recently why I don’t write my novels directly in English, especially since that will promise a wider audience and a more lucrative market. I answered by saying that as much as I love English, my relationship to Arabic is more visceral. I feel fortunate that my first language is such a rich one. I inhabit a certain ‘I’ when I think and write in Arabic. I also belong to a very specific genealogy. I was reminded of two of my favourite writers: the first, Samir Naqqash (1938–2004), the Iraqi Jewish novelist who

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was forced to leave his native Baghdad while still very young. In Palestine, he wrote all his works in Arabic despite the disadvantages of publishing in Arabic in Israel. He refused to switch to Hebrew like some of his peers who would enjoy more institutional support and international attention after writing in Hebrew. It was a political choice that had to do with his anti-Zionism and his identity as an Arab-Jew. The other figure is the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944–2007). He lived in the United States as of 1968, but kept writing in Arabic. He described Arabic as the only true homeland he had left and the umbilical cord that links him to his people and his history. These are my sentiments as well. Like Naqqash, I use the regional dialects of Iraq in the dialogue of my novels. This is impossible to translate into English or any other language. I also find immense pleasure in writing in Arabic. If I had the time and the temperament, I would translate all my novels myself. With I‘jaam, my first novel, I had started translating it, but then had to go to Baghdad with my colleagues in the collective we formed to film the documentary, About Baghdad. Rebecca Johnson kindly expressed the desire to translate the novel. When I finished Wahdaha Shajarat al-Rumman (‘The Pomegranate Alone’, which was published as The Corpse Washer), I missed my characters and translating the novel into English was one way of going back to be with them. Moreover, I wouldn’t trust anyone else to be able to do the job. There are very specific references to Iraqi popular culture and history that would be very difficult for others to decode. You might wonder why I didn’t translate Ya Maryam myself. I was emotionally drained after finishing it and the novel contained events and characters that I was intimately familiar with. But henceforth I will translate my own novels! I assume that writers dream of a global audience of readers and I am no exception. However, in recent years I have come to realise, based on my interactions with Iraqi and Arab readers, that I consider them to be my front-row readers. I write for anonymous readers and it is rewarding when my texts speak to readers from various backgrounds. For those front-row readers, the Iraqis, Syrians and Palestinians, at a time when entire cities are destroyed and depopulated and when millions are made refugees, these novels are more than mere entertainment. Readers inhabit other selves and spaces that allow them to temporarily visit Iraq. I accompany them to its past, cities and underworld. These sentiments were reinforced during conversations I had with readers in my recent visits to Kuwait and Iraq, and correspondences with Arab readers. If many writers are rushing to be translated to European languages and to be inducted to the dubious category of ‘world literature’, which is very problematic, I am proud to be a local writer of sorts! I might travel through translation and reside elsewhere when I write English, but Arabic is and will always be home.

Institutions of Engagement: The Academy, Arabic Literary Studies and the Middle East KM: Professor Antoon, I would like to turn now to your academic career in the US and your scholarly work on Arabic literature and culture. As with your literary career, this

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has been highly successful, comprising graduate studies at Georgetown and Harvard Universities and now a tenured Professorship at New York University. However, the majority of your studies took place at a time of resurgent anti-Arabist and Islamophobic impulses – often oriented around the figure of the Arab immigrant, not to mention those of Iraq and Iraqis – across the country. Such attitudes must certainly have infiltrated and perhaps continue to infect the milieu of the American academy, from its collegial relationships to its scholarly and professional opportunities. Today, the controversy surrounding the Palestine question and especially the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement continues to destroy academic careers, divide colleagues and campuses, and prompt conflict if not chaos in scholarly associations. As an engaged academic as well as writer whose work often explicitly addresses the politics of (American involvement in) the Middle East, how have you found the tenor of academic life here when it comes to issues pertaining to the region? Given such work, have you met with any institutional or other forms of resistance that you would care to relate? And what do you make of the apparent expansion of Arab and Middle Eastern representation in the academy – in student associations, curricula and programmes, academic publishing, scholarly associations, and so forth – during, perhaps not coincidentally, this same period? SA: Most of the micro-aggressions and verbal attacks I have experienced have been from outside the academy. There is support and solidarity from colleagues and comrades, but there is also resistance and hostility, especially when one points to, or attempts to challenge the Eurocentric structures that still dominate the curriculum and the academy at large, despite the insurrections and disruptions here and there. The global success of BDS and the challenges it represents to the Zionist narrative have prompted Israel and pro-Israel groups in the US to wage a war against BDS. Despite the ferocity of this war and the fact that corrupt politicians in the US collude with these groups against courageous academics, I believe there is a sea change in terms of the discourse on Palestine in the US. There are various reasons for this. It is the fruit of long years of tireless activism as well as more access to independent media and critical information. The continuing crimes of the state of Israel and its apartheid system can no longer be camouflaged as easily as before. As I try to answer your questions I read more depressing news about ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids and barbaric deportations in Trumpistan. The rise of Trumpism has validated and unleashed the ugliest strands of racism that have always existed in the settler-colonial culture of this country. Islamophobia is now official state policy and there is thirst for even more wars to feed the military-industrial beast. KM: Regarding your monograph, The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf, it seems to me that this very importantly and provocatively contributes to the growing body of work in Arabic literary studies that seeks to revise, even overturn, the earlier assumptions of Arab as well as Euro-Orientalist literary modernity about the premodern period.13 Specifically, it aims to excavate the fourth/tenth-century Arabic poetic genre of sukhf – obscene and scatological parody – from the literary historical archive, and, in so doing, to shed new light on the ideological constituents of a discourse of Arab literary modernity that had consigned this genre

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to oblivion. Given that so much of your other work is oriented around contemporary literature, culture and politics, I’m curious as to what drew you to sukhf and its progenitor, Ibn al-Ḥajjāj, in the first place. Is it a matter of correcting the literary-historical record, or of enriching the present in an act of cultural retrieval that expands our understanding of the past, or both? Do you see this work as part of a wider trend in Arabic literary studies? And what do you make of these recent developments as the field has started to reinvent its understanding of the literary heritage after decades of subservience to the models imposed by modernity? Might this be considered a – or the – postcolonial moment in the field? SA: I have always been interested in pre-modern Arab culture, even before going to graduate school. My interest initially was as a poet who wanted to know his heritage and his genealogy. Many, if not most, of my peers were enamoured mostly with modern Arabic poetry and ‘world poetry’. This is understandable, of course. However, it was oftentimes also accompanied by a certain negative attitude towards pre-modern Arab poetry and culture. The assumption was that the Arab cultural past was of no use for a genuinely modern text. As I mentioned above, the Ba‘ath regime was deploying a vulgar version of pan-Arab discourse and mobilising Arab culture and history in its propaganda. The regime had even carried out a campaign of ‘rewriting history from a Ba‘athist perspective’. So, I was aware early on of the competing narratives of history, including literary history. After leaving Iraq and beginning graduate studies in Arabic literature in the US I was confronted with the resilience of Orientalism and its narratives. Ibn al-Ḥajjāj is one of many figures who were part of the pre-modern canon, but were exiled from it in the modern period at the hands of Orientalists. The great majority of Arab literary critics and scholars reproduced the Orientalist narrative. Ibn al-Ḥajjāj was rarely mentioned in modern criticism and when he was it was to dismiss him and stress his ‘filth’. These gestures of exclusion and policing of the boundaries of what counts as worthy of scholarly attention drew me to Ibn al-Ḥajjāj. Red flags and border demarcations are always revealing and instructive. In addition to being a fascinating poet with a rich legacy that influenced the trajectory of pre-modern Arab poetry in later periods, Ibn al-Ḥajjāj destabilises traditional narratives of Arab literary history and culture. Re-inscribing him and his poetry into cultural history is an attempt to rethink the cultural past as well as the discourses that overdetermine how it is approached. There are many other figures and genres that demand our attention. I think there is now a new generation of younger scholars who are deploying critical tools and theory and practicing a different type of philology.

Valences of ‘the Postcolonial’ KM: Finally, Professor Antoon, I would like to ask about your relationship to the category of ‘the postcolonial’. Given the apparent contemporaneity of colonialism in much of the Middle East, including or especially Iraq, this category has been met with much scepticism in Arabic and in Middle East studies more broadly. Indeed, part of my co-editor Anna Ball’s and my intention in positing ‘post/colonial modernity’ as a framework for analysis in our editorial introduction to the present volume is to suggest the persistence of such up to the present day. Has this category and the scholarly work associated with it been of value in your own work? Do you see it (or any of its

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variations) as an appropriate descriptor of or lens for issues of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, culture and politics? Is it possible, or even worthwhile, to reconcile the category of ‘the postcolonial’ with that of ‘the Middle East’? SA: Every category has its limitations, of course. But the critical insights and tools bequeathed by critics and writers who belong to postcolonial theory have been of great value to me as a reader, writer and scholar. The decolonisation of knowledge and the critique of colonial modernity is integral to understanding the power dynamics of the world today, not only in what is termed ‘the Middle East’ (the term itself is a colonial product that reproduces and reinforces Eurocentrism), but elsewhere as well. The US, where I work and live, is a settler-colonial country and its history and culture, as well as its current sociopolitical moment (and imperial desires and practices), cannot be fully understood without reading it as an ongoing settler-colonial project. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a neo-colonial project par excellence, be it in the ideological horizon and discourse of the war itself in the colonial metropolis, or in the material and discursive violence perpetrated in Iraq, as well as the long-term effects on Iraqi society and subjectivities. Many Iraqi and Arab intellectuals internalised the colonial discourse, parroted imperial narratives, and supported the war and the invasion. So, there are colonised minds aplenty, but there are also critical activists, scholars and writers in the region and who are deconstructing colonial narratives and courageously confronting the mutations of the colonial. The postcolonial prism remains an essential tool for a critical understanding of the genealogies of the current moment in the Arab world and elsewhere. KM: Professor Antoon, thank you very much for your time.

Notes 1. Nazek Fahmy, ‘Book review: Sinan Antoon’s “The interpreter’s tale”’, Ahram Online, 4 September 2013, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/18/62/80781/Books/Review/-Bookreview-Sinan-Antoons-The-interpreter%E2%80%99s-tale.aspx (last accessed 1 December 2017), n.p. 2. Sinan Antoon, ‘Necropolis’, Qui Parle, 16:2 (2007), pp. 1–3; p. 1. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 3. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 52. 4. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile: and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 186. 5. See Sinan Antoon, I‘jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, trans. Rebecca C. Johnson and Sinan Antoon (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006); Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer, trans. Sinan Antoon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); and Sinan Antoon, Bassam Haddad, Maya Mikdashi, Suzy Salamy and Adam Shapiro (dirs), About Baghdad (InCounter Productions, 2004). 6. Anna Akhmatova, ‘Requiem’, PoemHunter.com, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ requiem (last accessed 28 February 2018), n.p. 7. Antoon, I‘jaam, p. 7. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 8. Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Blues (Brownsville: Harbor Mountain Press, 2007), p. 7.

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9. See note 2 above. 10. See Sinan Antoon, ‘Debris and Diaspora: Iraqi Culture Now’, in Chris Toensing and Mimi Kirk (eds), Uncovering Iraq; Trajectories of Disintegration and Transformation (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), pp. 115–41. 11. See Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago Books, 2011). 12. See Sinan Antoon, ‘Mahmud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 31:1 (2002), pp. 66–77. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 13. See Sinan Antoon, The Poetics of the Obscene in Premodern Arabic Poetry: Ibn al-Ḥajjāj and Sukhf (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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Part I The Colonial Encounter: Discourses of Imperialism and Anti-imperialism

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Chapter 6 Between the Postcolonial and the Middle East: Writing the Subaltern in the Arab World Juan R. I. Cole

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he task I have set myself here is to talk about the relevance of the Subaltern Studies school to the historiography of the Middle East from about the mid-1960s to the beginnings of the 1990s. I shall confine myself primarily to surveying monographs, and, in the nature of the case, have made a selection of a small number of key works. I have not attempted to be comprehensive. My focus is on books that have contributed to our understanding of the history of non-elite groups in the modern Middle East. I will try to credit Arabophone authors, but my main focus will be on scholarship in European languages. The idea of the ‘subaltern’ derives ultimately from Antonio Gramsci’s reformulation of Marxism in Italy between the wars. It was given its current resonances, however, by a school of historians from or in India, beginning in 1981 with Ranajit Guha’s manifesto, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’. There, he made sixteen points that he hoped like-minded historians would take up in the new series he began, Subaltern Studies.1 As the title of the manifesto indicates, his main concern was with the historiography of British-ruled India, that is, the period from 1757 to 1947, just short of two centuries. His thesis was that the historiography on this period and up through the 1970s had had two main protagonists. One was the colonialists themselves (whom British historians tended to celebrate for their bureaucratic, military and other achievements in the subcontinent); the other was the Indian wealthy and upper middle-class political activists who in the twentieth century mounted a challenge to the colonial order that eventuated in the creation of an independent India. With a little shorthand, we might say that Guha saw Indian historiography as centred on Lord Curzon and Jawaharlal Nehru respectively. And there was a sense in which historians of India were willing to see both types as key to the creation of the Indian nation. In this initial manifesto, Guha demonstrated a concern that historians recognise and seek to recover an alternative set of modern histories, one focused on the actions taken by non-elite Indian actors. Thus, he argued for more attention to peasant revolts, for instance. Most Indians, of course, were peasants during the British Raj. But mainstream Marxism had never known what to make of peasants, seeing them as archaic or passive (in Marx’s words, ‘so many sacks of potatoes’), mired in a premodern religious mindset. Marxism saw the industrialists and the factory workers as the two modern social classes, twins who grew up together to defeat the old feudal lords, after which they would turn on one another until the worker emerged victorious. One of Guha’s

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goals was to restore peasants living under a colonial regime to agency in Indian historiography, which would involve challenging both the bourgeois and traditional Marxist paradigms. He argued for a history of the ‘politics of the people’, of the ‘non-elite’ or ‘subaltern’ classes, mentioning peasants, factory workers and the urban ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (which would include, for example, artisans). He challenged the notion that these classes laboured under the ‘hegemony’ of the colonialists and the Indian bourgeoisie, accepting only that they were dominated by the latter. Gramscian hegemony would have required that they assent to the ideologies of colonialism and the primacy of the market. In contrast, Guha argued for their autonomous action. He also at some points suggested that the narrative of the nation was insufficient to an understanding of the discontinuous and marginal history of the subaltern.2 In India, Guha contended, the industrial working class was ‘immature’ and consequently not able to take up the cudgels expected of them in Marxist historiography. This weakness of the proletariat in turn helped to explain why the Indian peasants unexpectedly undertook elements of an anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist struggle that their archaic class position would not have predicted. In essence, they moved into the vacuum left by the stunted Indian proletariat. The point, moreover, was not to erase bourgeois history but to see the bourgeoisie as only one, admittedly powerful protagonist in the arena of colonial struggle. Alongside Nehru and Curzon he wished to place Ramchand the peasant, Ali Hasan the bearer and the Ahmedabad textile workers. He argued, then, for reconceiving colonial India as a realm of contention between colonial capitalism on the one hand, and an indigenous bourgeoisie along with rebellious peasants, rioting artisans and striking workers on the other. The often unexpected interactions among the elite and subaltern indigenous opponents of colonialism, as well as the ways in which activism or violence that was not primarily aimed at colonialism could become caught up in the anti-colonial struggle (or used by colonialists to divide and conquer, as with sectarian strife), all had to come together to make sense of the making of the modern Indian nation. Some later historians working in the Subaltern school became uncomfortable with having the bourgeois nation as the reference point for the new historiography, and argued that rural, peasant histories in particular had their own rhythms in which the ‘nation’ was elided altogether. A historian of China influenced by the Subaltern school went on to write a book, Rescuing History from the Nation.3 Other Subalternists subsequently attempted to explore the rhythms of local peasant life without reference to national developments.4 The rise of the nation was not necessarily the most important thing that happened to agricultural labourers or tribal peoples in the twentieth century, so why should it frame our writing about their experiences? Perhaps, even, we should take more account of the way in which they structure their own historical narratives (for instance their attribution of causality to the supernatural).5 Gyan Prakash writes, ‘In Guha’s account, the subaltern emerges with forms of sociality and political community at odds with nation and class, defying the models of rationality and social action that conventional historiography uses’.6 Nevertheless, some members came back to attempt to reintegrate elite figures such as Gandhi into the new stories they told of rural agitations, for which some criticised them for falling back into old, bad, bourgeois habits (though note that such a view of ‘intertwined’ histories is actually envisioned and called for in Guha’s manifesto).7 Several historians associated with the school came under the influence of Michel Foucault and

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postmodernism, inflecting Gramsci with a new set of interests, in the body or the development of the private sphere. The Subaltern Studies school has had a wide impact on the historiographies of Latin America, Africa and even the US. Some historians of South Asia based outside the subcontinent, such as David Arnold, out and out joined it. It was, however, little attended to by historians of the Middle East over the past thirty-five years. The new social history, in part under the impact of E. P. Thompson, has produced some important writing on workers, artisans and peasants, but these have not usually been thought of as subalterns together. (Whether Guha was right to cobble these disparate classes together into a reified category is a question worth asking, but at least it needs to be engaged.) Some may wonder whether the configuration of social groups to which Guha pointed, labouring under two centuries of foreign rule, had much of a counterpart in the Middle East. To say the least, few authors writing on the modern Middle East have attempted to sidestep the nation as a framework for historiography. Here I wish to consider some works regarding the Middle East about what Guha would have termed subaltern social classes, and to explore in a comparative way the different ways of approaching their history in Middle Eastern and South Asian historiography. The contours of political and social history in the Middle East differ in important regards from those in India. As Frederick Cooper has noted, the idea of the subaltern as a set of fairly fixed categories may have greater purchase in India, where observers at least tend to believe that there are relatively sharp social distinctions of a long-lasting nature, even if social mobility there is greater than these observers generally realise.8 Twentieth-century regimes in the Arab world like the Nasserist have seen massive upward mobility for persons of peasant or other subaltern background, so that even if the Middle East is not more egalitarian than India in reality, the perception of social distinctions as insuperable is less widespread. Another primary divergence has to do with the history of colonialism. India experienced direct European rule for very long periods of time. In Bengal the colonial period lasted nearly two centuries. In Panjab it was close to a single century. Moreover, the initial conqueror was not the British government but the British East India Company, which ruled on behalf of London until the Indian war of independence (the ‘Mutiny’ in British terminology) of 1857. Thus, direct colonialism and European capitalism made a joint and immediate impact. In tandem, they exerted powerful centripetal and centrifugal social forces. They attracted the cooperation of large numbers of local notables and merchants, such that a colonial elite grew up that only turned against the colonial enterprise en masse as the midpoint of the twentieth century approached. This collaborating elite in turn for the most part employed its local authority and resources to discipline the subaltern classes. Guha’s manifesto ignores these centripetal processes in favour of concentrating on a history of their breakdown. The Subaltern school privileges subaltern and elite revolts against colonial rule (understood as a set of power and economic hierarchies with extractive intent). Such revolts did break out from time to time in various parts of British India, though for the most part they were suppressed with relative speed, success and often brutality. Only for a period in 1857 and again in the mid to late 1940s did the British entirely lose control, decisively in the latter period. Social geography may also play a role in the divergences between India and the Middle East. Much of India is relatively wet, able to engage in rainfall agriculture, and enjoys many rivers and streams, all of which allows villages to be sited closely

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together. This density and proximity of the rural population in turn allows for peasant mobilisation in a way that is very difficult in much of the Middle East, which is arid and thinly populated, and where villages too close to one another would risk depleting aquifers. Nikki Keddie made this argument in explaining the predominance of urban revolutions over peasant revolts in modern Iran.9 Even the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys do not aid such social density and communication in the way the Ganges does, because of their rapids and violent flooding. Only the Nile river valley, the shores of the Caspian Sea and a few other such areas come close to approximating Indian conditions with regard to the proximity of peasant villages to one another and ease of communication for mobilisation among them. In contrast, the subaltern in Kuwait are the Bidun, the stateless tribespeople living on poor land, whose very lack of resources makes it impossible for them effectively to mount resistance against their marginality. Most Middle Eastern peasants have not been submissive in history, but they have lacked the conditions conducive to large-scale mobilisation and generally have not even thrown up important peasant political parties, in contrast to India or China. As in India, so in the Middle East, the industrial sector remained weak for most of modern history, burgeoning in a few countries only from the 1960s, and in many places it is still very weak at the opening decades of the twenty-first century. There are therefore the same reasons to look elsewhere than the new proletariat for histories of resistance as obtained in India. But resistance against what? Colonialism is not the same sort of obvious plot device in the Middle East as in India, with the exception, perhaps, of French North Africa. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were never formally colonised, though attempts were made. Iraq’s experience of direct colonisation only lasted about twelve years (1920–32) and Egypt’s lasted forty (1882–1922). French Syria and Lebanon were a twenty-six year project. Middle Eastern subalterns did mount resistance to European rule, as in Egypt in 1919 or Iraq in 1920, but was this resistance episodic or part of an overall history of collective action? Informal colonialism, as John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson argued, was far more important in the Middle East, where typically a local dynasty presided over penetration of the country by European political power and European capitalism.10 Revolts occurred that included participation by subaltern classes. But the artisans and seminary students who demonstrated in favour of a constitution in Istanbul in 1876 seem mainly to have resented the absolutism of their own Ottoman sultan, though it is true that the degree to which he was beholden to European bondholders and diplomats did rankle. Likewise, the anti-European and anti-capitalist elements of the ‘Urabi revolt of 1881–2 in Egypt were melded with demands for a Westminster governmental system and denunciations of local despotism. It may be, then, that it is harder to perceive a subaltern in the Middle East because it lacked the sort of clear, long-lived, hegemonic opponent that it had in India. Kurdish and Arab tribes were continually revolting in the Ottoman vilayets of Kirkuk, Baghdad and Basra during the late eighteenth century, but it would be hard to make the case that most of these instances of ‘resistance’ had very much to do with European colonialism or even, before about 1869 when the Suez Canal opened, global capitalism. They were most often tax revolts, or protests against bureaucratic encroachment, or simple clan feuds among the tribes themselves over territory. What allowed Guha to perceive a ‘subaltern’ in the kaleidoscope of modern India may have been the ability easily to define these strata against a unitary colonial, capitalist state. The very number of disparate regimes against which peasants could rebel in the Middle East, from semi-feudal

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theocracies like Yemen to Habsburg-like modernising monarchies such as the Ottoman Empire, raises questions about whether ‘subaltern’ revolts in the Middle East can be seen as having very much in common with one another. Still, one could legitimately define colonialism in such a way as to include its more informal manifestations (which were often quite powerful nonetheless, as any consideration of the role of British officials and commerce in Egypt in the 1940s would show). If one took this approach, the colonial era in Egypt might stretch from about 1820 to about 1956, rather than only for forty years. Still, some of the themes in Guha’s manifesto certainly have resonances in Middle East studies. As in India, the protagonists of Middle Eastern historiography before the 1970s were mainly European colonial administrators or bourgeois (perhaps we could more accurately call many of them ‘notable-class’) indigenous reformers and anti-colonial activists. Indeed, the preponderance of the historiography on the Middle East did not even concern the modern period, the focus being on classical Islamic civilisation. So the few forays, whether in Europe and North America or in the Middle East, into modern history were remarkable in themselves. Some such histories were commissioned in the twentieth century by the Egyptian monarchy, and a few historians were allowed to write from the Abidin archives on subjects such as the Muhammad ‘Ali and Isma‘il periods in Ottoman-Khedivial Egypt of the nineteenth century. Books on modern Egypt written before 1960 have titles like The Founder of Modern Egypt, Anglo-Egyptian Relations 1800–1953 and Allenby: A Study in Greatness. Historians of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire tended to focus on reigns they saw as relatively progressive, but the emphasis was either on the court or on reformers like the Young Ottomans. The historiography was almost universally politically conservative. Historians from the Middle East tended to be from an elite background and/or to have elite patrons. Western historians of the region often had had experience in government or even intelligence, and many derived from missionary or Foreign Office/State Department families. The few exceptions beginning in the 1960s included the work of André Raymond (France), Nikki Keddie (US), Gabriel Baer (Israel) and a handful of social historians in the Middle East. Many historians were under the spell of modernisation theory, which tended to cast the colonial enterprise as having been a good thing for the region despite any unpleasantnesses it may have entailed. Arab nationalists and some Western authors cast rulers like Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha of Egypt either as an over-ambitious tyrant who ran the country into the ground or as a progressive nationbuilder, but in either case depicted the peasants as passive and submissive.11 As late as 1968, Chicago Middle East specialist William Polk remarked on the emergence in the 1960s of a new cohort of modern historians and social scientists who posed a challenge to the medievalists who had dominated study of the region. He noted that ‘some Orientalists have feared that the new specialisation would result in gross distortions because a perspective of the majestic whole would be lost in concentration on the ephemeral part’. He admitted that occasionally this eventuality had come to pass, but went on to speak of the excitement of the new social science literature: ‘The new disciplinary challenge to established notions has provoked a kind of academic cloudburst from which torrents of discussion have eroded the familiar landscape of the unified field of Orientalism’.12 The important intellectual reference point for most social historians of the Arab world and the Middle East more generally was not India but rather variants of the European Marxist tradition. For, say, Egyptian historians at Cairo University, this

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tradition was relatively uninflected Marxism on the Soviet model. For their colleagues in Europe and the US, it tended to come out of what has been termed ‘Western’ Marxism, particularly the Anglo-Marxists. This latter group of historians, some of whom moved rather far from traditional Marxism, included E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé and Christopher Hill, among others. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class put the factory workers at the centre of nineteenthcentury nation-building in Great Britain, and his subsequent work on the moral economy of the crowd expanded his focus to urban artisans. Rudé worked the notion of the urban crowd into his studies of the French Revolution. Hobsbawm initially saw peasant millenarianism as an ‘archaic’ form of social protest, but went on to identify a phenomenon he called ‘social banditry’, wherein peasant bands that attacked the rich were not simply criminals but rather reflected aspirations for wealth distribution of the other villagers, and often played Robin Hood. The Anglo-Marxists thus gradually authorised research on the urban petty bourgeoisie and peasants, along with the proletariat, as part of the history of resistance to capitalism and the bourgeois state in Europe. Indeed, it seems likely that the Anglo-Marxists were unacknowledged influences on the Indian Subaltern school. But the resemblance to Guha’s project is only partial, since they did not see the proletariat as stunted, and continued to think of the guilds and peasants as in some sense archaic survivals who would be absorbed into the modern working class before they could become central to the modern political struggle. The nation remained a preoccupation for all but Hobsbawm, who boasted of retaining his old Marxist internationalist credentials.13 And none was primarily interested in the colonial world. As Hobsbawm observed in a widely read article, their project was social history, the history of large-scale social groupings, including classes, occupations, cities and regions, though it was implicit that what made these large groupings interesting was their involvement in and reaction to the rise of modern industrial capitalism.14 Among the first subaltern studies in modern Middle Eastern historiography was Nikki Keddie’s short book on the Tobacco Revolt in Iran, 1891–2, published in 1966. She showed how the Shah colluded with British carpetbaggers to impose on Iranian tobacco growers and marketers a British monopoly that would set prices and do international sales, remitting a sort of rent on the industry to the Iranian state. She traced the opposition to this enterprise among farmers, merchants and Shi‘ite clergymen, which resulted in urban disturbances. Perhaps reacting against her own Marxist past in the 1950s, she avoided explicit theorising and, like Guha a decade and a half later, was willing to see groups as ‘progressive’ and anti-imperialist that traditional Marxism would have seen as reactionary and archaic (including peasant farmers, traditional merchants and Muslim clergymen).15 Two years later, in 1968, Ervand Abrahamian published a study of the role of the urban ‘crowd’ in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 in Iran, in Past and Present, a journal founded by the Anglo-Marxists. Again, the ‘crowd’ was largely petty bourgeois, a class that Marx had seen as fickle, untrustworthy and old-fashioned, but Abrahamian argued that urban demonstrations played a key role in protesting European domination of Iranian resources and also the despotism of the Qajar dynasty.16 Students of the Arab world had also been contributing to social history in the 1960s, and in 1968 Israeli historian Gabriel Baer’s seminal collection of essays, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt, appeared at the University of Chicago Press. This

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collection followed on seminal monographs on the guilds and on land tenure. Forced by his lack of access to archives in the Arab world to fall back primarily on European diplomatic documents and manuscript collections, Baer nevertheless excavated key aspects of the history of artisans, peasants and slaves in Ottoman-Khedivial Egypt. It is not clear, however, that he escaped the conviction of the traditional European Left (Baer was a Labour Zionist) that these social classes were archaic or outmoded in the nineteenth century, a warm-up act for the bourgeoisie-proletariat duet to come later. Indicative of his mindset is his chapter on ‘The Dissolution of the Village Community’, which set the transition from a tightly knit organic community or Gemeinschaft to a modern sort of society (Gesellschaft) in the nineteenth century, ruling out the possibility that it occurred earlier through heuristic means. That village history may have been far more complex than such a ‘dissolution’ implies is not acknowledged. Nevertheless, a key contribution of this volume was his essay on the history of peasant revolts in modern Egypt, which came in response to the Israeli-Egyptian political scientist Nadav Safran’s assertion that the fellahin had been passive for centuries. Baer showed that large numbers of peasant revolts had broken out in the nineteenth century. He admitted that these uprisings often took on a religious or Mahdist colouration, but pointed out that religion was a vital cultural vehicle for the expression of peasant discontents. Those in the Orientalist tradition desperate to deny that there was any class struggle in the Middle East were thus given no comfort by Baer’s careful analysis.17 A few years later, another European man of the Left, André Raymond, made a substantial advance in methodology and periodisation that somewhat outflanked Baer’s important contribution. His two-volume Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (Artisans and Merchants in 18th Century Cairo), published in Damascus in 1973–4, employed Islamic court and probate records to write the social history of artisans and merchants in eighteenth-century Cairo. Baer had expressed doubts that extensive Arabic-language documentation for the history of guilds survived, and had seen the nineteenth century as the turning point in ‘modernisation’. Raymond showed that both premises were flawed, that the sources did survive, and that the history of the rise and fall of the textile and coffee trades in the eighteenth century already intersected with the global market. Raymond had largely abandoned the Marxist paradigm of his youth for an Annales school emphasis on the history of commodities, prices, urban forms and demography. Yet he retained his sympathy for the subaltern classes, which perhaps left open for him the desirability of studying the guilds, which traditional Marxism tended to view as reactionary in contrast to the modern working class.18 The next monument in Middle Eastern social history was a study of the social origins of the Iraqi Communist and Baath parties by Hanna Batatu. Batatu’s book, researched and written in the 1950s and completed as a dissertation at the American University in Beirut in 1960, appeared from Princeton University Press as The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq in 1978.19 The first two sections of the book deal with what Batatu called the ‘old’ social classes, in accordance with traditional Marxist thinking. In actual fact, however, his social categories are closer to Weberian status groups than to Marxist classes, with both cultural attributes and the distribution of life-chances determining the contours of the class, and with the possibility of status or wealth changing at variance to one another. He is interested in religious ethnicity (Sunni, Shi‘ite, Sufi) and its overlap with linguistic ethnicity (Arabic, Kurdish). He is interested in the main social groups as Iraqis thought of them – Sayyids

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or descendants of the Prophet, the old Ottoman aristocracy, bureaucrats, landlords, great merchants, pastoralists and peasants. He is also interested in the leadership of the tribes and peasants, the Kurdish Aghas and their Arabophone counterparts. His story is one of the concentration of landed and other wealth in many fewer hands with the transition from Ottoman to a modern, ‘British-influenced’ property regime. In the third section, Batatu set out a narrative of the small Communist Party and the slightly larger (and much more ultimately successful) Baath Party in modern Iraqi politics and society, and attempted to gather information on the social origins of members or at least central committees. Batatu showed that in the mid-1950s about a fifth of the Communist Central Committee members were from a peasant background, but only about 3 per cent were from proletarian families. Most members came originally from the urban lower middle class. But the actual occupation (as opposed to class origins) of the vast majority at that time was white collar and professional.20 Over the next decade, he showed, the proportion of members of the Central Committee who were actually workers rose to about a quarter, and the proportion of Shi‘ites grew a great deal, to 45 per cent. But the composition of the Central Committee might not tell us all that much, and the overall numbers for the Communist movement were quite small, with an estimated 5,000 members of Communist Party organisations in Baghdad in the mid1960s (see p. 1,213). The almost Leninist premise that the parties were the vanguard of radical politics led in the third section to a study of urban intellectuals and a handful of workers rather than of subalterns. One would never know from the third section of the book that in the 1960s a good half of Iraqis were peasants, nor are their particular struggles with the state, the imperatives of the world powers and the world market discussed. Batatu manages even to avoid any extended comments on the 1920 revolt (which grouped peasants, tribespeople and some urban actors in a protest against the establishment of the British mandate) – an event no historian in the Indian subaltern tradition would have dreamed of passing up. I will pass over here a study of the social origins of the Iranian Communist party by Ervand Abrahamian that appeared in 1982, because my main concern in this chapter is with the historiography of the Arab world.21 Both Batatu and Abrahamian, however, had a great impact on a younger generation of scholars of the Middle East who came to consciousness in the late 1960s or in the 1970s, many of them deeply influenced by the world-wide youth culture and the New Left. In particular, these works challenged the old mosaic theory of Middle Eastern societies, which argued that they consisted of a series of pyramidal social formations characterised by hierachical relations of authority. In the mosaic theory bedouins were controlled by their shaykhs, peasants by village headmen, urban workers by guildmasters and masters of city quarters. A strong divide was posited between the poor and the elite, and political developments tended to be attributed to the elite, with the common folk depicted as passive. Batatu and Abrahamian argued that the Marxist conception of social class was relevant to understanding the evolution of modern Middle Eastern societies. Abrahamian in particular adopted the approach of E. P. Thompson, often called ‘cultural Marxism’, in which working-class consciousness was not posited as a natural given but rather as a process growing out of conflict with the factory management. Among the more important studies of a subaltern group to appear in the past four decades is Judith Tucker’s Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt, published in 1985. It was the most important intervention in women’s history since the pioneering 1978

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collected volume, Women in the Muslim World, edited by Nikki Keddie and Lois Beck, which contained many studies in the social history of women not only in the Arab world but farther afield as well.22 This subject had been little written on in Middle Eastern studies (and was one to which Guha and the Subaltern school also paid scant attention). Many pioneering studies of women attempted to inscribe their history on the various nationalist projects in the twentieth-century Middle East, though in time many scholars of gender history became dissatisfied with the national framework. Tucker innovated in looking specifically at working-class women and slaves in the period 1800–1914, a period of Ottoman vassalage with informal European colonial penetration before 1882, and then direct British rule. She countered the master narrative of Egyptian nationalists, which depicted the Muhammadi dynasty of Ottoman vassals as having initiated in tandem with European advisers and entrepreneurs a modernisation process that benefited the entire population. She argued that the changes introduced in Egypt by the impact of the capitalist world market, the undermining of local crafts and the advent of cotton as a large-scale cash crop had the effect of weakening the basic family structure and hurting the position of women. She also found that what we would now call subaltern women mounted important challenges to the twin modern developments of the growth of bureaucracy and the integration of Egypt into the capitalist world market. She pointed to the participation of peasant women in rural uprisings against the French in the late eighteenth century. Under Muhammad ‘Ali lower-class women were feared for their rumour-mongering and placed under surveillance during times of crisis, and it seems likely that they gave various sorts of support to the major peasant uprisings of the early 1820s. Likewise, Isma‘il Pasha made local women stay inside during the 1863 visit of the Ottoman Sultan because ‘Arab women are vociferous and might shout out their grievances’.23 The long neglect of the history of workers began breaking down in English-language historiography in the 1980s. Ellis Goldberg’s study of textile workers in interwar Egypt (Tinker, Tailor, and Textile Worker: Class and Politics in Egypt, 1930–1952) appeared in 1986. Among the more powerful interventions in what might be thought of as subaltern historiography was the 1988 co-authored Workers on the Nile by Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman. Some labour history had been produced in Egypt, especially from the Nasser period with its socialist leanings, including Rauf Abbas’s pioneering Arabophone history of the Egyptian working class in 1967 (Al-Ḥaraka al-‘Ummaliyya fi Misr, 1899–1952) and Amin ‘Izz al-Din’s three-volume work on the subject in 1970 (Tarīkh al-Ṭabaqa al-‘Āmila al-Misriyya, 1919–1929). Aside from Goldberg’s monograph, relatively little writing of this sort had appeared in English, however, and the Beinin and Lockman volume filled a huge lacuna, covering the period of 1882 to the 1950s and presenting a dense thicket of documentation along with sophisticated analysis grounded in Marxist critical theory. According to the mosaic theory, the workers were just one more social pyramid, controlled by their Wafdist union bosses, submissive and having little interaction with other classes. Others held that there was a disjuncture between workers’ strikes for their economic goals and nationalist actions. Beinin and Lockman argue that the unions saw themselves as having a firmly national context, in which they celebrated events like workers’ participation in the 1919 protests against British rule, which were simultaneously nationalist icons. They contend, however, that beginning in the 1930s the working class began being large enough and well-organised enough to demonstrate some autonomy from the big-landlord Wafd

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party. By the mid-1940s the communist wing of the union movement in particular, they show, was able to launch independent strikes (in 1946 and 1951–2) in the context of the national movement against continued British influence. Wafdist willingness to renegotiate the 1936 treaty with the British while British troops remained on Egyptian soil provoked a large-scale national strike in February of 1946, in which labour union activists from the Shubra al-Khayma textile factory played a major role, along with students and other unions. Although the elite political class, mainly large landlords with a sprinkling of entrepreneurs, argued that class interests should be subordinated to national ones until complete independence could be achieved from the British, and although workers largely did accept this nationalist framework, they did sometimes feel it necessary to assert their particular rights and needs even at the cost of temporary disunity among Egyptians. Beinin and Lockman recognise that the workingclass movements acquiesced in their incorporation into Nasserist statism after 1954, but argue that this complaisance derived in part from the incorporation of workers’ demands into the programmes of the Nasserist regime.24 The Lockman and Beinin book makes no reference to the Subaltern Studies school, which had been launched only a few years before it was written. Rather, its theoretical reference points are Althusser, Poulantzas, E. P. Thompson and other writers influential with the American New Left, along with Middle Eastern Marxist thinkers. Despite its considerable achievements, the book ultimately inscribes the workingclass experience on the standard framework of Egyptian nationalist historiography. Nationalist writers could come away from it with their main conceptions of the Egyptian nation intact, even if they would have to admit a greater role and influence for workers than had previously been recognised. Egyptian nationalism itself is never problematised or decentred in this book. Moreover, there is a classical Marxist focus on the industrial working class, such that peasants are largely ignored save for those who came to work in the factories. Yet the main experience of labourers in Egypt during this period was as peasant workers. It is only fair to note that subsequent work by the two authors has admirably repaired some of these omissions. A handful of authors in our period are particularly associated with studies of Egyptian peasants in the colonial era. In 1975, ‘Asim Disuqi published a study of Egyptian peasant revolt in 1919, based on British documents (Kibar Mullāk al-Arādi al-Zira‘iyya wa Dawruhum fi al-Mujtama‘ al-Misri, 1914–1952). Two years later ‘Ali Barakat’s important examination of the development of large landholding in Egypt appeared, which contained new information on peasant land invasions in 1882 and other instances of rebellion (Taṭawur al-Milkiyya al-Zira‘iyya fi Misr wa Athāruha ‘ala al-Ḥaraka al Siyasiyya, 1813–1914). In 1981 Latifah Salim brought out her study of social forces in the ‘Urabi revolution, including a long chapter detailing peasant participation in it (Al-Quwwa al-Ijtima‘iyya fi al-Thawra al-‘Urabiyya). Aside from Gabriel Baer’s journal articles, scholarship in European languages on the social history of the peasants followed a bit later. In 1981 Reinhard Schulze published his dissertation on the same subject in German, undertaking a careful region-by-region examination of different sorts of peasant collective action in spring of 1919. In 1990 Nathan Brown’s ambitious examination of peasants and politics in modern Egypt appeared. This period of fruitful new activity with regard to peasant studies in the Middle East was continued by Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury’s edited volume, Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East, published in 1991. Reem Saad Luka

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Mikhail innovated in writing on contemporary peasants out of oral history interviews, a study that resulted in the seminal Peasants’ Perceptions of Recent Egyptian History, published in 1994. Key questions for writers on peasants in the modern Arab world have to do with their relationship to the layers of authority that encompassed them – their village headmen, the urban effendi class of bureaucrats and professionals, the great landlords who built up huge haciendas, and the British. Schulze argued that 1914 proved a key turning point in British agricultural and other policies, which now aimed at supporting the war effort. A million and a half Egyptians were conscripted, and some sent to Gallipoli, representing about a third of able-bodied male peasants at that time. At the same time, the British virtually requisitioned cotton for their factories, establishing a state monopoly in its marketing. The price of cotton spiked during the war, so that the general money supply expanded a great deal, causing inflation. But the British cotton monopoly ensured that Egyptian peasants could not achieve more than a fraction of the world market price for their cotton. When the effendis of the Wafd party called for a national strike in March of 1919, peasants all over Egypt mounted revolts. In some instances they were led by local landlords who had seen their authority constricted by the colonial bureaucracy, and were eager to reassert it. In others they conducted land invasions on their own account. Some used irrigation to put in rice rather than cotton, rejecting the colonially dictated planting of a controlled cash crop. Attacks on Greek and Coptic money-lenders were numerous. Schulze was careful not to make blanket generalisations about the peasant role in the revolt, but he did leave no doubt that they played an important and unexpected role (in contrast to the urban poor). Schulze’s work suggests that Egypt’s experience may accord with Guha’s thesis for India that peasant conflicts with landlords formed an important element in the development of the Indian nation.25 Brown showed the ways in which supposed peasant ignorance was decried both by British administrators and by members of the Egyptian elite. He argued, however, that peasants behaved rationally rather than simply demonstrating knee-jerk reactionary tendencies, refusing innovations that would benefit them. In fact, he argues, the reality of peasant interaction with the state often consisted of taxation, corvee and contract labour on irrigation works, imposition of alien norms concerning criminal behaviour, and ‘reform’ projects that often brought little real benefit to the villagers and often imposed on them new obligations.26 Perhaps the work in modern Middle Eastern historiography most indebted to the Subaltern school is Joel Beinin’s Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, published in 2002. Beinin wrote in his introduction to this survey that ‘the term “subaltern” suggests that the subordinate social position of artisans, workers, peasants, and other social groups – slaves, tribal nomads, heterodox religious minorities, women – cannot be explained solely by class relationships’.27 Beinin is among the few historians of the modern Middle East who has explicitly recognised the attempt of the Subaltern school to escape both colonial and nationalist narrative hegemonies. He appears to have seen these concerns, however, as filling out and enriching a relatively state- and nation-centred narrative, and his chapter headings continue to focus on subjects such as ‘The Rise of Mass Politics 1908–1939’ and ‘Populist Nationalism, State-led Development, and Authoritarian Regimes, 1939–1973’. Although the word ‘subaltern’ began more often making its way into the literature on the modern Middle East in the twenty-first century, it was usually deployed simply to

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mean ‘working class’ in the Marxist sense rather than taking the theoretical concerns of the Indian school. As noted above, many Subalternists attempted to sidestep the nation entirely. In contrast, the formation of the modern nation tended to remain front and centre for the Middle East specialists. The edited collection helmed by Stephanie Cronin, Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa, published in 2008, even has a section on subalterns and national movements.28 In her introduction, Cronin notes the difficulty Middle Eastern historiography has faced in escaping the narrative of the nation. Although she instances the Anglo-Marxists and the Indian Subaltern school equally as inspirations for her volume, it seems to me to owe more to the former than to the latter in the end. Not only in this volume but in general, the villagers, Dalits, tinsmiths, cow-lovers and denizens of the bazaar that bepeopled the volumes of Subaltern Studies remained less important for historians of the Middle East than factory or railroad workers, even when their gaze was lowered from the French and British viceroys and the Middle Eastern notables. The section of the Cronin volume that probably comes closest to the Indian school treats Roma and manumitted female former slaves, but focuses on these groups in the early modern (Ottoman) period, so that escaping the modern state was easier. The early modern and pre-colonial periods for some reason seem an easier era in which to contemplate non-elite actors disconnected from the state for historians of the Middle East, as is also apparent in the recent edited book of Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar, Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Subaltern History, published in 2016. The focus of this book on nonconformist individuals rather than on social groups takes it a bit away from the concerns of most Subalternists, and despite the subtitle, Ranajit Guha does not appear to be mentioned by any of the authors.29 The conviction that the subaltern classes in the Middle East were supine in the face of colonial domination or that they acted only at the direction of their elite headmen, landlords and effendi patrons should have been shaken and even overturned by the social history produced in the past forty years, and yet this cliché is still to be met with. The historiography on the region has been firmly wedded to explorations of the process of nation-making, and has tended to focus on elite political developments in a single country. Many such accounts relegated the subaltern classes to bit parts or the role of supporting actor, where they mentioned them at all. The subaltern in the modern Middle East was discovered largely via the framework of European-style social history, especially the Anglo-Marxist school, rather than in dialogue with the Subaltern Studies school of India. Although colonialism and the construction of the nation have been central concerns of writers on artisans, workers and peasants, just as has been the case in subaltern studies in the subcontinent, the variety of nations and colonialisms in the Middle East have perhaps obscured the degree to which various works on these themes constitute a unified discursive field. Far moreso than in India, older assumptions about the subaltern classes have tended to survive in Middle Eastern historiography, whether on the left or the right. Artisans still tend to be dismissed as archaic or vestigial, peasants as submissive except when directed into action by headmen and landlords, and workers as subsumed under nationalist projects. A comparative view of Indian subaltern studies and Middle Eastern social history holds the promise of further undermining these venerable premises. But more, it may be that some of the discontinuities and anomalies faced by the much more disparate Middle Eastern historiography may help make clear where the Indian work overly

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simplifies the triangle of subaltern, indigenous elite and colonialist. Such a comparative analysis might clarify that not all subaltern collective action in British India was necessarily relevant to anti-colonial nation-making. At the same time, the very possibility of the constitution of the Arab peasantry as a subject, which has been so difficult in the framework of social history, is at least broached in the Subaltern school. The epistemological openness of subaltern studies suggests that we should pay a great deal more attention to how peasants structure their views of history, yet very little oral history or ethnography has been carried out to that end. New perspectives and new, invigorating debates seem likely to lie ahead as historians of the Middle East grapple with the implications of subaltern studies.

Notes 1. See Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, 1 (1982), pp. 1–3. 2. See Charlotte Kelsted, ‘Subaltern Studies and the Global Historiography of Oppressed Peoples’, The Historian Journal, 18 May 2017, https://thehistorianjournal.wordpress. com/2017/05/18/subaltern-studies-and-the-global-historiography-of-oppressed-peoples/ (last accessed 12 January 2018), n.p. 3. See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4. See Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780–1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998) and Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 5. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 6. Gyan Prakash, ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism’, American Historical Review, 99:5 (1994), pp. 1475–90; p. 1480. 7. See essays by Shahid Amin and Partha Chatterjee in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 8. See Frederick Cooper, ‘Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History’, American Historical Review, 99:5 (1994), pp. 1516–45; p. 1519. 9. See Nikki Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), pp. 78–9. 10. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6:1 (1953), pp. 1–15. 11. Cf. Khalid Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12. William R. Polk, ‘Introduction’, in Gabriel Baer (ed.), Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968), pp. x–xi. 13. See David Renton, ‘Studying their Own Nation without Insularity? The British Marxist Historians Reconsidered’, Science & Society, 69:4 (2005), pp. 559–79. 14. See Eric Hobsbawm, ‘From Social History to the History of Society’, Daedalus, 100 (1971), pp. 20–45. 15. See Nikki Keddie, Religion and Rebellion in Iran: the Iranian Tobacco Protest of 1891–1982 (London: Routledge, 2016). 16. See Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905–53’, in Haleh Afshar (ed.), Iran: A Revolution in Turmoil (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), pp. 121–48.

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17. See Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt. 18. See André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (Damascus: Presses de l’Ifpo, 1973–4). 19. See also Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, ‘The Historiography of Modern Iraq’, American Historical Review, 96:5 (1991), pp. 1408–21. 20. See Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 718. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 21. See Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 22. See Lois Beck and Nikki Keddi, Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). 23. Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 142. 24. See Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998). 25. See Reinhard Schulze, Die Rebellion der ägyptischen Fallahin 1919 (Berlin: Baalbek Verlag, 1981). 26. See Nathan Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: the Struggle Against the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 27. See Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3. 28. See Stephanie Cronin, Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (London: Routledge, 2008). This volume came out of two workshops held in the UK, one of which, at SOAS in 2004, I was invited to attend. 29. See Odile Moreau and Stuart Schaar (eds), Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Subaltern History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).

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Chapter 7 Orientalism and World Literature: A Re-reading of Cosmopolitanism in ṬĀhĀ Ḥusayn’s Literary World1 Wen-chin Ouyang

The view that the Muslim world was completely at a standstill until the forces of the West collided with it at the end of the eighteenth century is no longer tenable. The stirrings of Wahhābism in Arabia, and somewhat later, of the Sanūsiyyah in North Africa are signs of vitality. . . . The fact is, however, that such indigenous movements did not become powerful or extensive enough to direct the political and cultural history of the Near East. Particularly is this true of the one country that concerns us here, Egypt. . . . A convenient starting point for a history of the Egyptian Renaissance is the landing of Napoleon’s forces in 1798. It was not merely a military expedition: with it came some distinguished French scientists and orientalists, and they brought to Egypt its first printing press. . . . In fact, the most significant feature of the literary picture of the period was the appearance of literary translations. These soon became so popular that, unless specially commissioned to translate a scientific book, translators devoted their entire attention to fiction, so that apart from the influence they have had on style in general, translations are responsible for the appearance in Arabic literature of two genres: novels and plays. Pierre Cachia, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn2 n his masterful 1956 literary biography of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (1889–1973), Pierre Cachia, typical of Orientalist scholarship at the time, situates the education and development of this famed ‘Dean of Arabic Letters’ (‘amīd al-adab al-‘arabī) as a public intellectual and reformer of Egyptian culture and literature in the context of the nineteenth-century Egyptian Nahda, the beginning of which, as Cachia posits, like all historians of Arab modernity, is traceable to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798–1801). This particular encounter between the French and the Egyptians, all at once violent, shocking and fascinating, precipitated the series of events, measures, reforms and transformations in Egypt as well as the Arab world. This is how the story of the Nadha has been told in cultural and literary histories of the Arab world until very recently. The military might of the French dazzled those in power. The knowledge exchange between French scientists and Orientalists and local scholars incited thirst for new knowledge among the Egyptians. The delegation of students sent to receive education and training in France brought home ideas and plans for modernising all aspects of Egyptian life, from government bureaucracy to the military, city planning,

I

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education, the status of women, dress, language and literature. And the introduction of the Būlāq printing press in 1820 gave birth to what Benedict Anderson would call ‘print capitalism’3 in modern Arabic, particularly journalism, and generated newspapers and journals in which the issues of the day were proposed and debated. This gave rise to a lively and dynamic print culture that served as one of the arenas of what Jürgen Habermas would call the ‘public sphere’4 in which ideas, concepts, bodies of knowledge and world views circulated into and out of Egyptian culture and literature along multiple trajectories.

Ḥusayn’s Legacy in the Egyptian Nadha Ḥusayn, who was embroiled in one controversy after another during his lifetime, is now an iconic figure in the story of the Nadha.5 His impact on modernising Egyptian education,6 culture and literature,7 albeit controversial in certain quarters,8 is undeniable. His standing as one of the most important architects of modern Egyptian culture is acknowledged in the stupendous efforts made to preserve his words and deeds in writing.9 Pieces culled from newspapers10 as well as his private papers and letters to other Egyptian luminaries11 are published in collected volumes. His contribution to and influence on Egyptians are subject to continuous assessment.12 Generations of admirers and detractors have been responding to him, praising or taking to task the views he expressed (even those embedded in his studies of classical Arabic poetry and prose, in his reviews of the works of his contemporaries, and in his translations and summations of French poetry, novels and plays), the proposals he made for cultural rejuvenation that were published in print or broadcast on radio, and the programmes he suggested for the reform of Egyptian school and university curricula.13 Ḥusayn is what Michel Foucault would call an ‘author function’14 and Roland Barthes a ‘myth’15 in that he has come to embody the ethos of the century-long enlightenment (tanwīr) which began with Rifā‘a Rāfi‘ al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–73) and ended with him. Considered the last of the generation of the Egyptian Renaissance, his death marked the formal end of what Albert Hourani calls ‘the liberal age’ of ‘Arabic thought’.16 He is most interesting as a site of the confluence of all the competing, overlapping, contradictory, dialectical and differing positions held and perspectives taken by public intellectuals with regards to democracy, freedom of speech, secularity,17 Islamic reform, the separation between critical thinking and faith,18 the role of literature in public life, and literary innovations and fashions.19 This ‘towering figure of Arabic letters’ is ‘a mirror of his times’, as Gaber Asfour (Jābir ‘Uṣfūr) puts it in his masterful study of Ḥusayn’s literary criticism, al-Marāyā al-mutajāwira: dirāsa fī naqd Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Adjacent Mirrors: A Study in the Criticism of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, 1983).20 Through his works it is possible to reconstruct the Egyptian-French intercultural context of the development of Arabic culture, literature, literary criticism and even Egyptian society21 in the first half of the twentieth century. His autobiographical works, al-Ayyām (1929) and Adīb (1935), are unsurprisingly the loci of inquiries into his life, his time and even his blindness22 in the stupendous body of research on the political, cultural and literary issues heatedly debated across the pages of the Egyptian print culture and the sound waves of radio broadcasts at the time. His writings and transcribed broadcasts are invaluable precisely because they are saturated with the material conditions of his life. He continues to speak to us of his time and

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place, quite often repackaged in utopian idealisations, a nostalgic remembrance of an age of enlightenment, tanwīr, and of the impact of the Nadha on contemporary Egypt in reassessments of its achievements, missed opportunities and failures.23 His bearing on Egyptian modernisation is, however, simultaneously enduring and evanescent – he is everywhere but nowhere in particular. He is indispensable in any consideration of the legacy of the Egyptian and Arab Renaissance. At the same time, he seems either ahead of his time or out of sync with his contemporaries, for very few of his ideas gained during his lifetime the kind of critical currency associated with, for example, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1838–97), Muḥammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), Rifā‘a Rāfi‘ al-Ṭahṭawī (1801–73), Rashīd Riḍā (1865–1935) and Sayyid Quṭb (1906–66) in debating Islamic reform and modernisation, or Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1805–87), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (1868–1930), Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987) and Najīb Maḥfūẓ (1911–2006) in setting new literary trends. His simplified but elegant language of expression was universally admired,24 but his experiments with the novel were far from pioneering. His translations of Greek plays were well received but of unknown impact to date. And his practical criticism, of classical or modern Arabic literature,25 was often referenced but rarely taken further as the kernel of a serious critical method, perhaps because the diverse and divergent sources of his critical thought manifested themselves in his proclamations on classical and modern Arabic and European literary works rather disparately and without much theoretical coherence or even intellectual discipline. If in hindsight Ḥusayn’s thoughts on culture and literature proved too soft for new generations of theoretically more robust cultural critics and literary theorists, the main areas of his interest – literary criticism, creative writing and translation – continue to throw up ideas and issues of immediate relevance to our pursuits and practices today. Subsequent to Cachia’s biography and Hamdi Sakkout’s magisterial bio-bibliography in 6,342 pages (1975),26 and in the years since his death, Ḥusayn has been subject to numerous revisionist considerations which take stock of the ways in which his discourses were enmeshed in the fabric of the Egyptian Nadha and which reassess not only our understanding of what was at stake but also the continued relevance of the unresolved issues of his time. His secularism and Orientalism,27 usually entwined with Islamist assessments of his dismissal of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran as reliable sources for the history of Islam, for example, remain contentious.28 But these are not the only issues that can have an afterlife in our current reassessment of the cultural and identity politics of the Nadha period. The cosmopolitanism inherent to his discourses on literature and culture, even as it is underpinned by Orientalism, I will argue, suggests ideas and trajectories by which world literature may be differently theorised. More importantly, it suggests alternatives to nationalism as an imagining of community articulated around the conceptual category of ‘nation state’ that will have an impact on how Arab identity politics will be understood differently and modern Arabic literature read.

Cultural Encounters and Literary Worlds In the past decade or so, since the ascendance of ‘world literature’ as an idea for inclusion of literary works from around the world in an ‘international canon’ and as a method of literary study, always informed by translation, scholars of Arabic literature

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have taken advantage of the concepts and methods proposed or assumed in ‘world literature’ to rethink Arabic literary studies and at the same time to respond to its problematic theoretical underpinnings. Translation, as a means of cultural encounter, or the ‘translation zone’ as Emily Apter calls it,29 has been most productive for Arabic studies. Apter’s notion of ‘untranslatability’ has informed many revisionist studies of the Nadha, moving literary and cultural histories from equating Arab modernisation with Westernisation, and from the postcolonial master-slave dialectic in Arab responses to the West.30 Similarly, Pascale Casanova’s idea of ‘world republic of letters’ has sparked a new way of envisioning the medieval Islamic world of letters.31 However, translation, as both a mechanism of cultural encounter and an itinerary of world literature, problematically straddles the two poles of ‘nation’ and ‘world’, with ‘nation’ serving as ‘local’ and the ‘world’ ‘global’, the latter more often than not being located in the ‘West’. More importantly, ‘nation’, as sovereign territory, has come to underpin our understanding of language. Language, just like nation, is territorially sovereign. Any text constructed in a language is by extension, ‘nation’-like, territorially sovereign. World literature, which requires translation for its circulation, inevitably comes to be defined by the movement of ‘national’ canons, via translation, from ‘local’ to ‘global’. Conversely, ‘nation’, as defined by the language of its national canon, is necessarily monolingual. In a post-national move to pry open the sovereignty of ‘nation’ and ‘language’, I want to make a concerted effort to rethink the monolingualism of the ‘nation’, or the ‘local’, as Francesca Orsini does in her article ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’ (2015),32 and its cosmopolitanism – understood here simply as a vision of humanity as one community based on a shared morality – that is more akin to ‘worldliness’ of a text or to the idea that a text, as theorised by Edward Said, always inheres in the world and is never self-sufficient,33 and less to Michael Allan’s sense of Ḥusayn’s ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’.34 In Ḥusayn’s works this cosmopolitanism entails a vision of humanity that extends beyond the ‘national’ to encompass all Egyptian, European and Mediterranean35 civilisational values. My purpose is threefold: to move away from the linear itinerary of world literature, from ‘national’ to ‘global’ where global is always located in Europe and North America, by pluralising the temporal and spatial configurations of world literature as well as diversifying its sites around the world; to rescue narratives of the Nadha from mere postcolonial identity politics; and to read modern Arabic literature as more than a set of allegories of ‘nation’. One way of doing this is to shift focus to the ‘literary world’, and more particularly, to its cosmopolitanism and the ways in which this cosmopolitanism takes shape in cultural encounters and their attendant – even if only enacted in the fabric of one language – multilingualism. World literature itself need not travel, but it can demand the circulation of ideas and people across multiple literary worlds, not necessarily through translation but rather through the multilingualism of the world or those who inhabit it. More important, the ‘world’ of world literature can be located anywhere in the world, in the past or present. Now seen as multilingual and cosmopolitan, this literary world can guide us to alternatives to ‘national’ history of both the Arab world and Arabic literature. As we will see in Ḥusayn’s works, nationalism need not contradict cosmopolitanism. What impact will this have on the stories of the Nadha we will tell in the future? If we look for different imaginings of community, will we

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also uncover alternative narratives of the Nadha that will free us from the binaries of ‘nation’ and ‘world’, and more importantly, in the context of the postcolonial Arab world, of ‘colony’ and ‘empire’? Can we move beyond reading Arabic literature as postcolonial identity politics? I take Orientalism and the way it underpins cosmopolitanism as a test case for my inquiries. Orientalism here means the body of knowledge about the ‘Orient’ and the disciplines in which this knowledge is produced in Europe, as well as the discourses on the Orient as the other in academia, popular culture and political institutions.36 Diverging from Said, however, I do not consider Orientalism as necessarily informed by the will to power or domination, as driven by the impulse to demonise or reduce to stereotypes (see pp. 4–9), or as, in Said’s words, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (p. 3). Moving away from studies that consider it on its own as an element of the ‘Oriental’ discourse of modernity,37 I overlap this body of knowledge about the Orient produced in and circulated from Europe, with an interrogation of how Europe defined its modernity in relation to its internal others, or to its past medievalism, and in line with its perceived ‘Golden Age’ located in classical antiquity (as John M. Ganim argues in Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity).38 This complex Orientalism, comprising a combination of knowledge about both the Orient and European modernity, one which was underpinned by a profound ambivalence towards the relations between the two, I will show, serves as the foundation of Ḥusayn’s formulation of an at once authentic and cosmopolitan Egyptian identity, which is at once national and international.

Ṭāha Ḥusayn and the Itineraries of World Literature I see three overlapping areas of Ḥusayn’s legacy that can serve as loci for a productive interrogation of theories of world literature, imaginings of Egyptian nation and narratives of the Egyptian Nadha and modernity: the centrality of the exuberant print culture of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in fostering innovations informed by encounters in cultural practices, language developments, and literary sensibilities and trends; the role of the Greek cultural heritage, or European classicism, in the cultural politics of the Egyptian Nadha; and the impact of European Orientalism on the identity politics of a specific educated class represented by someone like Ḥusayn. By mining these areas, which have been overlooked by Cachia and other Ḥusayn scholars, and by reading Ḥusayn against world literature, I seek to complicate and nuance our theories of world literature as well as our understanding of the Nadha and modern Arabic literature. In the following reading of Ḥusayn, I pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I reconsider the itinerary of a world literature normally understood as structured by the linear movement of a literary work from the ‘national’ to the ‘international’ (West), located in Paris, London and New York, as mediated by translation of an entire literary work, particularly the novel,39 as well as the privilege accorded to what Eric Hayot calls the ‘literary world’40 in thinking about world literature. As I do so, I interrogate the sovereignty not only of the ‘nation’ conceptualised in ‘world literature’ but also of its assumed monolingualism, and argue that ‘nation’, even when seen as the ‘local site’ of the circulation of literary works, can be multilingual, multicultural, cosmopolitan and worldly, and that the ‘literary world’ that inheres to this ‘nation’ is, like the ‘nation’,

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necessarily created in the circulation of ideas, concepts and bodies of knowledge across linguistic boundaries and national borders, and, more importantly, in the multilingualism of the local and its intrinsic cosmopolitanism. Second, I look at the kind of ‘nationalism’ Ḥusayn proposes and ponder its implications for our understanding of the Nadha and reading of modern Arabic literary works. Given the size of both the Arabic print culture and the published material by and on Ḥusayn, it would be impossible to be exhaustive in coverage or thorough in analysis. It is perhaps more judicious, then, to focus on a couple of texts that would allow me to bring together the disparate strands of thought from both Arabic print culture and Ḥusayn’s legacy in a way that is productive for how we think about world literature. I will move away from literary works typically used to theorise world literature, and look at his 1938 manifesto on the future of education, and therefore culture, in Egypt, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr (The Future of Culture in Egypt),41 in tandem with his essays on culture and literature, particularly those collected in Min ḥadīth al-shi‘r wa-al-nathr (1936) and Alwān (1958). These may not be works of literature, but their discourses on the role of multilingualism in the development of a worldly national literature that frames, informs and expresses a cosmopolitanism specific to Ḥusayn’s time and place, is in harmony with the contemporary modernist Arabic literature – poetry, fiction and drama – that Ḥusayn himself encouraged and promoted as a critic, and, on occasion, aspired to write. That he chose to announce his vision for Egyptian culture in the print culture, particularly in the case of Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa, rather than in the form of a report to be submitted to the government as he initially intended, points to the significance of print culture,42 an important arena of the public sphere in the ‘liberal age’, not only in shaping Egyptian national community and its attendant cultural identity but also in giving substance to the cosmopolitan literary worlds created in Arabic writings.

The Imagined Egyptian Nation in Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr This manifesto epitomises Ḥusayn’s vision of an Egyptian identity harvested from his experience as both student and educator, his knowledge of French and of traditional and reformed Egyptian curricula,43 his commitment to and understanding of literature, and his conviction in a form of cosmopolitanism that is informed by his belief in the unity of the Mediterranean and the world. This vision took shape in his encounter with modern European civilisation, as seen through the prism of French and, more particularly, of Orientalism and the discourses on the Orient intrinsic to the agenda and scope of Orientalist scholarship as well as its adjacent discourses on European modernity. It is equally inspired by an Egyptocentric nationalism that aspires to be simultaneously ‘authentic’, or firmly rooted in the local, and ‘at home in the world’ (a concept I borrow from Timothy Brennan to denote the kind of place Ḥusayn envisions for Egypt, on a par with Europe in the global and ahead of other ‘Oriental’ nations, as well as his critical self-indulgence).44 If we wish to be on equal footing with the European nations, in particular, with their military might, so as to be able to defend ourselves against any invasion, and to be able to say to our English friends in a few years: get lost with thanks, for we are now able to defend the [Suez] Canal. Whoever seeks the end must have the

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means, whoever pursues power ought to possess the means to power, and whoever wishes for an army of European might should desire an European education so as to prepare the youth to form a powerful army. (p. 40) Full independence is the future of the Egyptian nation and it begins with economic independence from Europe. We are in need of economic independence without a doubt, and no one would dispute this. In fact, I call for it and insist upon it. . . . We do not want it in order to enjoy looking at it. We want it for the protection of our wealth and livelihood as we similarly want an army to protect the lands of our nation. This economic independence must be of the European kind, for we do not want to be independent economically in relation to Hejaz, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, but in relation to Europe and America. This is to be followed by independence of other kinds, which will eventually lead to both national and individual freedom. We wish for scientific, artistic and literary independence. This independence will enable us to shape a young generation capable of defending our nation, its lands and wealth, and of letting the European know that we are like them and equal to them. This will allow us to speak to the Europeans in such a way as to make them understand us, and to hear the Europeans and understand them. This will let the Europeans know that we see things as they do, assess things as they do, evaluate things as they do, seek from things what they do, and reject things as they do. We want to be their partners and allies in life, not their servants or means to life. If we desire this intellectual and emotional independence, which may only be achieved through scientific, artistic and literary independence, then we must desire the means to it. We must then learn as a European would, feel as a European, make judgements as a European, work as a European, and live as a European. For in the end what we desire is to be free in our homelands, free in relation to foreigners so that they cannot treat us unjustly or oppress us, and also free in relation to ourselves so that we cannot treat each other unjustly, or oppress each other. We want an internal freedom the foundation of which is a democratic system. We also want an external freedom the foundation of which is proper, full independence, and the ability to protect this independence. (p. 41) For such an Egyptian nation to emerge and take her place in the world, Ḥusayn suggests, each and every Egyptian citizen, regardless of her religious belief and class (he makes no mention of ethnicity or gender), must be educated into a cultured ‘citizen of the world’. The reforms and robust new curricula in multilingualism and what we today call ‘the humanities’ he forwards for the education of postcolonial Egyptian nationals. First aired in the print culture, these proposals were informed by the ideas of civilisation and the various types of knowledge about the world circulating around the Mediterranean, as well as the world, through and beyond the machinery of empire, in language, literature and culture, which in turn gave form and substance to the ‘worlds’ inhabiting his literary and cultural texts.

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Education and Nation-building Written between 1937 and 1938 and published in 1938, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr celebrates Egypt’s nascent independence in the wake of the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, by which Britain ended its military occupation and control of Egypt, and the 1937 Montreux Convention, by which the Capitulations in Egypt were abolished (see p. 11). The future of the Kingdom of Egypt looked, in the early moments of post-independence euphoria, rosy and full of possibilities. The modernisation project driven by a desire for technological advancement begun by Muḥammad ‘Alī Pasha (who reigned as Ottoman Viceroy from 1805 to 1848) and continued through the rule of Farouk I (who reigned as King from 1936 to 1952), when Ḥusayn was writing, could now twin itself with the project of nation-building and forge ahead at full speed. The project of ‘imagining political community’, which started as early as al-Ṭahṭāwī,45 looked certain to take the form of a nation state, now that Egypt – even if along the way it was mapped by European powers – had gained its territorial sovereignty and financial independence. It was time to look ahead and plan for a future that all Egyptians could subscribe to, invest in, participate in building, and finally enjoy the fruit of their labour, living fully and happily as ‘authentic’ Egyptians in a democratic nation state that guaranteed individual freedom, particularly of faith and speech, and social equality. This idea is repeatedly stated, explained and related to education throughout the book (see pp. 65–9, 144–8). ‘Primary education is the fundamental pillar of democracy’, Ḥusayn declares in a chapter on the relationship between education and democracy (p. 65). ‘A democratic system must guarantee all members of the nation life, freedom and peace’ (p. 65), and as such it must guarantee a ‘livelihood’ to its people, which can only be achieved through education (ta‘līm)’ (p. 66). For education will guarantee the ‘nation’ its survival (p. 66) and individuals their freedom and peace, for freedom cannot be founded on ignorance (p. 67). Education ‘allows an individual to know himself, his natural surroundings and his patriotism, and to harmonize his needs with these’ (p. 67). Egyptians live in a country (on earth), ‘al-arḍ’, which is their refuge, and among a community, ‘umma’, in which a language is used. They must learn this language in order to achieve a simple goal: as speaking social animals (‘ḥayawān ijtimā‘ī nāṭiq’), education will enable individuals to take responsibility for themselves, removing any sense of superiority among those in charge that does not ‘agree with democracy, equality and freedom’ (p. 145). This sense of superiority must be replaced by ‘belief in equality and justice’ and ‘faith in the people’, which are ‘fundamental to national belonging’ (juz’ muqawwim li-shu‘ūrinā al-qawmī) (p. 146). As he asserts in a chapter on ‘al-qawmiyya al-islāmiyya, al-qawmiyya al-waṭaniyya’ (see pp. 54–64), for Ḥusayn the responsibility for nation-building must be shared by the state and its apparatus, the government and the nation, or all Egyptian nationals, regardless of their faith and social background. While the state provides funding for education, from the four years of primary school through the five years of secondary to the four years of university, and plays a leading role in curriculum design and reform, production of textbooks, teacher training, inspection of schools and supervision of delivery, all nationals partake in education so as to fashion themselves into ‘citizens of the world’ able to interact fully and on an equal footing with Europeans, and thus re-join the most advanced civilisations in the world. ‘The purpose of general education (ta‘līm ‘āmm) is not only to provide an individual with what he needs in order to live

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in an advanced society, but also to go beyond to something loftier; to reach the highest ranks of knowledge’ (p. 87), so that the ‘sons of our nation’ can be on a par with the ‘foreigners’ (p. 96). It would be best for Egyptian schools, private or public, religious or secular, to follow a unified general education, from which not even a single Egyptian would be excluded regardless of social or religious background (see pp. 70–98). The foundation of education, a general education that would serve as a basis for more skilled specialisations, ought to be a fully developed curriculum in languages and the humanities, through which mastery of multiple languages may be cultivated, and in-depth knowledge of each branch of the humanities attained. The ideal Egyptian national would be multilingual and versed in history, geography, philosophy, literature and the culture of the Mediterranean, the cradle of civilisation, as well as of the world, from ancient times to the present, so as to take up his or her true place in the world. Arabic and Islam, the national language and religion, are to be compulsory for all Egyptian nationals regardless of their religious background, for Islam, along with Pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Ottoman and colonial histories, is perhaps the most important part of Egyptian history and culture, and must be taught to Egyptians with increasing depth from primary through to secondary school. Greek and Latin understandably became essential language requirements, and there would also be room for Coptic, especially among the Coptic population, who too are entitled to their own religious education (see pp. 266–8). In addition, pupils must learn European languages so as to be able to access European civilisation, and their choice must not be limited to English and French, the languages of Egypt’s former colonisers, but rather include, for example, German, Italian and Spanish. The ascendant European civilisation is not confined to the achievements of the English and French, Ḥusayn argues, but encompasses contributions made by other Europeans. There are also the languages of the fellow members of the Muslim community, particularly Persian and Turkish, however ambivalent Ḥusayn might have felt towards the Ottomans, whom he blamed for the recent backwardness of the Muslims (see p. 35), for the Iranians and Turks are similarly architects, engineers and builders of Muslim civilisation. In a chapter on ‘what ought to be taught in general schools’ (mādhā yu‘allam fī al-madāris al-‘āmma), Ḥusayn asserts that languages afford their speakers, or those fluent in them, access to the cultural heritage of humanity at large. This world cultural heritage is the ultimate objective of multilingualism. A truly cultured Egyptian would be schooled in their own cultural heritage as well as the culture of humanity at large. A general curriculum for Egyptians must include ‘geography of the homeland’, which ‘links the past of their homeland to the past of humanity, and their mutual influence’, as well as arithmetics and foreign languages. And foreign languages will allow ‘the school pupil to transcend his homeland culturally to reach other homelands’ (p. 152). The educational workers employed by the state, school teachers and inspectors, must take up their responsibility once funding, curriculum reform and design, and the structure within which a multilingual and cultural educational programme may be delivered have been put in place. Schoolteachers must serve as role models for their students and embody the kind of multilingualism and multiculturalism Ḥusayn hopes to see shape Egyptian national subjects. Otherwise, how can they be effective as teachers and convincing, to their students and to the nation, of the curriculum they are to deliver? School inspectors must similarly personify the ‘citizen of the world’ and at the same time take up the additional task of ensuring the delivery of the desired curriculum to the full (see pp. 149–89).

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This prescription for the school inspector and teacher is preceded by a lengthy critique of the educational policies and practices followed in Egypt at the time. The disparate curricula pursued by colonial, missionary, religious and ‘modern’ (those established by Muḥammad ‘Alī) schools, which fulfilled the divergent agendas of their founders but no longer suited the purposes of nationalisation, particularly of the Egyptian subject, must necessarily be reformed. At the heart of reform, in addition to curricular unification and redesign, is pedagogy. Teachers and inspectors, while called upon to perform their role seriously and responsibly, are to be trained in critical thought as well. Teachers are expected to impart critical skills to their pupils, and inspectors to ensure their delivery in full (see pp. 198–231). The new Egyptian nationals are to be, like Ḥusayn himself, worldly and autonomous thinking subjects (see pp. 269–83). Ḥusayn’s adoption of Cartesian scepticism is well known. It is often attributed to the French influence and assessed in terms of its impact on the study of pre-Islamic poetry and the Quran in relation to the history of Islam. However, seen in the light of Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr, it is also relevant to his imagining of the Egyptian nation. If the multilingual and multicultural Egyptian nation he imagines is to be founded on the principles of democracy, equality and individual freedom (modelled on the slogans of the 1789–99 French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity), it must also foster solidarity among all Egyptian nationals. He therefore proposes the separation of religion from state, and faith from thought (though he allows for religious knowledge to be taught and transmitted in the religious community and even within the system of public education) as a strategy for building an all-inclusive, multi-faith national community with a distinct Egyptian identity (see pp. 253–68).

Multilingualism and Mediterranean Cosmopolitanism in the Egyptian Nation Ḥusayn’s ambitious multilingual programme for Egyptian nationals is his recipe for Egyptian identity. The nature of life in Egypt dictates, for example, that the Faculty of Arts (Kulliyyat al-Ādāb) teach Semitic languages, including Arabic and Eastern languages (see p. 257), Islamic studies, including Islamic philosophy, Islamic history, modelled on what is being taught in Europe (see p. 257), and foreign languages (see p. 258). To be a true Egyptian is to be rooted in Egyptian culture, which is by definition multicultural, whether one looks at it historically or geographically. Egypt, the cradle of Pharaonic civilisation, one of the most ancient civilisations in human history, has been the site of intercultural confluence since time immemorial, starting with the Pharaonic, which spread outward to the eastern Mediterranean and Europe, followed by successive waves of Greek, Roman, Islamic, and finally modern European ‘colonisation’, which brought to Egypt their respective cultures, making Egypt multicultural for thousands of years. Egypt’s location along the southern shores of the Mediterranean has made it part of the same cultural sphere to which modern Europeans, similarly heirs to Pharaonic, Greek, Roman and Islamic civilisations, belong (see pp. 18–48). ‘The future of culture in Egypt is tied to its distant past’, Ḥusayn announces in the title of chapter two (p. 18), by which he means its Pharaonic history. He then goes on to link ‘the Egyptian mind and the Greek mind’ and explain their mutual influence (see pp. 21–4), as well as ‘Islam

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and Christianity’, which ‘have in common their heritage in philosophy’ (see pp. 26–8) in that the ‘Islamic mind is like the European mind’ (see pp. 29–30) and that both learned from other civilisations and must continue to do so (pp. 39–50). Being in close contact with Europe does not present any danger to ‘our personality’ (p. 49), for an authentic Egyptian identity, in Ḥusayn’s estimate, is by definition multilingual and multicultural. A multilingual and multicultural national education for Egyptians is arguably their right by birth and a timely reminder of who they are and what their rightful place in the world is. The world Ḥusayn sees is the Mediterranean. He sees the Mediterranean as one cultural block whose different parts have centuries of history as well as some core cultural values in common. He resorts to a pre-modern term, ‘baḥr al-rūm’, literally the Roman or Byzantine sea, to designate a region delineated by its Mediterranean reach rather than by its location in the African continent, and in so doing reminds his readers of Egypt’s Greek and Roman past, a subject he taught at the Egyptian University (al-Jāmi‘a al-Miṣriyya) between 1919 and 1925, upon his return from France.46 He also borrows the European division and categorisation of the rest of the world, such as ‘Near East’ and ‘Far East’, to articulate his Eurocentric global vision for Egypt. Egypt may be a part of the Near East, ‘al-sharq al-qarīb’, not of the entire East, ‘al-sharq’, as Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm would see in ‘Uṣfūr min al-sharq (1938), and as such it has little to do with the Far East, ‘al-sharq al-ba‘īd’, Ḥusayn asserts, notwithstanding his admiration for Japan’s achievements in modernisation (see pp. 22, 36). Egypt has far more in common with Europe, both being parts of the same Mediterranean world. There is no escape from the European influence historically or geographically, even at the level of religion, and for that matter, no point in denying the pervasiveness of Europe in Egyptian life past and present. On the contrary, it is desirable to be a part of the same world as Europe, now that European culture, the most advanced civilisation in the modern age, has indeed become an integral part of Egyptian culture (see pp. 49–50). This apparent Eurocentrism and Orientalism of Ḥusayn’s cosmopolitanism is, however, tempered by his critical position towards both the achievements of the Far East, evidenced by his admiration for Japan, and his discomfort with the darker side of Europe, seen in its violent imperialism and self-serving imperial policies. Egyptians should not blindly imitate the English or French, therefore; they should engage with them critically in such a way that would lead to their own transformation into global citizens (see pp. 39–50). Ḥusayn’s cosmopolitanism entails locating Egypt in the global not only in the sense of being ‘at home in the world’, as Timothy Brennan says, but also in that of engaging actively and critically with cultural others in such a way that leads to the transformation of the self. If anything, Ḥusayn’s manifesto on the future of Egyptian education and culture is about a transformation of the self, of Egyptians and of their place in the world, one that is premised on embracing Europe as well as what it says about Egypt. Orientalism informs and underpins Ḥusayn’s cosmopolitanism.

Orientalism and Egyptian National Identity Ḥusayn’s interpretation of pre-Islamic poetry and classical Arabic literature, as he clearly lays out in his introduction to Fī al-adab al-jāhilī (On Pre-Islamic Literature, 1927), the heavily revised second edition of Fī al-shi‘r al-jāhilī (On Pre-Islamic Poetry,

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1926) for which he was tried,47 owes a great debt to European Orientalists, chief among them Carlo Alfonso Nallino (1872–1938), who taught Ḥusayn during his tenure as professor in Cairo, and David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940), whose views he often borrowed and repackaged for his Arabic reading audience (though not always without contention).48 What he says about adab, for example, is a paraphrase of Nallino’s views.49 His controversial discussion of the unreliability of pre-Islamic poetry and, in fact, the Quran as historical sources for the reconstruction of the rise of Islam in the ‘authentic’ historical context (an issue that would become known as the question of the authenticity of pre-Islam poetry) echoed Margoliouth and what the European Orientalists were debating at the time.50 Even his commentary on contemporary Arabic literature was considerably coloured by contemporary French criticism (Paul Valéry (1871–1944) was his favourite poet and critic, and the most influential source for his critical views). Ḥusayn’s self-Orientalising impulse is not necessarily only deconstructive of Egypt’s relationship with its past; rather, it is part of a broader agenda of reconstruction that is in turn informed by European Orientalism and its attendant discourses of European classicism and medievalism. The scope of European Orientalism goes beyond the discourses of Arabic pre-Islamic poetry and classical literature, and encompasses those of the ancient civilisations of the Near East as triggered by the decipherment among European Orientalists of the hieroglyphic writing of Pharaonic Egypt and the cuneiform scripts of Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian in the nineteenth century. The Rosetta Stone, the key to Jean-François Champollion’s (1790–1832) successful decoding of the Pharaonic hieroglyphs in 1820, contains a text written in three languages – Hieroglyphic, Coptic and Greek, and as such it certainly inspired Ḥusayn to link Egypt’s history and culture to those of Europe, and to unproblematically incorporate the Copts into the Egyptian nation.51 He was not the first or alone in reconstructing Egypt’s history by drawing a much longer temporal line beginning with the Pharaonic and stretching through the Greek, Roman, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman civilisations, all the way to Muḥammad ‘Alī: Al-Ṭahṭāwī had already done so before him in Anwār tafwīq al-jalīl fi akhbār Miṣr wa-tawthīq banī Ismā‘īl (1868).52 Such a reconstruction of Egyptian history in a linear progressive fashion from time immemorial to the present corresponds to another process of reassessment of the past, one that echoes the ways in which modern Europe redefined its past as well as its relationship to its various parts. In the process, it reaffirmed its Greek heritage, or classicism/Hellenism, as the foundation of its ‘Golden Age’, and distanced itself from the medievalism that (with its Orientalism) Ganim has shown to comprise the other face of European modernity. As he argues, ‘the idea of the Middle Ages as it developed from its earliest formulations in the historical self-consciousness of Western Europe is part of what we used to call an identity crisis’, ‘a site of contest over the idea of the West’, where an ambivalence about its Oriental contaminations, even origins, as well as about the Orient, would by the nineteenth-century become connected with Orientalism as well as Romanticism. European modernity would in the end locate its roots in classicism.53 Modernist Egyptian intellectuals performed a similar procedure by which they identified the ‘Abbasid era as the ‘Golden Age’ of Arabic-Islamic civilisation, one in which Greek learning was a key constituent, and demonised the Ottoman rule of what would become known as ‘the Arab world’. Medievalism and Orientalism in European modernity would collapse into Ottomanism in late Egyptian

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Nadha discourses of modernity – an issue which has yet to be explored fully54 – and European Orientalism would become a key ingredient in Egyptian imaginings of national identity. More significantly, Orientalism and Hellenism in European modernity would become twin(n)ed in Ḥusayn’s cosmopolitanism. He now located the ‘Golden Age’ of Arabic-Islamic civilisation in the ‘Abbasid era, as his predecessors and contemporaries did and his successors continue to do even today, as well as in the Hellenism of this very ‘Abbasid ‘Golden Age’. In a variety of lectures he gave on the Arabic prose and poetry of the ninth and tenth centuries in Egypt and abroad, possibly between 1930 and 1933, which were later collected and published under the title of Min ḥadīth al-shi‘r wa-al-nathr (Essays on Poetry and Prose, 1936), Ḥusayn identifies three cultural sources underpinning classical Arabic literature, as evidenced by that of the ‘Abbasid ‘Golden Age’: the Arabic language as shaped by the Quran; Greek philosophy and science; and Persian material culture and art.55 However, he privileges the Greek sources over the Persian. Persian culture and art, limited to a few works and ideas (see p. 31), did not have as profound an impact on knowledge and thought, as did Greek philosophy and science. More importantly, the Persians in fact lived and operated under the influence of the Greeks – even Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ could not escape their influence, and he purportedly went as far as translating Greeks works as well (see p. 31). Ḥusayn’s examples all go to show the Greek underpinnings of classical Arabic thought and aesthetics. All under the influence of the Greek cultural heritage the Arabs translated, preserved, embodied and transmitted were, from among the prose masters, Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (ad 724–50), ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib (d. ad 749/50), al-Jāḥiẓ (ad 776–868), Qudāma b. Ja‘far (c. 873–932/948 ad) and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (ad 932–1023), and, from among the major poets, Abū Tammām (ad 788–845), al-Buḥturī (ad 820–97), Ibn al-Rūmī (ad 836–96) and Ibn al-Mu‘tazz (ad 861–908). Hellenism was at the heart of the ‘Golden Age’ of classical Arabic civilisation. Its return to Europe gave rise to the European Renaissance and even to modern Europe itself (see p. 21). Ḥusayn’s translations of dramatic56 and philosophical57 Greek works, albeit more often than not indirectly from French, and his dissemination of Greek traditions58 bespeak his faith in Hellenism and in its further role as a catalyst for a second coming of the Arab ‘Golden Age’, a time when the Egyptian nation would stand shoulder to shoulder with those of Europe. Interestingly, however, Hellenism serves another set of purposes for Ḥusayn. In a lecture he delivered on ‘Al-adab al-‘arabī wa-makānatuh bayn al-ādāb al-kubrā al-‘ālamiyya’ (‘The place of Arabic literature among the major world literatures’) (see pp. 11–22) at the American University in Cairo in November 1932, he deploys the Hellenism inherent to classical Arabic literature to refute the Orientalist claim that pre-modern Arabic literature is as naive as that of black Africans that was allegedly made by Carl Brockelmann (1868–1956) in the (first edition of) his Encyclopaedia of Islam (see p. 13),59 and at the same time to situate it in a rather sizable world in which multiple languages are used and various cultures – particularly Arabic, Greek, Latin and Persian – overlap and are all unified in and by the Arabic language (see p. 15). Classical Arabic literature, even if it is second (only) to Greek literature, is necessarily cosmopolitan, as evidenced by its inherent multilingualism (Arabic, Greek and Persian, to say the least) and explicit multiculturalism (Greek, Persian and Arabic-Islamic, to name but a few), as we have already seen in his assertion of the multilingual and multicultural sources of classical Arabic prose and poetry.

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Arabic Print Culture and World Literature Orientalism, simultaneously expressive of its attendant classical Greek and modern European traditions, understandably becomes an integral part of the texture of Arabic writing, just as does the experience of living in intimate proximity with the European world. The travel of European life, culture and literature into Arabic writing takes place on divergent trajectories and follows diverse itineraries, not necessarily those of translation alone. This is not to undermine the role of translation in mutually enriching as well as transforming cultural encounters; rather, it is to point to other avenues which, if fully explored, could open up current theories of world literature to new possibilities. Looking at Orientalism as a body of European knowledge that inhabits the textual worlds of Arabic writing, it is possible to begin to see how the circulation of ideas, even world views, outside the ‘translation zone’ occurs through quotation, paraphrasing, summation, allusion and even critique in print culture, in newspapers, magazines and ‘trade’ or ‘popular’ books intended for, let us say, a ‘general audience’, or the public. Ḥusayn’s Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr is a good example. Arabic print culture in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century served as an important arena for the formulation, debate and reformulation of issues relevant to modernisation in the ‘public sphere’. Ḥusayn, with whom this role of Arabic print culture allegedly ended, took full advantage of the relative freedom of the press at the time and, like his predecessors and contemporaries, put forward his ideas and those of others to have them tested, debated, and revised, as was the case with his Fī al-shi‘r al-jāhilī. Arabic print culture is where knowledge from various sources was gathered and then spread. This knowledge, like that of Orientalism, became part of the fabric of Arabic writing at the time, and was by definition and necessity grounded in the kind of multilingualism and multiculturalism that Ḥusayn sought in his utopian vision of a cosmopolitan Egyptian nation.60 Alwān (1958), another collection of Ḥusayn’s essays originally published in newspapers and journals, though from a later period, brings together yet again major and minor cultural and literary figures, their major works and influential ideas or practices, from classical Greek and Latin, classical and modern Arabic, modern and contemporary European and French, and contemporary American in a comparative fashion. Cicero (106–43 bc), Yazīd b. Mufarrigh (a minor poet Ḥusayn picked out from Kitāb al-Aghānī for a discussion of the ways in which poets in the early Umayyad period were embroiled in politics), Voltaire (1694–1778), Diderot (1713–84), August Comte (1798–1857), Paul Valéry (1871–1945), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Richard Wright (1908–60), even the two famous Parisian salon hostesses, Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732–72) and Marie Anne de Vichy-Champrond, known as Madame du Deffand (1697–1780), appear in parallel individual studies. Aristotle (384–322 bc), Aristophanes (c. 446–386 bc), Sophocles (c. 497/6–406/5 bc), Euripides (c. 480–406 bc), Pindar (c. 522–443 bc), Ibn Ḥazm (994–1064) and Stendhal (1783–1842) are on the other hand seamlessly alluded to in the fabric of the text. Always paraphrasing and summarising but never quoting directly or translating, Ḥusayn populates the world of Alwān with characters from different historical eras and cultural spheres, who are now all engaged in dialogues through the prism of his impeccable Arabic prose, so as to shed light on issues of immediate relevance to humanity at all times, such as the universal topics of war, love, freedom and justice.

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In a contemplation of artistry in literary works in ‘Fī al-ḥubb’ (‘On Love’),61 Ḥusayn juxtaposes Ibn Ḥazm to Stendhal and ponders the ways in which love as explored and theorised in their works (which Ḥusayn does not name) goes beyond cultural, emotional, political and psychological preoccupations, and explains the nature of art itself. Similarly, in an inquiry into individual freedom and just rule in ‘Thawratān’ (‘Two Revolutions’), the slave rebellion against the Roman Republic most famously linked to Spartacus (c. 111–71 bc), known as the Third Servile War (73–71 bc), is compared with the Zanj Rebellion led by a certain ‘Abdallāh b. Muḥammad (ad 869–83) during the ‘Abbasid rule (see pp. 13–153). In order to adjudicate in favour of ‘political engagement’ against ‘art for art’s sake’, practices in Greek, Arabic and French literary fields in the past and present are brought to bear on a discussion of literature and politics in ‘Al-Adab bayn al-ittiṣāl wa-al-infiṣāl’ (‘Literature between Isolation and Engagement’; see pp. 155–70). Panoramic surveys of world literature in ‘Al-Adab al-muẓlim’ (‘Oppressive Literature’; see pp. 172–92) and ‘Bayn al-‘adl wa-al-ḥurriya’ (‘Between Justice and Freedom’; see pp. 193–207) respectively provide a general sense of how humanity has always responded to injustice, and of the perpetual tension between freedom and justice. The text of Alwān is worldly, as are the in-built texts, or chapters, that make up the collection. It will be worthwhile to unpack the ways in which Ḥusayn’s impeccable Arabic is infused by the French language, or, put differently, how the French language transformed his Arabic. The task will not be easy, but will not be impossible either. Perhaps it suffices for now to see that the intellectual and, let us say, cultural and literary ingredients of his texts, even as they are now given a different shape and texture in the Arabic language, come from multiple extra-Arabic sources. These sources, melded into each other, give his texts a worldliness that corresponds to his Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. This inherent cosmopolitanism places Ḥusayn’s writing in the world and this worldliness gives texture to his writing. Ḥusayn’s writing, whether in Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr or elsewhere, gives us two ideas about theories of world literature: that the worldliness of literary works, what Eric Hayot calls ‘literary worlds’, ought to be an important area of inquiry; and that the circulation of ideas, concepts, bodies of knowledge and world views outside the machinery of translation (and this machinery is yet to be adequately and carefully theorised) is equally significant in giving shape to worldly literary works.

Orientalism, Hellenism and Egyptian Cosmopolitanism In Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016),62 Aamir Mufti points out that world literature as conceived by Goethe in the late nineteenth century and revived today has a complicated history in Orientalism. Orientalism’s relationship with world literature is not too different from that which it has with European modernity. Equally, it has a complex relationship with the Egyptian Nadha and its discourses of modernity. It is a site of competing discourses and often overlaps with Hellenism. Ḥusayn was not the first to advocate for a multilingual curriculum in schools or for the teaching of Greek and Latin literature and history. In al-Ṭahṭawī’s schools, Arabic, English, French, Italian and Turkish were taught, as was a book by ‘Abdallāh Ḥusayn al-Miṣrī called Tārīkh al-falsafa al-Yūnāniyya.63 However, the Greek and Latin heritage, or Hellenism,

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would in Ḥusayn’s hands become one of the many sides of his definition of Egyptian modernity and ‘national’ identity, and not simply a part of medieval Islam. There, it is overlapped with Orientalism as well as with Egypt’s Pharaonic and Islamic roots. As juxtaposed to Ottomanism, these elements would become the foundation for his vision for a Mediterranean Egyptian identity. This Egyptian identity is comprised precisely of its ‘authentic’ multilingualism and multiculturalism, and more importantly, its refusal to be boxed into one language, religion or culture. What other stories of the Nadha can we tell by focalising our examination of the nineteenth century through Ḥusayn’s insistence on Egypt’s multilingual and multicultural heritage? It has been sixty years since the publication of Cachia’s literary biography of Ḥusayn. Literary studies within area studies, comparative literature and world literature, having acquired novel priorities and developed new theories and methodologies, have significantly transformed Orientalism. However, the cultural encounter that Cachia, in his writings on Ḥusayn, identified between Egypt and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains a site of contemplation and debate on issues relevant to Egyptian cultural and literary modernity and national identity. Even Ḥusayn, as one embodiment among many of this cultural encounter, can still provide us with the critical ammunition not only to theorise world literature differently but also Egyptian modernity and identity. The story of Orientalism, Hellenism and Ottomanism in Egyptian discourses on modernity and identity has yet to be told.

Notes 1. This chapter was originally published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, 49 (2018), pp. 1–30. Minor edits have been applied here. 2. Pierre Cachia, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (London: Luzac, 1956), pp. 3–18. 3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 4. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 5. Tributes to his contributions have regularly been made even while he was alive. For examples of personal tributes, see Muḥammad al-Sayyid al-Dusūqī, Ayyām ma‘a Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-al-Dirāsāt wa-al-Nashr, 1978) and Nizār Qabbānī, Tarṣī‘ bi-al-dhahab ‘alā sayf Dimashqī (Beirut: Manshūrāt Nizār Qabbānī, n.d.). Also, poems and letters addressed to him by, for example, ‘Allāl Fāsī, may be found in ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Ibrāhīm (ed.), Rasā’il wa-qaṣā’id lam tunshar ilā Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 2006). For collective tributes, see Ilā Ṭāhā Ḥusayn fī ‘īd mīlādihi al-sab‘īn. Dirāsāt muhdāh min aṣdiqā’ih wa-talāmīdhih (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1962); Dhikrā Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: al-kalimāt wa-al-qaṣā’id wa-al-dirāsāt allatī ulqiyat fī-al-iḥtifāl bi-dhikr al-duktūr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, 26–28 fabrāyir 1975 (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1977); Mi’awiyyat Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: waqā’i‘ nadwat Bayt al-Ḥikma bi-Qarṭāj, 27, 28 jānfiya 1990 (Qarṭāj: Dār al-Ḥikma, 1993); Nahr al-‘amīd al-fayyāḍ (Cairo: Matḥaf Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, 1996); Maḥmūd Fahmī Ḥijāzī (ed.), Iḥtifāl Kulliyyat al-Ādāb bi-dhikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn bi-munāsabat murūr 25 ‘āman ‘alā raḥīlih, 27–29 Uktūbar 1998: dirāsa wa-mukhtārāt wa-wathā’iq (Cairo: Kulliyyat al-Ādāb, Jāmi‘at al-Qāhira, 1998); Maḥmūd Fahmī Ḥijāzī and ‘Abdallāh al-Taṭāwī (eds), al-Kitāb al-tidhkārī fī dhikr murūr khamsa wa-‘ishrīn ‘āman ‘alā raḥīl Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Kulliyyat al-Ādāb, Jāmi‘at al-Qāhira, 1998); and

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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Muḥammad Nawwār (ed.), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn min jadīd: ārā’ nukhba min kibār al-muthaqqafīn (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 2006). See also Muṣṭafā Rajab, Fikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn al-tarbawī bayn al-naẓariyya wa-al-taṭbīq (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1995). See, for example, Muḥammad Khalafallāh Aḥmad, Ma‘ālim ‘alā ṭarīq al-kilāsiyya al-‘arabiyya al-ḥadītha: Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-Maḥmūd Taymūr (Cairo: Ma‘had al-Buḥūth al-‘Arabiyya, 1977); Rashīda Mahrān, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn bayna al-sīra wa-al-tarjama al-dhātiyya (Alexandria: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1979); and Khālid Karakī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn riwā’iyyan (Amman: Maktabat al-Rā’id al-‘Ilmiyya, 1992). On the iconoclastic dimensions of Ḥusayn, see Jamāl al-Dīn Ālūsī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn bayna anṣārih wa-khuṣūmih (Baghdad, 1973); Sāmiḥ Kurayyim, Ma‘ārik Ṭāhā Ḥusayn al-adabiyya wa-al-fikriyya (Beirut: Dār al-Qalam, 1977); ‘Alī Shalash, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn maṭlūb ḥayyan aw mayyitan (Cairo: al-Dār al-‘Arabiyya, 1993); Kāmil Muḥammad ‘Uwayḍa (ed.), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn bayn al-shakk wa-al-i‘tiqād (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 1994); Muṣṭafā ‘Abd al-Ghanī, al-Mufakkir wa-al-amīr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-al-sulṭa fī Miṣr (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1997); and Aḥmad Zakariyyā al-Shalq, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: Jadal al-fikr wa-al-siyāsa (Cairo: al-Majlis al-A‘lā li-al-Thaqāfa, 2008). The majority of his works may be found in al-Majmū‘a al-kāmila li-mu’allafāt al-Duktūr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Lubnānī, 1973). In addition, his French writings are collected and translated into Arabic in ‘Abd al-Rashīd al-Ṣādiq Maḥmūdī, Min al-shāṭi’ al-ākhar: kitābāt Ṭāhā Ḥusayn al-faransiyya (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1997). See Turāth Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: al-maqālāt al-ṣuḥufiyya min 1908 ilā 1967 (Cairo: Maṭba‘at Dār al-Kutub wa-al-Wathā’iq al-Qawmiyya, 2002–3). On his contribution to journalism, see ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Sharaf, Fann al-maqāl al-ṣuḥufi fī adab Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: GEBO, 1986). See Ibrāhīm ‘Abd al-‘Azīz (ed.), Ayyām al-‘umr: rasā’il khāṣṣa bayna Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1998); Rasā’il Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Dār Mīrīt, 2000); and Awrāq Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-murāsalātuh (Cairo: Maṭba‘at Dār al-Kutub wa-al-Wathā’iq al-Qawmiyya, 2005–7). See, for example, Sāmī al-Kayyālī, Ma‘a Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1952); Anwar al-Jundī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: ḥayātuh wa-fikruh fī-ḍaw’ al-islām (Cairo: Dār al-i‘tiṣām, 1976); Sāmiḥ Kurayyim, Mādhā yabqā min Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: Dār al-Qalam, 1977); Ḥusayn Naṣṣār, Dirāsāt ḥawla Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: Dār Iqra’, 1981); Aḥmad ‘Ulabī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: rajul wa-fikr wa-‘aṣr (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1985); Ḥusayn Yūsuf Bakkār, Awrāq naqdiyya jadīda ‘an Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Beirut: Dār al-Manāhil, 1991); and Mujāhid ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Mujāhid, Riḥla fī fikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Dār al-Thaqāfa li-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzī‘, 2001). The critical responses to Ḥusayn are conveniently collected in Maḥmūd Mahdī al-Istānbūlī (ed.), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn fī mīzān al-‘ulamā’ wa-al-udabā’ (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1983). See Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Josué H. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 141–60. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Anette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), pp. 109–58. See Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). See, for example, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: al-‘aqlāniyya, al-dīmuqrāṭiyya, al-ḥadātha (Damascus: Mu’assasat ‘Ībāl, n.d.) and Kamāl Ḥāmid Mughīth and Sa‘īd Ismā‘īl ‘Alī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: maṣādiruh al-fikriyya, al-‘adāla al-ijtimā‘iyya, al-dīmuqrāṭiyya, al-ḥurriya al-akādīmiyya, al-fikr al-tarbawī, al-huwāyya al-thaqāfiyya (Cairo: Markaz al-Dirāsāt wa-al-Ma‘lūmāt al-Qānūniyya li-Ḥuqūq al-Insān, 1997). See Anwar al-Jundī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: ḥayātuh wa-fikruh fī ḍaw’ al-islām (Cairo: Dār al-i‘tiṣām, 1976); Sāmiḥ Kurayyim, Islāmiyyāt: Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, al-‘Aqqād, Ḥusayn Haykal,

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19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

the colonial encounter Aḥmad Amīn, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (Beirut: Dār al-Qalam, 1977); Ramaḍān Muḥammad Ramaḍān Jāriya, al-Ittijāh al-islāmī fī adab Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: 1996); and Ilhām Shāhīn, al-‘Ilmāniyya fī Miṣr wa-ashhar ma‘ārikihā (Egypt: Dār Hārmūnī li-al-Ṭibā‘a, 2001). For the role of his autobiographies, al-Ayyām and Adīb, in shaping the modern Arabic novel, see ‘Abd al-Muḥsin Ṭāhā Badr, Taṭawwur al-riwāya al-‘arabiyya al-ḥadīthda (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1963), pp. 302–21. See Jābir ‘Uṣfūr, al-Marāyā al-mutajāwira: dirāsa fī naqd Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: 1983). See ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Sharaf, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-zawāl al-mujtama‘ al-taqlīdī (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1977). See, for example, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Blindness and Autobiography: Al-Ayyām of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). See ‘Abd al-Majīd Muḥtasib, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn mufakkiran? (Amman: Makbat al-Nahḍa al-Islāmiyya, 1980); ‘Umar Miqdād Jimnī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn mu’arrikhan (Qarṭāj: Bayt al-Ḥikma, 1993); Lūsī Ya‘qūb, al-Aṣāla wa-al-mu‘āṣara fī fikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: Maktabat al-Maḥabba, 1989); and Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-ta’ṣīl al-thaqāfa al-‘arabiyya (Cairo: al-Majlis al-A‘lā li-al-Thaqāfa, 2002). For a linguistic analysis of his style, see al-Badrāwī Zahrān, Uslūb Ṭāhā Ḥusayn fī ḍaw’ al-dars al-lughawī al-ḥadīth (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, n.d.). For a summation of his literary criticism, see David Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics (Leiden: Brill, 1974). See Hamdi Sakkout (and Marsden Jones), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 1975). There is in addition: Sa‘d Muḥammad al-Hajrasī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn..! Fī al-qarn al-‘ishrīn. ‘Aṭa’āt usrat Ṭāhā Ḥusayn al-bibliyūghrāfiyya aw Ṭāhā Ḥusayn fī al-Khālidīn (Cairo: Dār al-Thaqāfa al-‘Ilmiyya, 2000). On his Orientalism, see ‘Abd al-Rashīd al-Ṣādiq Maḥmūdī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: bayn al-siyāj wa-al-marāyā (al-Haram: ‘Ayn li-al-Dirāsāt wa-al-Buḥūth al-Insāniyya wa-al-Ijtimā‘iyya, 2005). See also Mohamed Al-Nowaihi, ‘Towards the Reappraisal of Classical Arabic Literature and History: Some Aspects of Taha Husayn’s Use of Modern Western Criteria’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 11:2 (1980), pp. 189–207. For a most recent discussion of this, see al-Tihāmī al-Hānī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-al-shi‘r al-jāhilī: bayna nafaḥāt al-mustashriqīn wa-ẓilāl al-‘arab (Tunis: al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya li-alKitāb, 2015). For earlier discussions, see Ṣāliḥ Jawdat (ed.), Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-qaḍiyyat al-shi‘r (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1975) and Muḥammad al-Khiḍr Ḥusayn, Naqḍ kitāb Fī al-shi‘r al-jāhilī (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-‘Ilmiyya, n.d.). See Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). See Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures (London: Routledge, 2007); Shaden Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). These studies of the Nadha take place side by side with studies that expand the arena historically and geographically to cover the Eastern Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See, for example, Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2004); Tarek El-Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Abdulrazzak Patel, The Arab Nahḍah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). See also Kamran Rastegar (ed.), ‘Authoring the Nahḍa: Writing the Arabic 19th Century’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 16:3 (2013), pp. 227–350.

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31. See Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). For most responses to ‘world literature’ from Middle Eastern perspectives, see Paulo Horta (ed.), ‘World Literature’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 20:1 (2017), pp. 1–124. 32. See Francesca Orsini, ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’, Comparative Literature, 67:4 (2015), pp. 345–74. 33. See Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 31–53. 34. Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, p. 129. 35. ‘The Mediterranean’ has been used as a foil to the division of the area into North Africa, the Near East, East Europe and West Europe, or nation states, in cultural, historical and literary studies since the 1990s. For the most recent responses from Mediterranean studies to ‘world literature’, see Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘Modeling Medieval World Literature’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 20:1 (2017), pp. 1–16 and Karla Mallette, ‘Translation in the Pre-Modern World’, Middle Eastern Literatures, 20:1 (2017), pp. 17–29. 36. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 2–3. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 37. See, for example, Joseph H. Escovitz, ‘Orientalists and Orientalism in the Writings of Muhammad Kurd Ali’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15:1 (1983), pp. 95–109; Usama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review, 107:3 (2002), pp. 768–96; Derek Hopwood, ‘Albert Hourani: Islam, Christianity and Orientalism’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 30:2 (2003), pp. 127–36; Lisa Lau, ‘Re-Orientalism: The Preparation and Development of Orientalism by Orientals’, Modern Asian Studies, 43:2 (2009), pp. 571–90; and Fruma Zachs, ‘“Under Eastern Eyes”: East on West in the Arabic Press of the Nahḍa Period’, Studia Islamica, 106:1 (2011), pp. 124–43. 38. See John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 3–6. 39. I refer to Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), pp. 54–68; Franco Moretti, ‘More Conjectures’, New Left Review, 20 (2003), pp. 73–81; and Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 40. See Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 41. References are made to the second edition: see Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 1973). For a partial translation of this text into English, see Sidney Glazer, The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington, DC: American Council for the Learned Societies, 1954). 42. See Ḥusayn, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa, pp. 12–13. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 43. A survey of his experience as a student and educator is found in Muṣṭafā Rajab, Fikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn al-tarbawī bayn al-naẓariyya wa-al-taṭbīq (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma li-al-Kitāb, 1995). 44. See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 45. See Benjamin Geer, ‘The Priesthood of Nationalism in Egypt’, PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011. 46. See Rajab, Fikr Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, p. 17. 47. For the relevant court documents, see Khayrī Shalabī (ed.), Muḥākamat Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: naṣṣ qarār al-ittihām ḍidda Ṭāhā Ḥusayn sanat 1927 ḥawla kitābihi ‘Fī al-shi‘r al-jāhilī (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya li-al-Dirāsāt wa-al-Nashr, 1972).

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48. See Maḥmūdī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn. 49. See Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-adab al-jāhilī (Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī li l-Ta‘līm waa-l-Thaqāfa, 2012), pp. 21–9. 50. See, for example, Meftah Tahar, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn: sa critique littéraire et ses sources françaises (Tunis: Maison Arabe de Livre, 1976); Muḥammad al-Khiḍr Ḥusayn, Naqḍ kitāb ‘Fī al-shi‘r al-jāhilī’ (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-‘Ilmiyya, n.d.); and al-Tihāmī al-Hānī, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-alshi‘r al-jāhilī: bayna nafaḥāt al-mustashriqīn wa-ẓilāl al-‘arab (Tunis: al-Dār al-Tūnisiyya li-al-Kitāb, 2015). 51. For the problematic role of Pharaonic civilisation and antiquities in the construction of postcolonial Egyptian national identity, see Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). For its role in shaping Egyptian nationalist discourse in fiction, see Samah Selim, ‘The New Pharaonism: Nationalist Thought and the Egyptian Village Novel, 1967–1977’, The Arab Studies Journal, 8/9:2/1 (2000–1), pp. 10–24. 52. See Wen-chin Ouyang, ‘Return or Departure?: Homecoming in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s Travelogue’, in Frédéric Bauden (ed.), Tropics of Travel: 4. Homes, Proceedings of the International Conference Organized at the University of Liège, 13–15 January 2011 (Louvain: Peeters Publishers, 2015), pp. 89–108. 53. See Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, pp. 3–6. 54. There is little on this aspect of Nadha discourses to the best of my knowledge. For an example, see Rifaat Ali Abou-el-Haj, ‘The Social Uses of the Past: Recent Arab Historiography of Ottoman Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 14:2 (1982), pp. 185–201. 55. See Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Min ḥadīth al-shi‘r wa-al-nathr (Cairo: Mu‘assasat Hindāwī li-al-Ta‘līm wa-al-Thaqāfa, 2012), p. 77. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 56. His translations of Sophocles’ Electra, Antigone, Ajax, and Oedipus the King, possibly in 1939, are found in Min al-adab al-tamthīlī al-yūnānī: Sūfūklīs. He also translated André Gide’s Oedipus (1931) and Theseus (1946) in Ūdīb Thīsiyūs (1946). 57. Ḥusayn translated Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians in 1921, as Niẓām al-ātīnīyyīn. 58. For his introductions to Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, see Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Qādat al-fikr (Cairo: al-Hilāl, 1925) (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Leaders of Thought, trans. Hasan Lutfi (Beyrouth: Khalifé, 1932)). An anthology of selected texts from Greek drama, Ṣuḥuf mukhtāra min al-shi‘r al-tamthīlī ‘ind al-yūnān (1920) is available in a Hindawi digital edition. 59. I have found an echo of what Ḥusayn alleges in the first chapter of Carl Brockelmann’s History of Arabic Literature on the Arabic language, which I accessed in Arabic, Tārīkh al-adab al-‘arabī, translated into Arabic by ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm al-Najjār (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, 4th edn, n.d.). The comparison reads as follows: ‘And this is how the Bedouins describe their camels, as the Bantu Africans (zunūj ‘Bantu’) describe their cows. For this reason, Arabic is not capable of inventing words that describe general and abstract concepts (lam taqwa al-‘arabiyya ‘alā ikhtirā‘ alfāẓ tu‘abbir ‘an al-ma‘nawiyyāt al-‘āmma wa-almadārik al-kulliyya); rather, it sufficed with describing and identifying specific features (al-ṣifāt wa-al-khaṣā’iṣ). This is the best feature of the poetry of ancient Arabs. It does not point to an expansive awareness; on the contrary, it indicates a narrow, limited consciousness not yet capable of abstraction (tajrīd al-ma‘ānī al-kulliyya wa-istikhlāṣihā)’: Carl Brockelmann, Tārīkh al-adab al-‘arabī, trans. ‘Abd al-Ḥalīm al-Najjār (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif, n.d.), p. 43; translation from Arabic mine. 60. I go against the grain of Allan’s reading of the exchange between Ḥusayn and Gide that took place in person but more particularly on the site of Adīb as ‘the limits of literary experience’

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and the ‘provincialism of the literary world’, even as he acknowledges something akin to ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’, and argue for the cosmopolitanism of Ḥusayn’s texts, more particularly, his critical texts. For his reading, see Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, pp. 115–30. 61. See Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Alwān (Cairo: Mu’assasat Hindāwī li-l-Ta‘līm wa-l-Thaqāfa, 2012), pp. 83–97. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 62. See Aamir Mufti, Forget English: Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 56–98, 99–145. 63. See Daniel L. Newman, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831) (London: Saqi, 2004), pp. 17–97.

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Chapter 8 On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited1 Ella Shohat

C

ommonplace sentiments such as ‘Jews and Muslims have hated each other for millennia’ and ‘Arabs and Jews have always been at each other’s throats’ have come to form taken-for-granted doxa within the global political landscape. At least since the partition of Palestine, such claims, widely disseminated in everyday conversation and in the media, and supported by a gallery of neo-Orientalist experts, continue to advance the trope of perennial enemies locked in perpetual conflict. Terrorist events in France – such as the Charlie Hebdo attack that also targeted the Hyper-Cacher minimarket, which largely victimised North African Jews – have sparked countless comments of this type, enlisting yet another piece of visual evidence to buttress a seemingly unshakable historical truth. This idea of an eternal and intractable enmity, however, is in fact a relatively recent invention. In geopolitical terms, Jew and Muslims, at least up to the twentieth century, were often allied, having in common the enmity of (European) Christians. During their passionate march to the Holy Land, the Crusaders assailed the Jews as well as the Muslims within the territories that fell under their dominion. Not coincidentally the (European) Christians regarded those sometimes called ‘the Jews of Islam’ as welcoming or joining forces with the Arab/Muslim conquest, especially during the Moorish expansion into Iberia. As such, Jews epitomised the proverbial Trojan horse facilitating the infiltration of those variously called Ishmaelites, Saracens, Persians, Arabs, Moors, Mohammedans, Ottomans, Berbers, Kabyles, Turks, Moslems, or simply Orientals. Conceived together, the Jewish and the Muslim infidels became the joint objects of Christian fears and phobias. Christian theologians diabolised them as one, and they dwelt side by side in the Christian imaginary. Always-already co-constituted with its Jewish element, the troubling figure of the Muslim, meanwhile, was partly real and partly phantasmatic. Dating back to the seventh century, up through the Muslim incursions into regions dominated by Christians, such as Sicily, South Italy and Iberia, the intertwined spectres of the Muslim and the Jew haunted Europe. Although the Normans defeated the Muslim Emirate of Sicily in 1072, and although the Reconquista crushed the last Moorish stronghold of Al-Andalus, Granada, in 1492, the sirocco threats blowing in from the Ottoman Empire frequently fanned the anxiety. The fear of the Muslim was shaped by recurrent reminders of the geographical proximity between the shores of Europe and Africa to the South and Asia to the East, resonating with the concomitant trope of ‘the-barbarians-at-the-gate’, whether the ‘gate’ in question was located in the Pyrenees, the Dardanelles, the straits

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of Gibraltar or the portals of Vienna. With the nineteenth century, as Western empires were expanding territorially and lording it over much of the globe, North Africa/the Middle East gained special significance. The 1798–1801 Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and (Greater) Syria orchestrated a political procession of a triumphant West trampling on a supine East or, within a revised geographical relationality, of North over South. At the same time, these imperial interventions unmasked, as it were, a religious Unconscious whose antecedents could be traced back to the various Crusades and to the centuries-long wrestle between the European-Christians and the Arabs/Moors/ Ottomans/Muslims. Yet, within imperial modernity, religious formations were also increasingly converted into racial principles. Within this transformed grammar, the Hebrew/Arab, the Sephardi/Moor and the Jew/Muslim were resignified within a new colonial order, performing initially jointly but increasingly separately, in a still overwhelmingly Eurocentric arena.

The Bifurcated Oriental Reconsidered Beginning with eighteenth century philological genealogies and proceeding to nineteenth century racialised geographies, Eurocentric discourse produced a parallel series of otherised groups, most notably the (American) Indian, the Black/African, as well as the Asian/ Oriental, which included the Semite – all positioned in contradistinction to the White/ Aryan.2 With the emergence of nineteenth-century biological sciences, and especially with the rank-and-measure racist theories that organised the ‘people of the world’ within an ossified hierarchy, Hebrews/Jews and Arabs/Muslims were classified together under the broad rubric of ‘the Oriental’, and more particularly, as ‘the Semite’. Eighteenth-century linguistic families transmuted into nineteenth-century biological kinships, engendering fixed maps of civilisational origins and ethnological archetypes at once physiological and cultural.3 This perceived kinship took many forms, found, for example: in Voltaire’s Enlightenment account of the ancient Hebrews and Arabs as vagabonds ‘infected with leprosy’4 characterised by ‘the same thirst for plunder, the same division of the spoils’,5 lacking in the requisite manners and spirit of nations; or in Ernest Renan’s deterministic demarcation between the superior Indo-European and the inferior Semite, viewed as an ‘incomplete’ race that failed to contribute ‘to this organic and living whole which is called civilization’, and thus owed ‘neither political life, art, poetry, philosophy, nor science’, and thus ‘nothing at all’;6 or in Hegel’s progressive philosophical synthesis that classified inferior civilisations, including the Semitic, as living ‘outside of History’, and delineated world history as travelling unidirectionally ‘from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History’.7 Although the critique of Orientalism (à la Anouar Abdel-Malek and Edward Said) currently tends to be associated primarily with the objectification of Islam and Muslims, Judaism and Jews were Orientalised within the very same Eurocentric thesis or ‘negative dialectics’. Jews and Muslims came to occupy the denigrated side of the Orientalist East-versus-West binary, at best embodying civilisational primitivity going back to ‘the beginning of time’. Through a manifest hostility to degenerate peoples, or sometimes even through an affectionate embrace of exotic others, the Hebrew/Jew and the Arab/ Muslim were Orientalised conjointly. In his rendering of this aspect of Orientalism’s ‘Semite’, Said also pointed to the occurrence of a significant split between the negative

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and the positive poles of this archetype. Through ‘a concatenation of events and circumstances’, Said writes, ‘the Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionism movement; one Semite went the way of Orientalism, the other, the Arab, was forced to go the way of the Oriental’.8 At the same time, even prior to Zionism, with the Enlightenment, assimilationist emancipation and the Hebrew Haskala, it could be argued, the (European) Jew, who had gradually emerged as part of modernity, was sanitised of its tainted (presumed) Eastern extraction. This process was later further consecrated with Zionism’s aim of redeeming the ‘Diaspora Jew’ (the ostjuden, literally Eastern Jews) through affiliation with the West. Hence, the Zionist project paradoxically involved a de-Semitisation of the Jew (as evidenced in the visual Aryanisation of the Sabra phenotype and in the linguistic modernisation of Hebrew designed to undo its Semitic syntax and pronunciation) even while simultaneously claiming an originary Semitic lineage. As the nationalist project became more palpable, Zionist discourse completely severed ‘the Jew’ from ‘the Arab’, abandoning those earlier variations of romanticising the Bedouin and the local Arab shepherd as incarnating the Hebrew ancestors.9 The de-Orientalisation in the sense of the whitening of ‘the Jew’, increasingly took on more exclusivist characteristics, manifest in the teleological readings of excavated archeological layers and, more recently, of the tracing of genetic roots in the East.10 In my earlier engagement with Said’s genealogical critique of Orientalism, I was concerned with situating the Sephardi/Oriental/Arab-Jew vis-à-vis this bifurcation thesis. Invariably, for Orientalist discourse ‘the Jew’ in question was assumed to be internal, located in-Europe even if with fixed Semitic origins traced back to the East, while the conjured-up Arab was external, located outside of Europe. Within Orientalism, the Oriental Jew, I suggested, also went, like the locus classicus colonised native, the way of the Oriental (the Arab), rather than the way of the Orientalist (the Jew).11 Already prior to Zionism, the Middle East/North Africa was subjected to the civilising mission that was also demonstrably aimed at the indigenous Jews. (I hasten to clarify that I use the term ‘indigenous’ not in an originary, purist and linear sense, but rather relationally – i.e. to refer to a community’s existence in a cultural geography, no matter how historically syncretic and palimpsestic due to movement, mixing and conversion, but which nonetheless precedes colonial-settler practices, including violently imposed new forms of cultural hybridity.) But with the Zionist project, Jews in Muslim spaces, in order to be subsumed into a Eurocentrically defined homogenous nation, had to be systematically shorn of their Orientalness, violently cleansed of Arabness. The omission of the figure of the Arab-Jew has often reflected a broader ambivalence about the national affiliation of indigenous Jews in the postpartition casting of belonging. In my work, I tried to position the Arab-Jew within a relational mapping of complexly plural Arab/Muslim spaces, one which transcended the Eurocentric narratives of both ‘Jewish History’ and the ‘Arab-versus-Jew’ divide. Evoking the hyphenated Arab-Jew (or for that matter, Jewish-Arab) has offered, it seems to me, a way to: (1) complicate the neat Orientalist division between the Hebrew/Jew and the Arab/Muslim, whether before or after the bifurcation into negative and positive poles; (2) rearticulate the nuanced spectrum between ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’, especially given the historically vibrant presence of indigenous Jews of the Middle East/North Africa; and (3) reframe the perennial enmity narrative so as to stress a thoroughly syncretic Judeo-Muslim culture. The Arab-Jew, both as an

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empirical category and as a critical trope, has embodied not merely a mutually constitutive cultural past but also an imaginative future potentiality. Although today ‘the Arab-Jew’ has gained some visibility in critical discourse, the widespread notion of ‘the Jew’ continues to be tacitly assumed to be European (Ashkenazi), whether or not (depending on one’s position within the controversy over Jewish origins and indigeneity in Palestine or Eretz Israel) defined as ‘truly’ of ‘Semitic descent’. Thus implicit in the question of the Arab-Jew is the elusive issue of who is this imagined Jew and who is this imagined Arab? – this pair that was once conceived together, only to be split later. Here I would like to examine the specific bifurcation that began prior to the Eurocentric formulation of Jewish nationalism, and focus on the place of the Arab-Jew within the imperial vision of the Orient. This chapter attempts to account for the ruptures generated in the colony even prior to the spread of Zionism and the massive dislocation of Middle Eastern/North African Jews in the post-partition era, a historical process that I termed elsewhere the ‘ruptures-before-the-Rupture’.12 The location of the Jew ‘in’ the actual Arab geography raises a question about the Orientalist classification of Arab Jews: did they inhabit ‘the Arab’ or ‘the Jewish’ side of this tale of ancestral lineage? Today, given partition, diasporisation and competing nationalist imaginaries, the ArabJew can be said to silently occupy an ambivalent position within the bifurcation. Its ambiguous presence has much to do with persistent ideological realignments around Israel and Palestine. Probing representations in the era prior to the advent of Zionism and the emergence of Arab nationalism, meanwhile, allows us to ask: where would the indigenous Jew of ‘the Orient’, and more specifically the Arab-Jew, conceptually fit within the split?13 Revisiting the narrative of the splitting into two Semites, I am interested here in continuing to explore the place of the Arab-Jew, or the Jewish-Arab, within this ruptured Orientalised unit. During the longue durée of Orientalism, Arab/Middle Eastern Jews, I suggest, were located firmly – indeed as firmly as any Arab/Middle Eastern community in terms of claims to indigenous belonging – within the territories of the actual ‘Orient’. The epidemic of scientifically formulated racial ideas that travelled from Europe to the colony did not pass over the Orient’s Jews. Exploring instances taking place both before and after the bifurcation, I trace moments in which the Jew-in-the-Orient began ‘his’ terminological journey of shifting from ‘the Arab’ to ‘the Jewish’ side of the equation. In what ways did the imperial rescue-of-minorities interventions impact such ruptures, recoding co-regional affiliations and engendering ambivalent indigeneity? And in what ways did the civilising mission, in tandem with the arrival of the already de-Orientalised European Jew in the Orient, undermine the millennial syncretisms of Judeo-Muslim culture? Within the skewed version of a colonising Enlightenment, Jews ‘in the Orient’, I argue, experienced a double colonisation, with its corollaries of assimilation and dispossession. One colonisation targeted ‘the natives’ in general, while the other was programmed specifically for the Jewish natives. The bifurcated Semite narrative, then, must account for the ‘travel’ of an Orientalist discourse to the Orient where it encountered Jewish-Arab hybridity in the flesh. Thus, this chapter will reconsider the bifurcation in light of a significant assimilationist de-Orientalisation (and later an explicit de-Arabisation) project directed at Jews within the imperialised Orient, producing what could be regarded as the-split-within-the-split.

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From Aryanist Orientalism to Romantic Orientophilia: Disraeli’s Sephardiness Said’s Orientalism begins with two epigraphs, one citing Karl Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’), and the other, Benjamin Disraeli from Tancred (‘The East is a Career’).14 Much critical discussion has been dedicated to the political limitations of a generally progressive Marx in relation to the non-European and, more broadly, to the question of Marxism in the colony.15 Disraeli, as a key figure in the Victorian British Empire, meanwhile, has often been regarded as prime example of an Orientalist. Indeed, his ‘One-Nation’ conservativism and his spearheading of an imperialist project, along with his hierarchical depiction of ethno-national archetypes throughout his novels, have cast him in the Orientalist position. And indeed, in tandem with the racialist philosophers, Disraeli linked Hebrews/Jews and Arabs/Muslims through a primeval narrative of a Semitic civilisation. At the same time, certain ambiguities in the very Orient conjured up in Disraeli’s fiction clash with the theses of the Voltaires, Renans and Hegels. Although Disraeli’s essentialist Romanticism is premised on the same racialist formulae, his text reverses the Aryanist hierarchy and virtually assigns the opposite valence to this civilisational dualism. Disraeli’s Orientalist novels The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) and Tancred: Or, the New Crusade (1847) depict a Jewish/Arab world, situated firmly as it were, in the very soil of the East, whether set in the twelfth century or in the nineteenth century. His fiction replaces Orientalism’s European Jewish Semite – usually the Ashkenazi Jew, whose distant ancestry is said to originate in the East – with the indigenous Eastern Jew, living in the East and depicted as an Oriental through and through. Shifting its focus to the Jew/Arab, Tancred has the contemporaneous Jew reside outside of Europe – the ultimate Jew-of-the-Orient. An interwoven world of Hebrews/ Arabs and Jews/Muslims unfolds, where the definitional boundaries distinguishing Arabs/Hebrews from Jews/Muslims shrink to the point of a reciprocal substitutability. The inherent connections between Hebrew and Arab are sanctioned, but within a racially tinged Romanticist vision. ‘The Arabs’, in the novel’s exoticising expression, are merely ‘Jews upon horseback’.16 Referred to as ‘an Arabian’ (p. 47), the heroine Eva is the daughter of a ‘prominent Hebrew’ (p. 179) Sephardi father, Adam Besso, and of a Bedouin Jewish mother, claiming a proud Arab lineage. Eva’s quintessential Arab identity is reinforced throughout the novel, for example in the woven-in description of her sartorial customs: ‘wrapped in a huge and hooded Arab cloak, so that her form could not in the slightest degree be traced, her face covered with a black Arab mask’ (pp. 70–1). A Bedouin poet extols Eva who ‘never quit the tents of her race!’ and blesses her: ‘May she always ride upon Nejid steeds and dromedaries, with harness of silver!’ (p. 179). Apart from invoking the history of Jewish-Arabs in the Arabian peninsula,17 the novel formulates a nineteenth-century character that is simultaneously Arab and Jewish, thus encapsulating an Orientalist moment in which their future antinomy had not yet been even imagined. The Arab character Emir Fakredeen, who was adopted by Eva’s maternal grandfather, the powerful Sheikh Amalek, defines himself in similar ways, without even a hint of any incongruity between being ‘a good Mussulman’ and ‘a Hebrew’ or ‘a Jew’

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(pp. 45, 52, 53). While the Jewish Eva possesses ‘Bedouin blood’ (p. 68), the Muslim Fakredeen is fancied a ‘Hebrew Prince of the Mountains’ (p. 67). By invoking their shared blood, the novel lauds the Oriental umbilical cord tying the Arab and the Hebrew. Fakredeen emphatically declares to Eva: I am a Hebrew . . . A Hebrew; yes, a Hebrew. I am a Hebrew by blood, and we all are by faith. . . . [A] Hebrew; I was nourished by your mother’s breast, her being flows in my veins; and independent of all that, my ancestor was the standard-bearer of the Prophet, and the Prophet was the descendant of Ishmael, and Ishmael and Israel were brothers. I really think, between my undoubted Arabian origin and being your foster-brother, that I may be looked upon as a Jew. (pp. 52–3) Literalising ‘the Semitic family’, here the shared maternal milk – traditionally bestowing the status of siblings even in the absence of common parentage – as well as the shared paternal seed, fleshes out an undeniably twinned ancestry. The novel affirms a universe in which Arabs, at their kernel, are Hebrews, just as the Hebrews are decidedly Arabs; where Muslims incarnate Jews and where Jews personify Muslims. By conveying these primordial links, the narrative yokes together the Hebrew/Jew and the Arab/Muslim as a kind of Janus figure. The joint familial heritage, furthermore, is framed within a narrative of Oriental nobility, as when Fakredeen blesses the fortunate pedigree of the symbolic siblings, exclaiming: ‘Everything comes from Arabia, my dear Eva, and at least everything that is worth saying. We ought to thank our stars every day that we were born Arabs’ (p. 162). The novel’s isomorphic rendering of the Muslim/Arab as Jew/Hebrew and of the Jew/Hebrew as Bedouin/Arab, making them virtually identical, illustrates the same thesis of a racial continuum that undergirded Orientalist discourse prior to the political concretisation of the split. But the novel actually reverses the thesis of the degraded Oriental, purveying instead a glorious tale of Semitic civilisation with its Arab/Hebrew kinship from time immemorial. The novel, furthermore, embodies a sanguine intimacy of Jew and Muslim within a panorama of deeply rooted Oriental civilisation breathing in the present. It paints the political Muslim-Jewish alliance as now forming an opposition to Europe’s imperialist efforts. The Muslim-Jewish union is mainly mediated through Fakredeen and Eva, who anxiously view the modern incursion of Europe into the East as a latter-day reiteration of the Crusades. Eva, the narrator states, ‘dreaded the idea that, after having escaped the crusaders, Syria should fall first under the protection, and then the colonisation of some European power’ (p. 65). For her a ‘link was wanted in the chain of resistance which connected the ranges of Caucasus with the Atlas’ (p. 65). The Jewish-Arab heroine sees in her Muslim-Arab foster-brother Fakredeen, with ‘his standard on Mount Lebanon’, a potential ‘beacon of the oriental races’ (p. 65). The Englishman Tancred, for his part, comes to share this vision. In this bildungsroman, the titular hero, whom Disraeli endows with the name of the historical Crusader Tancred, hails from the English nobility, and is revealed to be a descendant of a centuries-ago Crusader. In a passionate search for a genuine reunification with Christianity’s birth place, the young man voyages to the Holy Land only to be transformed by a mesmerising revelation: the pre-eminence of Oriental civilisation,

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whose achievements, chiefly Christianity and its Saviour, it bequeathed to Europe. In an allegorical encounter between the Christian Tancred and the Jewish-Arab Eva – simultaneously likened to the Hebrew Bible’s ‘Rose of Sharon’ and to the Arab heritage of ‘daughter of a thousand sheikhs’ (p. 49) – the Oriental woman converts, as it were, the Occidental man into a modern defender of the East. In contrast with the historical Tancred, here the converter is converted, less in religious than in civilisational terms. In the Orient, the newly awakened Tancred finds a fraternal mission rejuvenated with moral purpose. He advises Fakredeen, who aspires to ‘a Syria free from foreign rule’ and to making ‘the Syrians a nation’, against sending ‘secret envoys to Paris or London, cities themselves which are perhaps both doomed to fall’ (pp. 116–17). Tancred encourages his new Oriental brother to ‘act like Moses and Mahomet’ (pp. 116–17). In this updated epiphany, the hero, rather than repeat the old crusade, paves the way for a new crusade of reverence toward the East as the sanctified fountain of the West. Disraeli’s novel has the English nobleman champion an originary civilisational narrative contrary to his upbringing. In this allegorical reversal of the Aryanist ‘we-owe-them-nothing-at-all’ diatribe, the novel, in other words, moves didactically from Christian-European disavowal to the embrace of the East as the progenitor of the West. By no means a tale of textual affinity between theological practices, Tancred relates the intimacy between Judaism and Islam in the idiom of ‘blood’ – a kinship traced back to the patriarchal source of Abraham/Ibrahim.18 At first, the narrative stages the significance of literal presence in the Holy site, expressed for example at the tabernacle feast: ‘the Moslemin say that we are near paradise at Damascus . . . and that Adam was fashioned out of our red earth’ (p. 297). Fakredeen disquietly reflects on the Divine’s willingness to reveal Himself only to have Tancred’s assurance that ‘God has never spoken to a European’ (pp. 120–1) because, he supposes, Europeans did not dwell in a Holy Land. But soon, the novel emphasises the ancestral element mandatory for revelation. As Tancred begins to agonise about not yet receiving God’s message despite his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he wonders if ‘there is a qualification of blood as well as of locality necessary for this communion, and that the favoured votary must not only kneel in the Holy Land but be of the holy race’ (pp. 120–1). The Jewish-Bedouin sheikh teaches Tancred that the Quran ‘could come from God, as it was written by a member of the Koreish tribe’ and that ‘the tribe of Koreish are the lineal descendants of Ibrahim’ (p. 130). The monotheistic patriarch, whose name is pronounced here in Arabic, is rendered indistinguishably a Hebrew and an Arab, reverberating with both Biblical and Quranic chronicles of origins. Tancred subsequently inquires whether the Word of God could only be delivered to the ‘seed of Abraham’ and receives the (Jewish) sheikh’s affirmative elucidation: ‘Let men doubt of unicorns: but of one thing there can be no doubt, that God never spoke except to an Arab’ (p. 130). Here Disraeli inverts the racial hierarchy of Aryan-over-Semite by switching its valence. In another instance of what could be called Aryanism-in-reverse, Tancred confesses to the Sephardi Besso that he ‘cannot comprehend how a Christian can be uninterested in a people who have handed down to him immortal truths’ (p. 291). Both agree that ‘the government of this globe must be divine, and the impulse can only come from Asia’ (p. 291). For Tancred, Eva’s father Besso is worthy of being ‘the father of mankind’ (p. 297). In yet another allegory, the novel grants the Sephardi exiled from Spain a Christian apologia expressed in Tancred’s ultimate mea culpa. As a

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Christian ‘in the land of Christ’, he proclaims: ‘I kneel to a daughter of my Redeemer’s race. Why should I fly?’ (p. 413). As Christianity is brought to its proverbial knees, monotheism, more broadly, is animated by asserting a biological lineage that also supposedly explains the Orient’s grandeur. Within Tancred’s overall trajectory, the West-over-East topos is inverted; the self-assured negative attributes are reconfigured in support of a linear tale about the East as the natal locus of Christian Europe. As an imperialist conservative deploying a racialist paradigm, Disraeli at the same time mobilises the Manichean schema in favour of the Oriental. Rich with Orientalist paradoxes, this ode to the East also cements the prevailing nineteenth-century vision of hierarchically ordered civilisations. Although the East is celebrated as the fount of Western civilisation, in other words, the teleology remains profoundly Eurocentric; the East is ultimately redeemed only due to its preeminence as the originary matrix shaping the contemporaneous Christian-West. This glorification by Disraeli, whose father, the author Isaac D’Israeli, had him baptised into the Anglican Church at the age of thirteen, has sometimes been interpreted as bestowing a new Hebraic crown of nobility – more genuine than any Norman pedigree – upon the head of the inferior Jew,19 a case of a survival manoeuvre for the assimilated writer/politician facing anti-Semitism. But rather than simply the response of a universally imagined Jew – everywhere existing within the same conditions and carrying the same historical persecution memories – this reversal discourse could be read alternatively in light of Disraeli’s specifically Sephardi background. Illuminating a civilisational grandeur shining through the historical ruination, Disraeli’s Orient, in this sense, can be rearticulated as the imaginary return of the exiled Sephardi to his lost Andalusian heritage. Indeed, Disraeli’s wholesome Semitic figure took the form of revisiting Sephardi/Moorish history, partly shaped by the mesmerising impressions left by his literal visit to Spain’s historical sites. During his Andalusian sojourn, Disraeli was reportedly thrilled that his Alhambra guide mistook his dark complexion and curly hair for that of a Moor.20 Enchanted by this exalted lineage of ‘a legitimate heir to the princes who built the Alhambra’,21 he was apparently heard to murmur during his stroll in the palace, ‘Es mi casa’.22 Apart from the invocation of physical resemblance between Sephardim and Moors, Disraeli’s longing for the Moor reveals a deep-seated nostalgia for another, more immediate ancestry – in Al-Andalus/Sefarad. As a voyage into the Andalusian past, Disraeli’s presence in Granada embodies not merely a Sephardi return but also a Moorish homecoming. The Edenic garden from which Jews and Muslims had been banished, or had remained as anxious conversos and Moriscos, reverberates with Disraeli’s path as that of a modern British-Anglican converso. Tancred, whose gallery of symbolic characters also includes a Sephardi patriarch, comes to allegorise a nineteenth-century convivencia which this time takes place in the Near East – a modern-day Judeo-Muslim nexus. At times, Disraeli’s vision of Palestine becomes mutually intertwined with Andalusia, as voiced by Tancred: ‘. . . a man might climb Mount Carmel, and utter three words which would bring the Arabs to Granada, and perhaps further’ (p. 175). Although Disraeli is sometimes regarded as proto-Zionist, his fiction hardly observes an exclusivist restoration logic that would partition Jew and Arab, or draw two distinct ancestral chains of one detached from the other.23 Enunciated in generic nineteenth-century Romanticist idiom,

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his Orientalist fiction phantasises an East in which the Jew is always-already an Arab and vice versa, with both belonging to the originary site of the genesis of all Semites.24 Even a reading of both Tancred and Alroy as proposing a resurrection of the banished Hebrew nation in the Holy Land, could not, in this sense, fathom a return to the source geography as possessed singularly by Jews or, more precisely, for Jews sans Arabs.25 While replicating an exoticist and even a self-exoticising imaginary, Disraeli emphatically coupled ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’ as forming part of the same genus; the Aryanism-in-reverse undercurrent is enhanced by a quasi-Semitocentric formulation.26 Disraeli’s affective attachment to Eastern/Muslim civilisation – Arab, Moorish, Ottoman – could then be regarded on one level as characteristic of a certain strain of Romanticist Orientalism, a kind of Orientophilia. But, on another, perhaps deeper level, it could be viewed as a reflection of a latent Sephardi/Moorish historical consciousness. Manifesting the troubling symptoms of originary discourses, this genealogical tale might also unveil a desire to reunite the once displaced Sephardi and Moor, and subliminally restore a kind of convivencia. In this sense, Disraeli’s fictional Orient re-enacts a Sephardi eulogy for the not-so-distant glorious past of Al-Andalus/Sefarad. The contemporaneous Hebrew and Arab, or the Jew and the Muslim, are mutually imbricated, engrained in the antecedent Judeo-Muslim world. Benjamin Disraeli thus embodies the contradictions entailed in leading an imperialist project vis-à-vis the collapsing Ottoman Empire while also passionately advocating the civilisational prestige of the Turkish/Arab/Oriental. (This admiration famously took the political form of Disraeli siding with the Ottomans in the Balkans, in glaring contrast to the PhiloHellenic sentiments of the Romantics, as in Byron’s devotion to the Greek cause and Percy Shelley’s exclamation: ‘We are all Greeks!’)27 The imagery of an aggrandised East, in this sense, became intermingled with Disraeli’s own sense (real or imagined) of personal lineage, which, in another allegory of reversal, endowed the Sephardi/ Moor with sangre azul (‘blue blood’ associated with the aristocracy’s untanned visible veins, which in the Castilian context denoted a pure heritage presumably never tainted by Moors and Jews). In what could be considered a non-Aryanist version of Orientalism, Disraeli affirmed the East, yet, at the same time, this very affirmation was itself embedded in a broader racialist and Eurocentric account of world history as teleologically moving from the ancient East to the modern West. Disraeli’s Orientalist novels, in other words, reverberate with the genre’s distinctly exotic topoi, while also crafting a putatively positive Orientophilic idea of an Ur-civilisation. Such texts are thus ambivalently situated in two conflicting paradigms: one of the ‘Oriental’ – connoted by the author’s Sephardi descent and embrace of Andalusian legacy – and of the ‘Orientalist’ – connoted by the author’s assumed British prerogative to speak on behalf of ‘the Orient’.

The Jew-in-the-Orient: The Antinomies of a Classification In some instances, as the case of Tancred suggests, Orientalist discourse proper specifically thematised the indigenous Jew-in-the-Orient, transforming ‘the Jew’ of the (still unified) Oriental figure into a particular Semite, at once Arab and Jew. More generally, the Orientalist representation of indigenous Jews within Arab/Muslim spaces rarely revolved around their Jewishness per se. From the nineteenth century, and at times on through the middle half of the twentieth century, Jewishness as an ethno-religious

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category was subsumed under broader organising principles premised on racialised geographical location such as city and region. Firm classificatory distinctions between Arab and Jew, as we have come to know them, began to take shape largely with the emergence of a Jewish nationalist vision whose travelling gaze zoomed in on the ‘exotic Jews’, sorting them out of their ambient materiality. Yet cracks and fissures had already been surfacing within Orientalist discourse with regards to the Jew-in-the-Orient. Here, I will address some specific moments in the formation of such fissures, prior to the grand rupture brought on with the emergence of Zionism and the partition of Palestine – that is, those moments when colonial regimes first infiltrated Arab/Muslim spaces. Drawing largely on examples from Orientalist visual culture, the remainder of this chapter analyses the Arab-Jew figure through a poly-perspectival grid in terms of the orchestration of desires and fears in relation to the diverse religious, national and ethnic constituencies which formed the subjects/objects, and at times the audiences, for such drawings, paintings and photographs. With the imperial expansion into North Africa and the Middle East, a rift began to take shape in the iconography of the usually hitherto intertwined classifications of the Hebrew and the Arab, or the Sephardi and the Moor, or the Jew and the Muslim. Some pictorial representations inadvertently capture this shift, a transformation that dramatically impacted the perception and conceptualisation of Jewish belonging within Muslim spaces, resulting in their ambivalent indigeneity. Returning time and again to the scene of ‘the East’, Orientalist discourse took the form of varied sub-genres that included: realistic accounts of the contemporaneous East; historical narratives based on ancient and modern events; present-day tales incorporating the ancient past as backdrop for adventure, mystery and romance; and fantastic tales adapted from mythology, the Bible and travel literature. Sharing the homogenising fixity characteristic of Orientalism, these subgenres, to varying degrees, portrayed a colourful ‘peoples of the world’ assortment, often including representations of indigenous Jews to spice up the ethnological documentation with additional outlandish curiosities. Colonial visual culture ‘revealed’ Jewish lives in both the city and countryside within the contemporaneous Arab/Muslim lands. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, French depictions of the Orient’s indigène encompassed local Kabyl and Arab Jews, rendered, like their non-Jewish neighbours, as a ‘natural’ facet of the regional ‘scenes’ and ‘types’. British representations of Iraq, similarly, recorded ‘authentic’ pictures of city and countryside ‘natives’ also including local Arab and Kurdish Jews. Photographic albums arranged around regions and themes had as their organising principle a set of classifications that amalgamated Jews with their Muslim neighbours, even when the caption indicated their Jewish affiliation. An examination of this visual archive may shed light on the place of the Arab-Jew within the Oriental/ Orientalist split in the post-Enlightenment era, at a time when Europe’s emancipated Jew was being whitened and de-Orientalised, simultaneously with the Arab world becoming darkened and imperialised. The photographs in the postcard series Atlas Marocain or Moorish Atlas (c. 1912–15), for example, documented Jews in exterior settings, in identical fashion to the representations of Muslim inhabitants, seen in ‘Group de Juives à Tin-Mel’ (‘A group of Jewish women at Tin-Mel’, and in Arabic, ‘Isra’iliyat min jabal al-Atlas’) (see Figure 8.1). And the series of Tunisian interiors featured not only Muslim but also Jewish women as reclining Odalisques, as is evident in ‘6207 scènes et types. Femme Juive Tunisienne’ (‘6207 scenes and types. Jewish Tunisian Woman’) and ‘Femme Juive’ (‘Jewish Woman’)

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Figure 8.1 Marcelin Flandrin, ‘Atlas Marocain. Groupe de Juives à Tin-Mel’, Atlas Marocain Public domain

Figure 8.2 Unknown photographer, ‘Femme Juive’. Public domain

(see Figure 8.2), dating back to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Other visual portrayals displayed city dwellers in their colourful traditional garb, as in Théodore Chassériau’s Juives d’Alger au balcon (Jewesses of Algiers on the Balcony, 1849) and in his depiction of Constantine’s Jewish quarter, such as Scène dans le quartier juif de Constantine (Scene in the Jewish Quarter of Constantine, 1851) (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4). The penetrating gaze into the inner sanctum of Jewish homes combined domesticity with erotica in a manner reminiscent of the Orientalist trope of the harem. Still other images focused on exterior scenes of busy souks and narrow alleyways, often featuring a synagogue or a feast, as in Eugene Delacroix’s Noce juive au Maroc (Jewish Wedding in Morocco, c. 1839) (see Figure 8.5). In their ensemble these images now offer us a veritable Judeo-Arabic colonial archive.

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Figure 8.3 Théodore Chassériau, Juives d’Alger au balcon. © RMN, Musée du Louvre

Figure 8.4 Théodore Chassériau, Scène dans le quartier juif de Constantine. Public domain (Creative Commons Zero)

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Figure 8.5 Eugene Delacroix, Noce juive au Maroc. © RMN, Musée du Louvre In travel literature, paintings and photographs, the representation of the Orient tended to figure the local Jew as an integral part of the regional ethnic/racial landscape. In this sense, the Arabs were assumed by implication to be a multi-faith ‘race’, with the Arab-Jew implicitly forming a subcategory of ‘the Arab’ alongside Muslim and Christian Arabs. Even while recognising religious difference, Orientalist discourse rarely engaged the Jews-in-the-Orient as essentially distinct; they were conceived as part and parcel of Muslim spaces, alongside other ethnic and religious communities. The racialist view with which the Oriental/Arab was theorised in this sense included the native Jew. In fact, due to their religious affinity with the European imperial powers, Christian Arabs were in some ways more likely than Jewish Arabs to be split off from Muslim Arabs, as the cases of the colonial courting of Assyrians in Iraq and Maronites in Lebanon suggest. Both in content and form, Maghrebi and Mashreqi Jews were thus often exoticised in a similar manner to Muslims, regarded as just as indigenous to the region as their nonJewish neighbours.

From Judeo-Muslim Syncretism to Ambivalent Indigeneity Although still uncommon in nineteenth-century Orientalist representations, depictions of Muslim violence toward Jews began to surface, even if only sporadically. Alfred Dehodencq’s painting L’exécution de la Juive (The execution of the Jewess,28 original 1860, surviving reproduction by the artist, 1861)29 dramatically visualised

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Figure 8.6 Alfred Dehodencq, L’exécution de la Juive. © RMN – Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY the execution of a Jewish woman, imaged at the moment just prior to her beheading in the Fez public square (see Figure 8.6). The painting was prompted by the 1834 case of Solica (or Zoulikha) Hatchouel (or Hachuel), commonly known as Sol, a young Jewish woman from Tangier accused of apostasy (in Arabic, riddah/irtidād), although, as the Jewish-Moroccan tradition relates, she insisted that she never took the shahada (‘testimony’ of joining Islam) in the first place. Sol, as recounted a century later by the Jerusalem-born journalist of Moroccan descent, Abraham Elmaleh, was falsely accused after refusing the romantic advances of a Muslim neighbour, and subsequently imprisoned and transferred to Fez, where the prince, the son of the Sultan Mulai Abd al-Rahman ibn Hisham (and/or in other versions the Sultan himself), also pursued the beautiful Jewess, promising to raise her to the throne.30 During the three years of the case, the authorities offered her the opportunity to become Muslim in accordance with shari‘a law. Some versions recount that the qadis (Muslim judges) even sent the Fez hakhams (rabbis) to influence her, pleading with her to convert to Islam to save her life (an option permitted by Maimonides)31. But Sol insisted that she had never abandoned her Jewish faith in the first place, and thus never renounced Islam. Her refusal to recant, despite imprisonment, torture and seductive marriage offers, turned her into a folkloric heroine known as ‘Sol ha-tzadika’ (‘The Righteous Soul’ in Hebrew). For the traumatised Jewish community, she became a symbol of piety and martyrdom, eulogised in written and oral form. Liturgical poems (piyyutim in Hebrew) and vernacular stories (qisot, from the

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Arabic word ‘qiṣṣa’ for story, but in the Hebrew-based feminine plural suffix) were dedicated to the popular heroine, persisting within contemporary literature, for example in the poetry of the Algerian/Moroccan-Israeli Erez Bitton.32 The story underwent significant permutations in function of distinct perspectives on the event. In one version, the Sultan became paralysed immediately after the execution. Upon understanding the gravity of his crime, he visited her grave to plead for forgiveness, and Sol answered the Sultan’s prayers and healed him. In gratitude, the Sultan, every day for the rest of his life, sent olive oil and candles to be lit for her soul in line with the Jewish tradition (‘ilui neshama). Sol’s grave became a site for hiloula celebrations, a pilgrimage for miracle seekers, especially for parents mourning the loss of a child, for infertile women desperate to conceive, and for the families of newborn baby girls asking for protection from misfortune. Sol also became a figment of a transposed European imaginary, often portrayed as a Jewish Jeanne d’Arc. European narrators, especially French and Spanish, highlighted the efforts made by their diplomatic services to save Sol.33 The Muslim Moroccan narrative, meanwhile, highlighted Sol’s taking of the shahada, and thus her apostasy, and even, in some versions, her blasphemy against the Prophet. Within twentieth-century anti-colonial discourse, meanwhile, the suspicious regard sometimes cast toward religious or ethnic minorities reflected a wariness about their possible collaboration with the colonial power. Whether or not such collaboration systematically occurred, and whether for justifiable or unjustifiable reasons, the fact of the colonial is crucial for narrating the ruptures within which such events unfolded. Today, nearly two centuries after the execution, and over half a century since the establishment of Israel and the concomitant dislocation of the majority of Maghrebi Jews, Muslim Moroccans commonly have shown their respect for the pilgrimages to Sol’s gravesite, located adjacent to the Jewish quarter, the mlah, in Fez. Leading visitors to the cemetery, some guides make a point of confessing their own Jewish ancestry.34 Apart from a possible investment in promoting fables for tourist-consumers, the very act of their enunciation suggests the absence of an anxiety about Jewish ancestry, in contrast to the phobia historically associated with the state/church-sponsored ‘limpieza de sangre’, but which transmuted into nineteenth-century racialist theories, including the Aryanist thesis of tainted blood. Such touristic narratives give expression to the fluidity between Jewishness and Muslimness, understood as both biological/familial and religious/cultural. While it is not unusual for revered Jewish figures to become holy also for Muslims,35 given the charges against Sol it is unusual that she too, according to some versions, became a holy figure, known as ‘Lalla Sulica’ (‘Lady Sulica’).36 In some popular versions of Muslim-Moroccan rituals, Sol is also venerated as possessing healing powers, and her grave attracts not only Jews but also Muslims.37 Describing her 1981 visit to Sol’s tomb, Moroccan-Jewish-American author Ruth Knafo Setton, for example, writes: In one of the many odd notes in her tale, Muslim women worship her today as a saint. They come to her tomb in the Jewish cemetery in Fez, bringing plates of couscous (even a dead girl needs to keep up her strength), bunches of wild flowers, a lucky hamsa, a magic coin. Meanwhile the Jewish women light a candle and place it in one of the niches in the white dome over her tomb. The niches are filled with remnants of white candles, burned prayers. The women chant, pray, sing, cry, beg for her to listen. Usually they ask her for a baby or for help in getting pregnant or avoiding a miscarriage. Our Suleika, who never had a child of her own, is the secret ingredient

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for successful pregnancies. She has become a woman’s saint. In saint hierarchy, that means a saint too minor (too female) to have her own hillulah (or festive pilgrimage on Lag ba’Omer), relegated to granting conception, preventing illness in the family or menstrual cramps, you know: women’s stuff. ‘Her baraka is still strong’, a caretaker of the cemetery assures me. ‘She is still as powerful as ever. The women never stop coming to her’. Muslim women. Jewish women. Side by side. Praying to a dead teenage girl. In death obliterating the border that in life she couldn’t cross.38 Thus, despite a historically conflictual interpretation of the event, Knafo Setton’s description echoes the Muslim-Moroccan narrative – to wit, different religious affiliations were simultaneously practiced within a shared and taken-for-granted matrix of Judeo-Muslim cultural syncretism. Painted three decades after the execution, at the zenith of colonial rule in Algeria and the ongoing French attempt to fully expand into North Africa (and to generally seize lands from the declining Ottoman Empire), L’exécution de la Juive can hardly be reduced, as it often is today, to a visual demonstration or proof, a mimetic record, as it were, of the miserable conditions of Jews under brutal Muslim oppressors. The image, however, could be viewed as a document of the fissures within the intertwined imaginaries of the Jew and the Muslim that were beginning to form within the postEnlightenment colonial West, and which have had long-lasting ramifications for the perception – and the self-perception – of Jews within Muslim spaces. In this modern version of visualising violent history, the Orient is represented in an implicitly diacritical opposition to the Enlightened Occident, in this case to France’s historic Emancipation of the Jews (1791). It also absorbs Jews-within-Islam into the pictorial template of Christians martyred by Muslims, not merely in relation to the Crusades’ history but also in relation to contemporaneous Christians-within-Islam. In the painterly history of the three monotheistic religions, Orientalist canvases tended to spotlight the Muslim shedding of Christian blood. Delacroix’s painting Scène des massacres de Scio (The Massacre at Chios, 1824), which was triggered by the events of the 1821 Greek/ Turkish war that devastated the island, for example, depicted a horrific illustration of Greeks massacred by Turks (see Figure 8.7). The emergence of images of Jews massacred by Muslims, meanwhile, instantiates a historically novel visual chasm between the two racialised religious groups in the Orient. At the same time, however, even in the instances of depicting a conflict between native Muslims and Jews, the spectacle of horror is nonetheless anchored in the otherisation of both, albeit within a subtly revised hierarchy which now places the Jew over the Muslim. In Dehodencq’s title, L’exécution de la Juive, the Jewish woman remains nameless, devoid of historical specificity, although Sol’s family ancestry at least partially traces back to the Sephardim who settled largely in Muslim-dominated regions when the Reconquista, the Inquisition and the Edict of Expulsion drove the Jews out of Iberia. As commonly passed on in Moroccan-Jewish folklore, Sol uttered in Español/ Spanish: ‘Hebrea nací, y Hebrea quiero morir’ (‘Hebrew I was born, and Hebrew I wish to die’).39 With its stress on ‘the Jewess’, the painting’s title, in contrast, transports the Sephardi/Maghrebi into the realm of the generic other, represented with the same objectifying gaze as the rest of ‘the Natives’. Her Jewishness itself, furthermore, constitutes a rather ambiguous designation. Vis-à-vis the imperially desired geography of North Africa, the Jewess was rendered as a sacrificial symbol of Islamic fanaticism.

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Figure 8.7 Eugene Delacroix, Scène des massacres de Scio. © RMN, Musée du Louvre Yet, vis-à-vis the France of the lumière, the traditional Jewess was anathema to modernity, to the Emancipation of the Jew. Within a homogenising nation-state project, France’s assimilation of ‘the other’ was carried out according to the ideal of the (presumed) universal-over-the-particular. Although within the victim/victimiser duality ‘la Juive’ is distinguished from ‘les musulmans’, she is also a pre-modern figure implicitly in need of the light of reason. The Jewess, like her people, has thus to be saved not simply from Muslim intolerance but also from the all-embracing backwardness of the Orient, simultaneously Muslim and Jewish. As a metonym for her land, the Jewess becomes a gendered colonial trope par excellence of the kind of rescue phantasies propagated by penetrating European powers. Despite the modern split introduced into the coupled imaginary of the Jew and the Arab within Orientalism, in other words, the indigenous Maghrebi Jew remained, like the Muslim, in need of the universal civilising mission. It would take almost two centuries and an epic-scale reconceptualisation of belonging to redefine Jews as fully separate from their ambient Muslim culture, resulting in the contemporary reclassification of Jews as ‘naturally’ and even ‘essentially’ different from Arabs, and, for that matter, from their Berber, Persian and Kurdish neighbours. The Orientalist polarising of the ArabJew as distinct from the generic ‘Arab’, and the dissolving of the Judeo-Muslim hyphen in favour of the Judeo-Christian hyphen, would take more than a century to become axiomatic. In the 2012 exhibition of the Paris Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme

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entitled Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (‘The Jews in Orientalism’),40 that distinction was indeed axiomatic. The Dehodencq painting is exhibited as a signal moment of ‘Jewish History’ under Islam. In the present-day reception of such imagery, the Jewish quarter is framed as a document of ghetto-like conditions, while the Muslim sword metonomises brutal persecution – all within the trace-the-dots narrative that moves inexorably from pogrom to pogrom. The contemporary fixation on the Muslim sword-waving hand aiming at the Jewess’s throat has produced it as an iconic emblem, incorporating it into a modern visual archive of supposed perennial maltreatment. (Dehodencq’s graphic painting was perhaps not coincidentally selected for the cover of The Legacy of Islamic AntiSemitism.)41 Rather than merely an instance of what could be called the pogromisation of the history of Jews-in-Arab-lands, L’exécution de la Juive reflects the formation of cracks between the indigenous co-regionists traversing the imperial seismic shift.

Scape-Ghosts: Islam as Negative Exceptionalism The Dehodencq painting ironically cannot escape the particularity of its own civilisational heritage in both content and form. In content, it frames Muslims as essentially bloodthirsty, epitomised by the sword-holding hand and the threatening men hovering over the kneeling Jewish woman, as the assembled mob around the stage cheeringly watches, while one set of hands, presumably Jewish, pleads from the crowd. Betraying a certain air of mauvaise foi, this kind of French depiction of the-Muslim-versus-the-Jew has the effect of disavowing Christianity’s own history of intolerance. In the tragic case of Sol, the qadis did not actively initiate forced conversion but implemented the shari‘a law concerning apostasy and blasphemy against the Prophet. The purpose of this comparison here is hardly to justify execution or to sidestep events of forced conversions within Muslim history, but rather to suggest that the sudden sympathetic European investment in the plight of Jews-under-Islam was conspicuous in its lack of a lucid auto-critique of its own Christian past. Within the post-Enlightenment moment, modern Europe now projected this unsavory history of violence and forced exodus onto a medieval alter ego – Islam. The image of the Muslim-as-killer-of-the-Jew submerged a history of the Christian-askiller-of-the-Jew during over a millennium of religious wars. To an extent, the Muslim figure became a scapegoat for Christian culpability toward the Jew. The ‘fanatic Muslim’ also masked anti-Semitism – or Judeo-phobia – within post-Enlightenment spaces, which manifested racial ambivalence toward the Jew as a foreign Oriental element on Western soil. Thus, the Jew-in-the-Orient got caught up in the narcissistic dualism of ‘tolerant West’ and ‘intolerant East’. The Oriental/Orientalist bifurcation shaping post-Enlightenment Europe, furthermore, was now shipped to the colony,42 splitting the indigenous ‘Semite’ into the Jew and the Arab – and the ‘Oriental’ into the Sephardi and the Moor. Symptomatically, Sol became the subject of diverse passionate portrayals that took on a life of their own long after her death, from the 1837 account by the Spanish Eugenio Maria Romero’s El Martirio de la Joven Hachuel, ó La Heroina Hebrea (The Martyrdom of the Young Hachuel, or The Hebrew Heroine, 1837) to Bernard de Lisle and Dr Mace’s Sol Hatchuel, The Maid of Tangier: A Moorish Opera in Three Acts (1906). Focusing on the contemporaneous incident, Romero’s text produced a dramatic chronicle that contrasted the joy of the fanatic Moors witnessing the horrid scene with the deep sorrow of the helpless Jews who were unable to avert Sol’s fate.43 Such liberal narratives emerged particularly after Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain

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when Enlightenment ideas were arriving in Iberia, and when the Inquisition, which had been officially inaugurated in 1478, was formally abolished in 1834.44 It was the beginning of the decline of official Reconquista policies, which were only formally rescinded over a century later with the overturning of the 1492 Alhambra Decree in 1968.45 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ critical gaze at the Inquisition in Por linage de ebros (For Being of Jewish Ancestry, c. 1814–24) and Escena de Inquisición (The Inquisition Scene, 1812–19) was also infused with this novel humanist spirit (see Figures 8.8 and 8.9). In Por linage de ebros, the Jew occupies the visual paradigm of the traditional Christ’s portrayal, now with the Church as the crucifier, offering in this sense a historical auto-critique. In Romero’s text, in contrast, ‘the Moor’ is rendered as the contemporary crucifer. At the same time, despite their different emphasis – one on self-indictment and the other on the indictment of the Muslim – both Goya’s and Romero’s descriptions of intolerance were imbued with Enlightenment ideals.46 And yet, despite their critique of the Church, such figural representations also relied, paradoxically, on a Catholic visual model for depicting martyrs. In a historical irony, the liberal Spanish discourse avoids explicitly recognising that the Jewish martyr from Tangiers descended from Jewish martyrs from Spain.47 Such texts express neither a conscious mea culpa nor a possible comparative historical reflection on the place of Jews within Christianity and Islam. Sidestepping the spectacular autoda-fé, the continuous repression of the conversos and, also, of the Moriscos, including after the 1492 fall of Granada, this Enlightenment-inspired discourse nonetheless elided the Inquisition’s Tribunals and their public executions of Christian apostates, forgetting

Figure 8.8 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Por linage de ebros. © British Museum

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Figure 8.9 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Escena de Inquisición. © Album/Art Resource, NY the many Sols to be found in the Iberia of the Reconquista. Romero’s glorifying adjectives for the Hebrew heroine did stand in sharp contrast to the Inquisition, which did not name the executed Jews ‘martyrs’ and ‘heroes’ but ‘marranos’ (pigs).48 But this liberal document of Moorish barbarism ultimately blurred the traces of European intolerance. Alarmed by Muslim zeal, these texts give the impression of settling a longrepressed score with the ghost of the Moor, now traded over the Jew’s body. The Iberian past is projected onto the Orient, ultimately cleansing Christian Europe from its history of spectacular religious killing. Although liberal texts may be read as employing Islam only as a particular allegorical instance of a broader religious intolerance, nonetheless it is Islam that is viewed as possessing a pronounced tendency towards fanaticism, thus generating a kind of a negative exceptionalism. At a time when the Inquisition policy was being abolished, exactly in the same year as Sol’s execution (1834), such texts implicitly positioned Spain within modernity and rendered the Maghreb as ‘allochronically’ medieval. In fact, however, the very representation of the martyrdom event was already entangled within the broader seminal event of its time, namely colonialism. As a haunting figure, the Muslim historically constituted the emblematic invader threatening Christian Europe. With the advent of imperialism, the unyielding indigène posed an additional new threat. Scapegoating the Muslim for religious intolerance also had the function of displacing colonial violence, especially that of France and Spain vis-àvis Morocco. The historical ghost of the Muslim lingered on in the form of a modern scapegoat, becoming what could be termed a ‘scape-ghost’. The Muslim/Jewish divide was fully imbricated in the imperial ‘translation’ of the Enlightenment modernity project. The vision of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, with few exceptions, did not extend to the colonised and the enslaved. In Europe, the Enlightenment did not put an end to virulent anti-Semitism or to Judeo-phobia, which

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became publically visible, three decades after Dehodencq’s painting, in the notorious 1894 Dreyfus affair. (The spectacle, which was witnessed by the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, is considered a foundational moment in the formation of the Zionist idea.)49 While in Europe even the assimilated Jew was subjected to post-Enlightenment racialisation, in the Orient, the indigenous Jew was beginning to undergo a certain symbolic ‘whitening’ but only vis-à-vis the Muslim natives. Not coincidentally, Sol, within a colonial-racial chromatic hierarchy, is visualised as lighter skinned than the darker Moors/Arabs/Muslims. The literal and metaphoric whitening of the Maghrebi Jew, in conjunction with the darkening of the Maghrebi Muslim, began to craft an Orientalist illusion of a de-indigenised not-quite-white Jew in the heart of the Orient; racial tropes were now divisively superimposed on local religious identities. Reflecting this moment of de-Orientalisation, L’exécution de la Juive, perhaps not coincidentally, shows a Jewish woman willing to die in the name of God visualised without the traditional head cover – a gendered practice of concealment in the public space shared with Muslim women. Indeed, in her novel Road to Fez (2001), Ruth Knafo Setton describes Sol as arriving at the execution site with ‘a long veil’ over ‘her face and body’, which the executioner forcefully ‘slashed . . . from her face’.50 Dehodencq’s painting, in contrast, displays Sol’s long, curly, dark hair devoid of any head cover even on the execution ground to hint that it might have been dropped. Her neck and upper chest, along with the shoulders, are also bare, with a certain ambiguity as to whether their uncovering was due to a violent act. In his portrait of Sol (c. 1860–3), Dehodencq similarly paints the upper torso with a low neckline,

Figure 8.10 Alfred Dehodencq, Portrait de Sol Hatchuel. © Francine Szapiro

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just slightly above the breast, and displays Gypsy-like flowing dark hair (see Figure 8.10) – a style replicating his 1851 A Gypsy Dance in the Gardens of the Alcázar, in front of Charles V Pavilion. Yet generally in his sketches and paintings of Jewish-Moroccan women, Dehodencq did visualise their colourful veils or head covers, for example in La Mariée juive (The Jewish Bride, 1879) and Mariée juive au Maroc (Jewish Bride in Morocco, also known as Juive et négresse, Jewess and Negress, 1867) (see Figures 8.11 and 8.12). Rather than a case of inconsistency, this comparison may illuminate a moment of relative de-Orientalisation of the native Jew discernible even in the work of the same painter. The décolletage, which is fashioned more in line with the taste of the modern French viewer, furthermore, would have facilitated a sympathetic reception of a traditional Jew. By shaping a Jewish figure who is visually un-Jewish, the faithful Jewish-Oriental woman could embody an imaginatively more assimilable figure in the West.51 Against the backdrop of the shared exoticisation of Jews and Muslims, which involved colourful attire and a wide array of female coverings, Dehodencq’s semiunveiling signifies a kind of termination of the Sephardi and the Moor as a Janusfaced figure.52 The literal and metaphoric unveiling of the Jewish woman reinforced the broader project of cultural de-Orientalisation. If the positioning of the Jew-withinIslam that duplicated the massacred Christian-within-Islam detached the Jew from the

Figure 8.11 Alfred Dehodencq, La Mariée juive. © RMN, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

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Figure 8.12 Alfred Dehodencq, Mariée juive au Maroc. © RMN, Musée des Beaux-Arts Muslim, the association of the Jew with a presumably higher civilisational stage furthered the conceptual de-indigenisation of the Jew. Yet, the very act of splitting paradoxically underscored the interconnectedness of Muslim and Jew – that is, it suggested that a racial and cultural process of de-indigenisation would be required to turn Jews, in contrast with Muslims, into outsiders, foreigners, not truly indigenous. Today, in postcolonial spaces, Maghrebi Jews, not coincidentally, have come to be conflated with pied noirs, although the term initially referred to the white French colonial-settlers in Algeria. But due to the rupture between indigenous Jews and Muslims, the term has come to be applied retroactively to Maghrebi Jews. Such designations and redesignations have come to underscore the ambiguous affiliation of the Arab-Jew, which began to unfold with the arrival of the Oriental/Orientalist bifurcation in imperialised spaces. In the wake of travelling modernity and colonising Enlightenment, on the one hand, and of the emergence of anti-colonialist nationalism on the other, the Orientalist de-Orientalisation – that is, of separating the Jew from the Muslim – had further interjected an ambiguous indigeneity for the Arab-Jew, producing an anxious positioning within the post-independence nation-state. A long temporal ‘distance’, nevertheless, would have to be travelled between the not-yet-fully-colonised nineteenthcentury North Africa/Middle East and postcolonial France/Britain before the Jew and the Muslim would be projected onto opposite ends of the civilisational clash generated by modernity.

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The Aesthetic Unconscious and the Return of the Judeo-Muslim Repressed In formal terms, the staging of the violent divide between Muslim and Jew in this subgenre of Orientalism, ironically reveals a profound Jewish/Muslim theological affinity. The Judeo-Muslim – Biblical and Quranic – prohibitions against ‘graven images’, as we know, played into a penchant for an aesthetics of abstraction. The production of the visual was often displaced onto other mediated forms. The surfaces of mosques and public buildings, for example, were covered with Arabic writing shaped in forms that would enhance the architectural design of a building. Calligraphy turned letters into a vibrant medium, composing myriad geometric or vegetal forms created out of words, or elaborately shaped sentences evocative of such forms, designed to highlight the greatness, the eternity and the glory of God. Historically a principal of Islamic art, it was also deployed in non-religious contexts to adorn coins, cloth and pottery. The Judaic and Islamic censure of ‘graven images’, and the preference for abstract geometric designs, cast theological suspicion on directly figurative representation and thus on the ontology of the mimetic arts. While Roman Catholicism shared the Judeo-Muslim prohibition on substituting an image of God for God himself, it also accommodated the desire for a visual, visible and representable God. Brilliant paintings and frescos reincarnating sacred scenes, along with some pictorial adumbrations of saints and the Deity adorn many cathedrals. Within the Judeo-Islamic ethos, a visible carnal divinity, such as that painted in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, featuring a longbearded God in the process of creating Adam and Eve, would be simply unimaginable. Dehodencq’s sympathetic depiction of the Jewish martyr was, then, performed not merely within a Catholic iconography of saints but also within mimetic aesthetics rather alien to the dominant strain within Judeo-Muslim culture. Violating the prohibition on graven images common to both faiths, the imaging of the violent intramonotheistic clash, then, is paradoxically mediated through a representational mode foreign to both religions depicted in the painting. This Judeo-Muslim mandated aesthetic preference for the non-figurative would seem almost inherently alien to the mimetic aesthetic regimes. Within this perspective, Judeo-Muslim culture, partial to the abstract, would be essentially antithetical to the diverse techniques and movement of reproducing the real – the Renaissance perspective in the arts, the nineteenth-century rise of realism and naturalism as generic ‘dominants’, and the ever-more-refined technologies of verism, specifically the still camera, and later the cinematographic camera, with its built-in Renaissance perspective and its illusion of three-dimensionality. (Indeed, this dissonance generated theological debates that have remained a contested subject.)53 Dehodencq’s painting, in other words, condenses a striking philosophical tension between the conventions of the realistic genre and the mandated aesthetic preference for the non-figurative in JudeoMuslim visual culture. Yet, this latent discord was hardly unusual in the context of the Orientalist representations of Asia and Africa. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le Charmeur de Serpents (The Snake Charmer, c. 1879),54 for example, deployed the mimetic principles of Renaissance perspective to represent an ‘authentic’ outlandishly eroticised Orient, a mélange of Moroccan, Turkish, Iranian and Indian elements with a variety of ‘Oriental looks’ ranging from light to dark complexions (see Figure 8.13). In the foreground, a naked boy wrapped in a snake, and in the distant background, the

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Figure 8.13 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Le Charmeur de Serpents. © The Clark arches typical of Muslim architectural design, decorated with the abstract Arabesque. The realistic technique stands in sharp contrast to the abstract aesthetic of the Muslim world depicted in the painting. The gesture toward authenticity – its ‘effet de realite’, in Barthesian terms55 – ironically highlights the painting’s sacrilegious characteristic, with its virtually surreal portrayal of serpent and nudity together inside a space visually reminiscent of a mosque, and adorned by the name of God. In Gérôme’s painting, furthermore, calligraphic art, in all its complex philosophical meaning, is reduced to a decorative ornament to authenticate an image of exotica and erotica. Non-mimetic visuality is thus paradoxically subordinated to mimetic procedures. A structurally similar paradox informs Dehodencq’s work, which adheres to realism in its depiction of Jews and Muslims against the background architecture – in this case, alluding to the wall of the mlah (Jewish quarter) of Fez. Painted according to Renaissance perspective, L’exécution de la Juive eschews ambient Judeo-Muslim visual practices. As with Gérôme’s painting, this grafting of Jews and Muslims into the ecology of mimetic art elides the historical penchant toward non-mimetic aesthetic protocols in Judaism and Islam, as well as in Asia and Africa more generally. The figures on the canvas thus ‘embody’ the presence of the mimetic method, while simultaneously ‘disappearing’, as it were, the non-mimetic tenets of the source culture of the actually existing Jews and Muslims. The Orientalist representation that began to thematically divide the Jew and the Muslim, in other words, also inadvertently reveals an underlying Judeo-Muslim cultural affinity. In a rather ironic cultural twist, the French narrative, furthermore, invoked the conventions of Christian hagiographies. For his part, Dehodencq, who also worked in the

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portraiture genre, produced, in addition to L’exécution de la Juive, a portrait of Sol (see Figure 8.10). In mainstream Judaism, as in Islam, however, saintly and holy figures especially would be subjected to the graven images taboo, and their visualisation would be considered sacrilege.56 Indeed, Tangerian Jews were apparently upset with Dehodencq’s depiction of Sol, cursing the artist and warning him: ‘Woe to the wicked Franc who dares touch the holy’.57 Although human involvement in the painting’s destruction is unconfirmed, Dehodencq reportedly arrived at his studio one evening to find the original (1860) painting broken into pieces and his studio left in disarray (see p. 114).58 His reproduction (1861) of the earlier painting survives today.59 The iconoclastic act underscores the gulf between the French painter and his painted subject. The sacred faith that Sol died for, in other words, is met with the visual profanation that a figure like herself would have abhorred. Providing an iconic image of Sol, Dehodencq’s painting violates her religious principles. It is not a coincidence that her tombstone contains no memorial image, monument or statue – an absence in close affinity with Muslim practices. Despite the legendary beauty that, according to oral tradition, brought calamity upon her, iconic representations of Sol are non-existent in traditional Jewish-Moroccan culture. Despite French colonial assimilation and postcolonial dislocations, contemporary popular culture, especially poetry and music, continues to celebrate the tzadeket (righteous). When Sol’s image is referenced, for instance in virtual sites, it is borrowed from her various European representations, in a manner similar to the deployment of Orientalist paintings to visualise a pre-photographic Jewish past in Muslim lands. The gesture of defending the Jew against the Muslim is performed within a genre, a medium and an aesthetic procedure that are antithetical, as it were, to both Judaism and Islam. Their intimately shared aesthetic practice sheds lights on the submerged Judeo-Muslim cultural syncretism lurking behind the canvas of separation. The theologies of adaptation of the Bible and the Quran into the visual medium, which dictate the content and form of the permitted and the prohibited, thus come to haunt the Orientalist division of the indigenous Jew and the Muslim, and accentuate – even in the face of a political chasm – that division’s philosophical fragility.

The-Split-within-the-Split: A Doubly Colonising Enlightenment Although French expansionism in Africa is clearly not the theme of L’exécution de la Juive, Dehodencq’s 1861 painting reverberates with echoes from the colonial machine. Apart from Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798–1801), France’s tricolor ambition in North Africa was unfolding in the early part of the nineteenth century. Sol’s execution itself took place in 1834, at a time when the Maghreb was defending its territories against French troops. After the seizure of Algiers in 1830, Morocco mobilised to fight the French, only to withdraw its troops in 1832, while also continuing to support the ongoing Algerian anti-colonial struggle. That intervention led to the Franco-Moroccan war in 1844, and resulted in the Treaty of Tangiers, often regarded as a capitulation to the French. Against this backdrop, the stress on bloodthirsty Muslims in the 1861 representation of L’exécution de la Juive was embedded not simply in three decades of Algeria’s colonisation, but also in the ongoing French/ Maghrebi conflict. The painting appeared during the era of France’s imperial project of fuller domination in the region, formally installed with the French Protectorate of Tunisia in 1881 and the French Protectorate of Morocco in 1912.60

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Taking place during this highly charged moment of colonial drama between the north and south shores of the Mediterranean, the 1834 Sol event itself prompted interest far beyond the Maghreb.61 In the public outcry, the Muslim-killing-of-the-Jew came to be interpolated into a newly gendered narrative of minorities-rescue in the imperial outposts. Despite its horror, however, the event cannot be viewed simply through a binarist tolerance/intolerance lens. The theological issue of riddah, combined with cross-religious desire, reached its dead-end crescendo within the muddy international terrain of the Franco/Maghrebi conflict. At a moment when imperial eyes were watching from across the Mediterranean and within freshly occupied Algeria, the deeming of Sol Hachuel as a Jewish Jeanne-d’Arc was historically overdetermined and replete with imperial overtones. Rather than an act of Catholic-Jewish solidarity, the ‘elevation’ of Sol into a Christian iconic figure was embroiled in the effort to enlist Maghrebi-Jewish sympathies toward the French infiltration. France courted the Berbers/Amazighs in a similar way, highlighting for example their historic battles against the Arab invaders, at times arguing for their European ancestry, while also introducing legal regimes that would subject Muslims to differentiated systems of jurisdiction, for example the shari‘a for Arabs and the jama‘a for Berbers (as was the case of the 1930 ‘al-Dhahir al-Barbari’, or ‘the Berber Decree’).62 Campaigning on behalf of minorities in a context of recently initiated colonial turmoil generated considerable pressure on the Muslim authorities and on the Jewish community, far beyond any intra-indigenous theological clash among the ahl al-kitab (‘people of the book’). The sudden spotlight on ‘minorities’ on one level meant potential benefits and support from an empire more powerful than the local regime. In its desperation, Sol’s family, for example, is said to have received help from the Spanish consulate in Tangier – in yet another ironic historical twist for the descendants of the exiled Sephardim. Tangier, located at the coveted strategic entrance to the Straits of Gibraltar, was itself entangled in clashing imperial designs, particularly those of Spain, which continued its anxious surveillance of its intimate Moorish foe. On another level, the effort to modify the verdict outside of the local system signalled the danger of opening the gates to the invading colonisers. In their attempt to undermine a syncretic local political culture, imperial powers enlisted relatively disempowered groups to assist in the domination of the region. The Jewish/Muslim intercommunal decorum of negotiating cross-religious interactions, especially conflicts, as a result was increasingly enunciated and performed on an imperial stage. In this shifting context, such negotiations were beginning to be framed and resignified within an imperial schema. The majority/minority dynamic within Muslim spaces came under colonial legal regimes, which spoke on behalf of the Universal while simultaneously mobilising the dark undercurrents of the Enlightenment. The iconography of the sword approaching the throat – a vivid literalisation of the ‘always-at-each-other’s-throat’ topos – masked the imperial gestures that were moulding the Jewish/Muslim rupture. Narrated within clashing religious and national desires, Sol’s body has continued to be an object of contestation. Her name has been mobilised within a wide array of both universalist and particularist narratives. On one level, it was enlisted as evidence for the pitfalls of religious intolerance, the dangers of Muslim fanaticism, shari‘a oppression of non-Muslims, the perennial victimisation of Jews everywhere, the specific oppression of Jews in Arab lands and Muslim male power to possess Jewish women. On another, it gave evidence for the role of minorities in the Arab world as a fifth column,

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the stereotyping of Muslims, the Orientalist caricature of Islam, and the tragedies engendered by colonialist meddling in the Maghreb and the Arab world more generally. Echoed in the contemporary era, including in the unofficial realm of social media, violent acts have been explained within an Arab-nationalist perspective as encapsulating France’s divide-and-conquer attempt to breed conflict between Jews and Muslims who had long lived together peacefully. Within a synthesising multi-vocal approach, Saïd Sayagh’s 2009 historical novel L’autre juive: Lalla Soulika, la tsadika (The Other Jewish Woman; in Arabic Al-Yahudiyya al-ukhra) meanwhile, reclaims Sol as Moroccan, implicitly at once Jewish and Muslim. The novel captures the calamitous moment prior to Sol’s death, when ‘Jews, Muslims and the whole country’ realise that ‘The French have entered Algeria!’.63 The omniscient narrator compares the ‘stupor and a panic’ (p. 62) experienced by Tangier’s residents – both Jewish and Muslim – to the anxieties triggered by the exodus from Al-Andalus. The reverberations of the shared Muslim/Jewish Reconquista trauma in the imperial present are rendered through a gendered privileging of the terror felt both by Jewish and Muslim women, described as ‘screaming’ and ‘praying to as many saints as they could’ (p. 62). L’autre juive suggests that French colonial incursions led to an increasingly destabilised climate. Fearing that Jews were defying ‘the Dhimma pact which forbids alliances with the enemies of Islam’ (p. 64), Muslims came to distrust Jews. Sol’s brother informs her that arbitrary Muslim violence against Jews had begun to occur with greater frequency (p. 66). It is against this colonial backdrop that Sol’s trial is said to have taken place. Later in the novel, in another calamitous moment during the French bombardment of Tangier, Sol’s brother recalls her death, wistfully reflecting ‘if only . . . she had pronounced the shahada’ (pp. 156–7) – regretting that Sol did not respond to the pleas to convert (or feign conversion) and thus ensure her own survival. Though the novel describes the political disparities between the Muslim majority and Jewish dhimmi, it also ruminates on deeply shared Moroccan cultural heritages and familial bonds. In the following passages, the novel describes a world without borders, whether geographical, biological, racial or linguistic. For the narrator, Sol’s father Haim saw the North African past as one of not-infrequent changes of religious allegiance: ‘Over time, Haim had acquired the conviction that the person now called Abdallah actually descended from Alberto [i.e. Christian] or Benjamin [i.e. Jewish]. And this mixed past heritage was true of all the others’ (p. 74). Observing the mixed crowd in Tangier’s marketplace, Haim celebrates the spectrum of physical traits: ‘there was no fixed frontier separating the faces. Moroccan features crossed with Spanish and Saharan traits and complemented one another. Every whitish tint was touched with brown and every darker taint was touched by a white wave’ (p. 73). The languages overheard were equally mixed: ‘Berber words slipped into Arabic expressions with a djebel accent which geminates sounds and twists syntax and prosody and adds in words from Castille and Lusitania’ (p. 73). And for Haim, it was not a question of Babel-like cacophony, since ‘everyone understood everyone’ (p. 73). Here the trope of blood loses its connotations of religious purity (limpieza de sangre) or of class/racial superiority (sangre azul). The Jewish father, who believes that the ‘same blood flows within all veins’, expresses his love for ‘all’ (p. 73). Through the depiction of this multifaceted ‘mélange’ (p. 73), the novel transcends Jewish/Muslim religious differences to emphasise their deep and long-standing familial and cultural connections. The father even casts doubt on the aquatic border between the north and south shores of Gibraltar.

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Analogising Tangier to an ‘open vulva’ (p. 73) to the Strait, watered by Spain, the Rif and the southern lands, the father affirms that the Strait can never ‘separate’ (p. 73) Spain from Morocco. The novel, in this sense, invokes Al-Andalus/Sefarad not only as a trope of trauma but also of nostalgia for convivencia. Tangier serves as a microcosm of Moroccan hybridity – a métissage blessed by the Jewish father figure. As a historical prototype, the righteous daughter of Tangier, thus, comes to symbolise not only courageous sacrificial readiness to give one’s life for one’s ideals, but also the very fluidity of Moroccan Jewish/Muslim culture. L’autre juive interprets the Sol event as part of the predicament engendered by a French domination that shredded the Maghreb’s social fabric. But, as encapsulated in the subtitle’s epithets, meaningfully expressed in both Amazigh/Arabic and Hebrew – ‘lalla’ and ‘tsadika’ – this revisionist text ‘returns’ the disappeared Jew back into indigenous Maghrebi history, allegorically reuniting the split Oriental figure. Two centuries later, in the post-independence era, Sol’s body continues to live as a gendered allegory of clashing perspectives on colonialism, nationalism and religion, and implicitly, of the Jewish/Muslim rupture. It is perhaps telling that the inscription engraved on the Fez tombstone is not solely in Hebrew – as mandated by traditional Jewish practice – but also in French, sealing the fait accompli of the Orientalist splitting (see Figure 8.14). The Hebrew lettering is shaped in the form of an arch, positioned above the largely rectangular configuration of the French that occupies a larger space of the headstone; jointly, the two scripts create the visual semblance of a gate.

Figure 8.14 Tombstone of Sol Hachuel in Fez, Morocco, 2018. © Kamal Zamrani

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The Hebrew text eulogises the ‘righteous’ (‘tzadeket’) and ‘virgin maiden’ (‘betula’), who ‘sanctified Heaven’s Name’ (‘kidsha Shem Shamayim’) and ‘was killed in martyrdom in the name of Holy God’ (‘neherga ‘al kidush ha-Shem’). In the name of her righteousness, the text asks the Lord to ‘protect us’ (‘zkhuta tagen ‘alenu’), where the plural pronoun denotes the Jewish community. The French text, meanwhile, describes a heroine who, for ‘refusing to return to the Islamic religion’, was ‘murdered’ by ‘the Arabs’, leading to her being ‘torn away from her family’. The eulogy ends by affirming her global status: ‘The entire world misses this saintly child’. While the Hebrew inscription focuses on the piety of the martyr, the French emphasises Arab/Muslim ruthlessness. While the Hebrew calls upon God’s mercy to shield ‘us’ in the name of a righteous maiden, the French accuses the Muslims/Arabs of murdering a saintly child. While the Hebrew praises devotion to God, the French lauds the rebellious stance against forced conversion.64 The rhetoric of memorialisation is thus bifurcated, honouring a desired Jewish model in the one instance, and in the other denouncing in essentialist terms ‘the Arabs’. While the French text speaks on behalf of ‘the universal’, the Hebrew – and for that matter the absent Arabic or Español – remain in the realm of ‘the particular’. Each language has a different implied addressee, and each symbolises a different cultural ethos. (Although the tombstone’s date is contested, in the period of the execution French was not in wide local currency, and would only later be formally institutionalised, and deeply internalised by educated Jews and Muslims, as a result of linguistic imperial diffusionism.) The Hebrew/French linguistic schism captures two parallel spheres, each on the opposite side of the Enlightenment’s tradition-versus-modernity. However, their placement side-by-side in a Moroccan cemetery highlights an early instance of the Oriental/Orientalist split that was crossing from the metropole to the colony. Although the two texts eulogise the same woman, they also reveal the discrepancy between the traditional Jewish notion of ‘kidush ha-Shem’, of willingness to die rather than convert, and the modern interpolation of the-Jew-in-the-Orient into the dualistic saving-minorities paradigm. The texts’ contrasting idioms testify to the crisscrossing tensions fermenting within a geography undergoing a gradual process of colonisation. An altered linguistic, cultural and ideological ecology was emerging, underscored by powerful new binarisms: West/East, colonial/native, modern/traditional, French/Arabic, secular/religious and majority/minority. In this world-in-transition, the Hebrew text was nonetheless formulated within a theological paradigm of adherence to one’s faith, and thus reflected an ongoing cultural habitus on a continuum with that of the neighbouring Muslim. The apostasy charge, which concerned a ‘backsliding’ return to Judaism after the shahada, did not entail a controversy about a taboo on practicing Judaism (as had been the case in post-Reconquista Iberia). The concept of martyrdom, ‘kidush ha-Shem’, evokes the similar Arabic notion of ‘istishhad’. Thus, despite the Jewish/Muslim chasm connoted by the momentous death sentence, the Hebrew narrative corresponds to the historically shared Jewish and Muslim understanding of societal organisation, in which communal designation as premised on religious affiliation was itself shaped by vital inter-communal intersections across overlapping cultural universes. Haloed with an aura of universal prestige, the French inscription, meanwhile, simultaneously associates the Jew with the inappropriately Christian imagery of the Holy Infant, on the one hand, and with the modern political sphere on the other. Shari‘a law, it is implied, is ruthless in contrast with the secular law of an Enlightened

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state capable of protecting children and minorities. Legal Rights, it is suggested, are a French Humanist norm – a representation that erases the history of Islamic practices of granting rights for non-Muslims. Within a monotheistic system applied to the ‘religions of the book’, Jews were in principle conceived as legally protected (dhimmi), as possessing community rights to conduct their own affairs. Such arrangements did not indicate full equality, and they did assume institutional hierarchy among the religions, but they also pointed to a religiously sanctioned theoretical framework that – unlike the pejorative notion of ‘dhimmitude’65 – could be regarded as a kind of top-down pluralism or multiculturalism avant la lettre. (The Hebrew text interestingly calls for divine protection for the city of Fez.) This history of co-existence, however problematic, was interrupted by the introduction of colonial arrangements, engendering in its wake political vulnerability and cultural devastation. With all its troubling ramifications, a Jewish/Muslim theological dispute was nevertheless translated into the new language of the universal/particular – a discursive arena in which France wielded considerable authority to speak on behalf of ‘the Jews’ and, of course, ‘the world’. In this rendering of the Orientalist bifurcation, the formulation of ‘les arabes’, which carried colonialist overtones of an intrinsic cruelty, conceived the Arab/Muslim outside of ‘the entire world’ imaginary. The Jew, in contrast, was endowed with the exalted ‘enfant sainte’ emblem. Liturgical piyyutim and folkloric rituals, however, largely applied Jewish terms, such as ‘tzadeket’ (righteous or pious) to the martyr, especially since ‘sainthood’ – in the catholic sense of required procedures for canonisation – is rather alien to Jewish theology, as it is to Islam. For a Judaism that has never recognised Jesus as the Son of God, the evocation of a Christian saint is sacrilegious. Although symbolising the tenants of the Jewish faith for her community, ‘the Jewess’ was enlisted in the cause of the Universalist Enlightenment project; her life and death were transposed into the principle of laïcité, or the separation of Church and State, a regime foreign to the vocabulary of the historical tzadeket, as well as to the Jewish hakhams and to the Muslim qadis. Within the hermeneutical battle over the significance of iconic figures, the Christian/Jewish analogy emerged, then, as a new Orientalist artefact in the service of a triangulated colonial calculus. In these early instances of definitional rupture, ‘the world’ is not a transparent phrase but a vehicle in a separatist taxonomy. Reciting a tale of salvation and delivery of the Jew from the Muslim, which suggested that native Jews, unlike the Muslims, were ‘salvageable’, offered yet another example of de-Orientalising the Jew-in-the-Orient, metaphorically kidnapping the Jewish indigènes from their cultural history.

Ruptures-before-the-Rupture: The Sub-colonial Encounter Since the advent of Zionism, such violent episodes have been invoked for affirming a rather anomalous colonial/national project. The suffering of ‘Jews in Arab lands’ has furnished an explanation for their departure to ‘the Jewish homeland’, mobilised to justify Palestinian dispossession. In the French postcolonial context, the emancipatory metanarrative, meanwhile, has facilitated the admission of the ex-colonised into the presumably universal history of acceptable (subliminally Christian) modes of laïcité within the Hexagon republic. Yet, already in the pre-Zionist era, the emergence of imperialism’s ‘minorities’ discourse, and more specifically, the gendered narrative of saving-Jews-from-their-Muslim-captors, prepared the ideological ground for the

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post-partition severing of Jews from Arab spaces. The imposition of a colonialist Arab-versus-Jew narrative undermined the legitimacy of Muslim civilisational norms and axioms, and, with it, the place of Jews in the larger convivium of multiple communities. In these various imperial configurations, the indigenous Jew was conceptually torn from the past religious intersecting frameworks of both Islam and Judaism, a rift that would have long-term consequences for potential Jewish participation in decolonised forms of any future indigeneity. The Orientalist depiction of the indigenous Jew as the victim of the Arab/Muslim was tantamount to a theoretical dislodging of Jews from Arab/Muslim spaces, revealing the beginning of a conceptual rupture. As metonym and metaphor for the break emerging with colonisation, Dehodencq’s painting visualises a crisis then still in its infancy. It was the moment of what was at first only a minor rupture that, in the century and a half to come, would form the prelude to the epic-scale actual Rupture. The historically feared Moorish/Muslim ghost was beginning to be uncoupled from its longue durée Sephardi/Jewish component. As Jews-in-the-Orient were conceptually severed from Islam, they were interpolated into the Christian/Jewish paradigm, while also getting caught in a colonial twist on religious tensions. The painting of the execution invoked a case of persecution in the presumably still medieval Orient, but the representational act took place in the contemporaneous nineteenth century. Unfolding outside the picture’s frame, as it were, this geopolitical transformation injected a volatile force into Jewish/Muslim relations. Rather than merely incarnating medieval barbarity, the execution and its pictorial representation were deeply enmeshed in colonial modernity. As imperial boots-on-the-ground were forcefully pushing through the gates of the Maghreb and Mashreq, local religions were being re-signified as obsolete and pre-modern. The miserablist discourse also entailed the Jew’s rescue from an allochronically imaged backward culture – at once Muslim and Jewish. The new focus on helpless minorities, however, had everything to do with the uses and abuses of the Enlightenment project in the colonies. The-Jew-within-Islam was no longer simply an exemplum of Orientalist exotica but was becoming a signifier of Islamic evil. The theme was gaining international momentum in the diplomatic arena and in newspapers – whether reported from Morocco, Iran, Iraq or from pre-Zionist Palestine, as narrated for example in Chateaubriand’s travel writing.66 This exacerbated pathos for the wretched Jew in the desolate strands of the Orient, and the concomitant desire to spread the Enlightenment to the outposts of the globe, was thoroughly imbricated in Eurocentric epistemology. Testifying to the formation of a fresh paradigm, this ambiguously colonial ‘minorities’ discourse also manifested the cunning of imperialism’s hypocritical reason. Within the realm of imperial prestige, the portrayal of the Jew in the colony as closer to the West than to the Muslim clearly conveyed a message of aligning the indigenous Jews with Europe. Emerging republican Enlightenment ideals were now enlisted in the service of imperialism, producing colonised peoples as at once ‘frères’ and ‘sujets’. Republican values, as we know, were ‘translated’ in perverse ways in the colonies – hence French slavery continued because it was justified, as Montesquieu suggested, in certain climates67 – a subject passionately debated by Haitian revolutionaries such as Toussaint L’Ouverture.68 The contradictions of the Enlightenment became especially manifest throughout the Americas, but they were also visible in the Middle East/North Africa: first in the very entitled act of colonisation and then in the discriminatory practices

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of colonial rule. A shrewdly calculated policy of empowerment/disempowerment produced new colonised subjects who gained certain privileges over the majority, evident most visibly in the Algerian case, but with structurally similar tendencies elsewhere in the region. Thus, the point is not that there reigned an idyllic harmony between indigenous Jews, Christians and Muslims (and, for that matter between Arabs and various other regional communities such as Berbers/Amazighs, Kurds and Turkmen), but rather that the production of the oppressed minorities discourse and its translation into policies capitalised on some existing tensions and conflicts. At the same time, the novel imperial setting actively initiated and produced new real conflicts and symbolic rivalries, devastating a millennial fabric of relationality and engendering new material rifts whose ghosts still haunt us today. Narrating the multifaceted cultural imbrication between Jews and Muslims in the longue durée is especially germane given the historical shift in the meaning of the very terms ‘Arab’, ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab-Jew’. The shift transpired, then, even prior to the emergence of Zionism, in the wake of colonial modernity, with its discursive correlatives in the form of racialised tropes, Orientalist fantasies and Eurocentric epistemologies. Against this backdrop, the conceptual schism between ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’, or alternatively between ‘the Muslim’ and ‘the Jew’, can be traced back to the imperialised Middle East and North Africa. With the Enlightenment and its corollary the Euro-Jewish Haskala, and later with Zionism, the Orientalist schema ‘whitened’ the (Western) Jew, as the old schema began to be projected exclusively toward ‘the other’ Semitic figure – ‘the Arab’. The Arab-Jew, I have suggested, came to occupy an ambivalent position within the Orientalist splitting of the Semitic figure. Divide-and-rule imperial policies, furthermore, enunciated a new racialised grammar for a dynamic Muslim/Jewish religious-cultural matrix that had existed for over a millennium. In colonised Algeria, for example, the 1870 Décret Crémieux granted French citizenship to indigenous Jews but denied it to their Muslim neighbours, assigning the latter an inferior status pronounced in the 1877 Code de l’indigénat. Although an expression of the ideal of protecting minorities, the decree engendered a significant parting that was forming long before the century-later partition in yet another colonial space, British-mandate Palestine. The Arab-Jew, it can be said, came to possess an ambivalent indigeneity, ‘of’ the Maghreb or Mashreq but ‘in excess’ of the Arab/Muslim geography. Thus, the protecting-minorities paradigm was tainted due to its manipulative uses (the privileging of a selected group over the majority), and its differential application of Enlightenment principles in the colony – revealing the aporias of Republican colonialism. While indigenous Muslims and Jews were subjected to French assimilation together, the incorporation of the Oriental Jew into the Occidental Jewish paradigm generated two parallel forms of assimilation – first in relation to France as the emblem of the ‘universal’ West; and secondly in relation to France’s emancipated European Jews (largely of Ashkenazi background), as the tokens of abandoned cultural particularity in favour of citizenship in the modern nation-state. Consequently, imperialised Jews began a process of losing their historical and cultural specificity within what could be termed a double assimilation process. Aiming to provide Jews with a universal education, assimilated French Jews, such as the politician Adolph Crémieux, actively participated in the civilising mission, founding the Alliance Israélite Universelle schooling system not only in North Africa but also in the Middle East and the Balkans. The system embodied a pedagogical project that was simultaneously universalist

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(that is, French) and particularist (that is, Jewish-European). But by presumably becoming universal, the Orient’s Jews were paradoxically transposed into the particularist idea of the assimilated French Jew. The Jew-in-the-colony was beginning to march along the same path as the emancipated European Jew. Orientalism’s relatively unfamiliar non-European Jew was now becoming an intimate within the Humanist rescue vision, and even an internal ghost for an anti-Semitic discourse that was simultaneously Judeophobic and Arabophobic. The spreading of the assimilationist vision by metropolitan French Jews, moreover, shaped a novel split in which the new Orientalist, the European Jew, reproduced the split that had already taken place in Europe, this time in the colony – that is, a separation between the two intertwined indigenous Orientals, the Muslim and the Jew. With colonialist ‘emancipatory’ practices such as the Crémieux Decree, the Oriental/Orientalist bifurcation, then, was taking shape outside of Europe even before the arrival of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel. Indigenous Jews in colonised Algeria had already been officially endowed with an ambiguous status that generated resentment on the part of Muslim-Algerians and disorientation on the part of the Jewish-Algerians themselves. Granted French citizenship and partially incorporated into the Enlightenment-colonial project, some Algerian Jews ended up identifying with the French, while others identified with the Algerians, at times even taking up arms with the nationalist movement. Others in the Maghreb, such as Albert Memmi, began by diagnosing the twinned pathologies of ‘the mind of the coloniser’ and ‘the mind of the colonised’ within an anti-colonial spirit, but ended up seeing the necessity of Jewish nationalism.69 In the context of the early 1970s, Muammar Qaddafi’s call for the Arab Jews to return to their countries of origin was met with Memmi’s vehement rejection of the possibility of such a return. This debate ultimately suggested a kind of burial of the very ontology of the Arab-Jew. Over a century of French domination of the Maghreb resulted in a Jewish/Muslim divide and physical displacement into l’Hexagone. Put differently, the colonising mission of Enlightenment universalism gave way to seeking refuge in France’s particularist form of supposedly race-blind republicanism. With colonialism, Jewish Europeans also advanced their own version of the mission civilisatrice, exercising a new possessive hegemony in relation to their co-religionists in ‘the backwaters of the world’. The modern schooling system of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, for example, attempted to displace indigenous Jewish methods of teaching, debating and the transgenerational passing on of cultural practices. Religious/ cultural artefacts also came under the usual colonial ‘rescue’ rubric, for example, the centuries-long Arab-Jewish textual corpus – known as the Geniza – stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. The initiative of rabbi and scholar Dr Solomon Schechter to remove the documents from Cairo Ben ‘Ezra synagogue to Cambridge University took place under Egypt’s colonial authority, Lord Cromer. The dislocation reflected an increasingly dramatic Arab/Jewish split by which modern European Jews came to speak on behalf of all Jews, powerfully shaping Eurocentric representations of ‘Jewish History and Culture’. The physical dislocation of the corpus of documents prefigured the demographic diasporisation of the living bodies of the Arab Jews themselves in the wake of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Locating the split long before the actual partition of Palestine, in the colonial incursions into Muslim spaces, highlights the ways in which the colonial/modernity project triggered novel tensions and divisions. These antecedent

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fissures, prior to the emergence of Zionism – what could be regarded as the microruptures before the macro-Rupture – foreshadowed the massive post-1948 dislocation of Arab Jews. The initial fissures of these ruptures-before-the-Rupture resulted in the first serious splitting of ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’, a splitting that became more pronounced, as we know, with the unfolding translation of the Zionist idea into a political reality. Already the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which triggered massive dislocations and consolidated ethno-national redefinitions of belonging, had impacted the identity designations of indigenous Jews. Even after World War Two, with decolonisation and partitions, the process intensified, and life shifted for many communities, with population transfers that resulted in numerous transmutations of identity. The Jew-in-the-Orient, for the most part, continued to occupy the Oriental side of the bifurcation, but the signs of the cracks were increasingly more visible. The facts-on-the-ground Yishuv settlements, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the UN resolution to partition Palestine, and the establishment of the State of Israel implemented a novel nationalist lexicon of Jews and Arabs. If Palestinians paid the price of Europe’s industrialised slaughter of Jews, Arab Jews woke up to a new world order that could not accommodate their simultaneous Jewishness and Arabness. The anticipatory Orientalist split was to fully materialise only with colonial partition and its corollary of the dispossession of Palestinians and their dispersal largely to Arab zones, as well as with its concomitant dislocation of Arab Jews largely to Israel. While some, such as post-1948 Palestinians, have been shorn of citizenship for decades, others, like the Arab Jews, have adopted forms of citizenship inhospitable to the complexities of their cultural identity. Today, the iconography of Muslims-killing-Jews reverberates with contemporary Islamophobic discourses. It evokes real and imaginary Jewish fears of Muslims that have persisted in the postcolonial diaspora in France, Israel, Canada and elsewhere within Arab-Jewish exilic spaces. Such images are currently fetishised, however, as an ‘accurate’ historical portrayal of a millennial Muslim persecution of Jews, within a self-fulfilling prophecy which suggests that the place of Jews can only be in their so-called ‘true land of origins’, and thus, in a spatio-temporal leap, in the nation-state of Israel.

Muslim Spaces, Jewish Pasts: The Question of the Arab-Jew Both as a historical community and as a contemporary critical topos, in sum, the ‘ArabJew’ allows us to address the ambiguities of ‘the Jew’ and ‘the Arab’ within the Orientalist split – à la Said – into two Semites, one going the Oriental way and the other the Orientalist way. Even prior to the formation of Zionism, with the travelling of Orientalism into the colony, the indigenous Jew-in-the-Orient disturbed the prevailing Orientalist classifications. The recognisable Jew-in-Europe, phantasmatically associated with distant Eastern origins, was replaced by a more palpably present, actually existing Jew, decisively situated in the Orient. And if initially this newly ‘discovered’ Jew-in-the-Orient was catalogued as simply Oriental, that same Jew – within a Euro-diffusionist minorities discourse – gradually came to occupy an ambivalent position vis-à-vis both the coloniser and the colonised. A de-Orientalised non-Muslim, the Arab-Jew nonetheless remained an Oriental nonEuropean. For a post-Enlightenment trend which had already ‘elevated’ Europe’s assimilated Jew into the Orientalist/white paradigm, the indigeneity of the-Jew-in-the-Orient became superfluous and uncontainable within the standard bifurcation. The portrayal of

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violent acts, which symbolically tore the Jew out of his/her Arab social landscape, underlined a broader de-indigenisation of the Orient’s Jew, now reframed as ‘in excess’ of the Orient’s geography. And while the position of ‘the native Jew’ – as the Oriental – was being destabilised, that of the Muslim remained fixed within the terra firma of Oriental otherness. The ‘native Jew’ also remained Oriental vis-à-vis the European Jew. As a traditional Jew, he/she became increasingly subject to doubly assimilationist pressures, both carried under the banner of universalism, first from Europe’s civilising mission and secondly from the modernisation project carried out by the ‘emancipated Occidental Jew’ in the name of the ‘modern Jewish values’. Split off from the other Semite (the Arab), the assimilated European Jew was now empowered within the imperial process to spread the assimilationist project to the Jew in the colony. Fraternity among Jews was therefore no longer simply articulated within the enduring idiom of religious solidarity but more within a colonising Enlightenment paradigm. In addition to a minorities-rescue discourse (about Jews) that was travelling to the colony, a shared religious affiliation (among Jews) facilitated a newly sub-colonial encounter between the European and the indigenous Jew. In this sense, the earlier de-Orientalisation of the emancipated European Jew was now disseminated in the South and the East, as the Maghrebi/Mashreqi Jew was remodelled according to a ready-made post-Enlightenment blueprint. In a kind of mimicry of a mimicry, the Arab-/Berber-/Sephardi-Jew was ‘belatedly’ passing through the earlier stage of the civilising ordeals of the European Jew. ‘Oriental Jews’ had to be shorn of their ‘Orientalness’; within the new all-encompassing regime of de-Arabisation, they could no longer be Arabs. The manufactured minorities discourse concerning the Middle East/North Africa region, supposedly intended to ‘save’ the minority of Arab Jews, paradoxically, refashioned them as a new minority within a Eurocentrically conceived modern Jewishness. The imperial protecting-minorities endeavour, in tandem with the Jewish-metropolitan investment in emancipating their Oriental brethren, I have suggested, engendered a split-within-the-split. Colonial divide-and-rule strategy, along with Jewish-European assimilationist programmes specifically directed at ‘the exotic Jews’, then, played a crucial role in forming the ruptures prior to the post-partition Rupture. The imperial emancipation project displaced the long-standing designation, affiliation and belonging of Jews within Muslim spaces. Thus already prior to Zionism and to the post-1948 demographic dislocation, their palimpsestic political, cultural and affective indigeneity had been tangibly unsettled. The Orientalist bifurcation, formulated in post-Enlightenment Europe and now crossing over to the colony, only became magnified in the wake of Palestine’s partition. Within this decolonising genealogy, as the European-Jew has emerged de-Orientalised and as the Muslim has been re-Orientalised, the Arab-Jew has dwelt in a kind of twilight zone. The question of the Arab-Jew has, then, to be persistently posed to complicate ‘the split’, to more fully disassemble the essentialist Semitist idea and decolonise the conceptual divide. If the imagined Jew within the split forms a coherent unit, it would inevitably suggest that ‘the Jew’ in question is defined, not according to a multi-regional religious affiliation, but in correspondence with a fixed nationalist paradigm.70 Thus, a discussion of the splitting of ‘the Oriental’ that speaks of ‘the Jew’ without addressing a cultural geography, might implicitly reiterate: (1) a singular history, that of the European Jew; and (2) an ethno-nationalist redefinition of a previously religiously defined Jewishness. Such assumptions would subliminally impose a Eurocentric formulation both of Jewishness

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and of Arabness. To see the Arab-as-the-Oriental and the Jew-as-the-Orientalist, and to attempt to regroup the two under the pre-bifurcated category of ‘the Semite’, may inadvertently reproduce the Arab-as-East and the Jew-as-West, thus reaffirming the very supposition that the critique of Orientalism seeks to dismantle. A narrative of the fracturing into two Semites, which sidesteps or brackets the question of the Arab-Jew, may also risk a slippage into a stable nationalist lexicon of Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. The question of the Arab-Jew, then, must continue to be posed if one is to avoid the conflation of Jewish religious with ethnonational formation. But a view that stresses the Arabness of the Arab-Jew, rather than ‘disappearing’ that Arab-Jewishness into a single univocal form of Judeity, unsettles the ethno-nationalist Zionist narrative. After all, rather than subsume the Arab-Jew under the generic notion of a racialised European Jew, one could as well situate the same Arab-Jew on the Arab side of the bifurcation, within the larger colonialist Orientalisation of the Arab. Indeed, within Arab anti-colonial discourse, the indigenous Jew, who initially also ‘went the Oriental way’, formed part of an inclusive notion of Arabness. But with imperialism, and especially with Zionism, and in their wake with Arab nationalism’s ambivalent gaze on the Arab-Jew, that affiliation began to fray. The Orientalist splitting of the Oriental was now compounded by a nationalist splitting. The connotation of the phrase ‘Arab-Jew’ was transformed from being a taken-for-granted marker of religious (Jewish) and cultural (Arab) affiliation into a vexed question mark within competing nationalisms, each perceiving the ‘Arab-Jew’ as ‘in excess’. In a different fashion, the two nationalisms came to view one side of the hyphen in ‘the Arab-Jew’ suspiciously. In the Arab world ‘the Jew’ became out of bounds, while in the Jewish state ‘the Arab’ became out of bounds; hence, the ‘Arab-Jew’ or the ‘Jewish-Arab’ inevitably came to seem an ontological impossibility. With the imperial and with subsequent Zionist seismic shifts, the long-standing Jewish feeling of ‘at-homeness’ in the Arab world was thrown into doubt, thus giving way to a destabilising sense of vulnerability, to the point that the post-1948 evacuation of Arab spaces, a century later, was gradually seen as historically inevitable. Thereafter, in postcolonial diasporic spaces, a sense of Arab belonging for Jews came to be narrated largely in the melancholic past tense. To revisit the imagined place of the Arab-Jew within the Orientalist bifurcation is thus vital precisely because the slippage in the definition of ‘the Jew’ – between the religious and the ethno-national connotations – replicates the historical erasure of the Arabness of the Jew. Such slippage also undermines a more heteroglossic conceptualisation of Arabness, which eschews an anxiously voiced homogenous nationalism in favour of a prism of what might be called relational indigeneity. The (Arab) Jew, in other words, could be narrated as a differentiation within Arabness, without having to resurrect a pre-bifurcated Semitic figure, highlighting instead the complex overlay of cultures, a continuum of subtle differences and similarities. Within the long-term genealogy of what is often today considered the deep and presumably un-healable rift between Muslims and Jews, a different picture emerges when articulated through a de-Orientalising genealogy that highlights a co-imbricated Judeo-Muslim cultural geography. As an empirical category and as a critical trope, then, the ArabJew, or Jewish-Arab, encourages us to go beyond the fait accompli of the violent ruptures, within a reconceived decolonising framework of mutually constituted Jewishness and Arabness.

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Notes 1. Portions of this chapter are based on a talk delivered as part of the lecture series, ‘La Peur: Raisons et Déraisons’ at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Marseille, 26 March 2015; and on the ‘Ambivalent Indigeneity’ chapter in my manuscriptin-progress, The Question of the Arab-Jew. 2. For a critique of the ‘Aryan model’, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vols 1 & 2 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). For a critique of Eurocentrism as an epistemology, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (London: Routledge, 1994) and Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 3. It is commonly accepted that in the late eighteenth century, the German Orientalist August Ludwig von Schlözer first deployed the term ‘Semitic languages’, which by the nineteenth century, in conjunction with racial classifications of people, largely replaced the previous term ‘Oriental languages’. The notion of ‘Semitic languages’, more generally, has reflected a sliding from linguistic categories, which themselves are hardly pure given the historical syncretism across languages, into originary ethno-national paradigms. 4. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version with Notes, vol. 12, trans. William F. Fleming (London: E. R. Dumont, 1901), p. 32. 5. Voltaire, An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations, trans. Mr Nugent (London: J. Nourse, 1759), p. 49. 6. M. Ernest Renan, Studies of Religious History and Criticism, trans. O. B. Frothingham (New York: Carleton, 1864), pp. 117, 154, 159. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2004), p. 93. On the ‘Antinomies of the Enlightenment’, see Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism and Race in Translation. 8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 307. 9. This thesis was advanced by Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion. 10. For example, works by Keith W. Whitelam, Nadia Abu El-Haj and Shlomo Sand. 11. See Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 91–2. On the relevance of Orientalist discourse to Arab Jews, and on their ambivalent place vis-à-vis Palestine, see Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 201–32. 12. Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings (London: Pluto Press, 2017), p. 3. 13. For several different critical engagements with the notions of the Semite and Semitism, see Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008); Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 312–42; and Gil Z. Hochberg, ‘“Remembering Semitism” or “On the Prospect of Re-Membering the Semites”’, ReOrient, 1:2 (2016), pp. 192–223. 14. Said, Orientalism, p. xxvi. 15. For example, works by Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan, Vivek Chibber and Arif Dirlik. 16. Disraeli has this phrase expressed by the Sephardic character, Baroni (Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), p. 111); page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 17. Tancred relates the ancestral tale of Yemen’s Jewish-Arabs of the Koreidha tribe (see ibid. p. 130). 18. On a psychoanalytical approach to the story of the Patriarch Ibrahim in the Quran, see Fethi Benslama, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 1–108. For a critique of this reading, including of the notion of the Abrahamic, see Massad, Islam in Liberalism, pp. 275–342.

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19. On Disraeli’s aim at endowing the Jew with a noble status akin to that of England’s ruling elite as a response to anti-Semitism, see Bernard Glassman, Benjamin Disraeli: The Fabricated Jew in Myth and Memory (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002); Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York: Stein & Day, 1986); Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Nextbook Press, 2008). 20. On Disraeli’s travel, see Donald Sultana, Benjamin Disraeli in Spain, Malta, and Albania, 1830–32: A Monograph (Martlesham: Tamesis Books, 1976). 21. Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli, p. 60. 22. Sultana, Benjamin Disraeli in Spain, Malta, and Albania, pp. 26–7. 23. For a critique of the Protestant restoration of Jews, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence Toward the Jews, and the Notion of Exile’, in Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz (eds), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 276–98. 24. Although Disraeli’s fiction did reproduce negative Orientalist views, I am suggesting that this negativity was not necessarily manifested in the splitting of Jew and Arab. The protoZionism of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), meanwhile, reverberated with a modern Christian investment in the Jews’ repatriation to ‘their homeland’, within a kind of fixing of the cartography of the world’s ethnic-lineages, inspired by a philo-Semitism that simultaneously Romanticised the ancient Jew and foreignised his presence in Europe. Eliot’s prototype, interestingly, has often been associated with Disraeli, and one may argue that it is not a coincidence that the hero bears a Sephardi name – i.e. in its Spanish etymology, ‘from Ronda’. 25. In Disraeli’s historical novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy (1833) – which was inspired by the legendary figure of David Alroy, who professed to be the Messiah and aspired to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem – the project of return becomes highly ambiguous. Haunted by the ghost of the Jewish indigeneity question, Alroy comes to allegorise the emancipated Jew’s modern dilemma about origins, belonging and homeland. Jewish Diasporic life in twelfth-century Baghdad – standing as it were for nineteenth-century London – ultimately outweighs that of Jerusalem. The novel reflects the tension between traditional and modern interpretations of ‘Zion’ as a spiritual locus for which to yearn till ‘end times’ and as a historical place of origins where Jews could be re-settled. 26. This is not to suggest that as a British politician during the heyday of the imperial era, Disraeli somehow exhibited a deep concern for a potential Palestinian/Arab point of view. His protoZionist pamphlet examined the immanent collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the future creation of diverse nation-states under British hegemony, without concern for the inhabitants of Palestine (see Benjamin Disraeli, ‘The Jewish Question in the Oriental Question’, in N. H. Frankel (ed.), Unknown Documents on the Jewish Question (Baltimore: Shlesinger Publishing Co., 1947), pp. 31–8). My purpose here, rather, is to suggest that his Orientalist fiction was thoroughly infused with a vision of the Arab and the Jew as intimately and inherently related, making the in potentia return of ‘the Jew’ a reunification with the ancient Semite missing half in the land of origins. 27. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Hellas’, in Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (eds), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 406. 28. Dehodencq’s painting is also at times alternatively referred to as L’exécution d’une juive au Maroc (The Execution of a Jewess in Morocco). 29. Gabriel Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq: l’homme & l’artiste (Paris: Société de Propagation des Livres d’Art, 1910), p. 195. 30. Abraham Elmaleh, ‘Sol Ha-Tzadika’, Hed Hamizrah, 15 January 1943, p. 6. 31. Maimonides, ‘Ma’amar Kiddush ha-Shem’, in Iggerot ha-Rambam, https://www.sefaria. org/Iggerot_HaRambam,_Maamar_Kiddush_HaShem?lang=bi (last accessed 2 February 2018), n.p.

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32. See Erez Bitton, ‘Kasidat Solica’, in Naʿnaʿ: Shirim (Tel Aviv: Eked, 1979), p. 27. For an English translation, see Ammiel Alcalay (ed.), Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), pp. 269–71. In this poem, Sol’s experience can be read as an allegory for the Mizrahi/Moroccan experience in Israel, transposing the notion of being a minority Jew in Morocco to Israel. The bands Sfatayim (‘Solica’) and Droz (‘Lalla Solica’), meanwhile, have adopted the Moroccan tradition into popular Mizrahi music. And recently, Beersheba Theater produced Maor Sabag and Tair Sibony’s musical, Sulica, casting the Palestinian Nasreen Qadri as the heroine in an allegory of co-existence. 33. For two major comprehensive works on the case of Sol, see Sharon Vance, The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2011) and Juliette Hassine, Soliḳah ha-tsadeḳet harugat ha-malkhut (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2012). 34. Similarly, Jewish tour guides also highlight the blood relation between Moroccan Jews and Muslims (see darlett, ‘L’autre juive Solika la tsadika’, DARNNA.com, 13 December 2007, http://www.darnna.com/phorum/read.php?13,120172 (last accessed 2 February 2018) and ‘Lalla Soulika – Jewish martyr in the cemetery of Fez’, YouTube, 18 November 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCEjz5WNRQ (last accessed 2 February 2018)). 35. See, Yahadut Maroco: Praqim be-Heker Tarbutam (Jerusalem: Reuven Mas, 1975) and Josef W. Meri, The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 36. M. Léon Godard, Description et histoire du Maroc (Paris: E. Donnaud, 1860), p. 83. See also Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 37. In recognition of Sol’s grave as a holy site for both Jews and Muslims, the dome of the tomb is alternatively painted in the symbolic colour of each religion, blue and green. The latter would seem to confirm a narrative of her embrace by Muslims. This syncretism is recognised in popular touristic sites (see for example, Moshe Frigan, ‘Tfilat ha-‘Arviya be-Qever Suliqa’, Kikar ha-Shabat, 1 March 2017, http://www.kikar.co.il/223700.html (last accessed 2 February 2018)). 38. Ruth Knafo Setton, ‘Searching for Suleika: a Writer’s Journey’, in Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter (eds), Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), pp. 226–38; p. 234. 39. This statement has been popularly attributed to Sol in Jewish-Moroccan culture and can also be found in texts. See, for instance, Eugenio Maria Romero, El martirio de la jóven hachuel, ó la heroina hebrea (Madrid: Diego Negrete, 1837), p. 10. 40. The exhibition Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (The Jews in Orientalism) was held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in 2012 (see ‘Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme’, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 19 October 2015, http://www.mahj.org/fr/programme/ les-juifs-dans-l-orientalisme-16049 (last accessed 2 February 2018)). In his review of the exhibition, Vladislav Davidzon uses the presence of Jews in Orientalist painting to demonstrate the fallacy of Said’s thesis (see Vladislav Davidzon, ‘The Ghosts of Edward Said’, Tablet, 2 July 2012, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/105124/ the-ghosts-of-edward-said (last accessed 2 February 2018), n.p.), echoing Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London & New York: Allen Lane, 2006). In contrast, I argue there that the imaging of Jews was on a continuum with that of Muslims. For the latter, see Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 41. See Andrew G. Bostom (ed.), The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2008). 42. For an analysis of the export of the Enlightenment Jewish minority discourse to the subcontinent, see Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 43. Romero, El martirio de la jóven hachuel, p. 67.

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44. See Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews in Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 45. The Alhambra Decree was officially overturned at the Second Vatican Council in 1968. Today however, Spain and Portugal officially allow repatriation for Sephardi Jews but not for Andalusian Muslims. 46. For a historical study of Romero’s liberal views, see Sharon Vance, ‘Sol Hachuel, “Heroine of the Nineteenth Century”: Gender, the Jewish Question, and Colonial Discourse’, in Gottreich and Schroeter, Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, pp. 201–25. Elsewhere, Vance argues that European accounts ‘consistently portrayed relations between Muslims and Jews as characterized by animosity and violence. Any negative incidents in Morocco were used to reinforce arguments that Europeans should intervene’ (Vance, Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint, p. 70). 47. Sol’s Sephardi origins are often referred to on contemporary popular sites (see for example, Hatchuel-Hatchwell: The Branches of Solika’s Family, http://hatchuel-hatchwell.net/ (last accessed 2 February 2018)). 48. In a different interpretation of Romero’s omission, Sarah Liebovici argues that the text may implicitly criticise the expulsion from Spain (see Sarah Liebovici, ‘Sol Hachuel la Tsaddikah ou la force de la foi’, Pardes, 4 (1986), pp. 133–46). 49. Shlomo Avineri engages this common view (see Shlomo Avineri, Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State (New York: BlueBridge, 2013)). 50. Ruth Knafo Setton, The Road to Fez (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001), pp. 223, 224. 51. Interestingly, in Saïd Sayagh’s novel, Sol attends a Jewish wedding, where she is surprised to encounter a European artist. The man is the French painter Eugene Delacroix, and Sol learns that he has received the rabbi’s approval to portray the wedding. In this moment, the novel seems to evoke the anxiety around the visual imaging of the human figure, which it resolves through the rabbi’s approval, presumably granted due to the mundane subject-matter. See Saïd Sayagh, L’autre juive: Lalla soulika, La tsadika (Paris: Ibis Press, 2009), p. 72. 52. See Ella Shohat, ‘The Specter of the Blackamoor: Figuring Africa and the Orient’, in Awam Amkpa (ed.), ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Reading (Rome: PostcArt, 2016), pp. 95–115. In this sense, the French unveiled the Jewish woman before the Muslim. 53. For theological debates around the cinematic image, see Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998). For the creative adaptation of the Quran to the screen without visualising the Prophet, see Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, pp. 70–105. 54. The image appeared on the front cover of Said’s 1978 Orientalism. 55. See Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 141–8. 56. This is not to suggest that mimetic art has not existed within the history of Islam – indeed, one can even find depictions of the Prophet within the Shi‘a Iranian tradition. Rather, I intend here to address a certain dominant penchant therein. 57. Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, p. 114. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 58. See also Maximilien Antoine Cyprien Henri Poisson de la Martinière, Souvenirs du Maroc (Paris: Plon, 1919), p. 8. The French diplomat claims that Dehodencq’s studio ceiling collapsed, irreparably damaging the original painting. 59. The painting is held at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme. Dehodencq’s biographer dates the surviving copy to 1861. See Séailles, Alfred Dehodencq, p. 114 60. Various moments in modern history have been read within what could be regarded as a pogromisation metanarrative, for example, the 1941 Farhud in Iraq. For a related critique of this persecution discourse in relation to the 1912 Tritel in Morocco, see Yigal S. Nizri, ‘On the Study of the Tritel in Fez’, Pe‘amim, 136 (2012), pp. 203–24.

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61. Vance notes that neither forcible conversion nor the death sentence for apostasy were commonly deployed during the rest of the nineteenth century, indicating that the outcome of Sol’s case was critically shaped by the French invasion of North Africa, which had ‘aroused religious outrage’, exerting pressure on the Sultan to avoid any appearance of weakness (Vance, Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint, p. 74). 62. On the debates over Berbers, see Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller (eds), Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghreb (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). In relation to Berber-Jews, see Majid Hannoum, Colonial Histories, Post-colonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (Westport: Greenwood, 2001). 63. Sayagh, L’autre juive, p. 61; page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 64. In her examination of the French and the Hebrew on Sol’s tombstone, Vance notes the characterisation of ‘Sol as a victim of Arab brutality in the French version and as God’s chosen heroine for Moroccan Jews in the Hebrew text’ (Vance, Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint, p. 8). 65. For example, in Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, trans. Miriam Kochan and David G. Littman (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). In contrast to this discourse of essentialist Muslim/Arab anti-Semitism, Hassine’s book concludes that in the final analysis, the formation of a Moroccan heritage around Sol demonstrates tolerance. 66. See François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). 67. See Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), pp. 265–6. 68. See Aimé Césaire, Toussaint L’Ouverture: La Révolution Française et le Problème Coloniale (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981), p. 23. 69. See Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). Despite his anti-colonial stance, Memmi took a Zionist position, which also led him to reject the notion of the Arab-Jew; see Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1975). For a discussion of Memmi, see Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 20–43. 70. Within this Eurocentric perspective, as I argued in my earlier work, ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ were formulated as mutually exclusive categories and ‘the Arab-Jew’ came to form an antinomy, an oxymoronic concept, which ‘necessitated’ violent cultural de-Arabisation. See Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims’, Social Text, 19/20 (1988), pp. 1–35; Ella Shohat, ‘Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew’, Movement Research, 5 (1992), pp. 7–8; and Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, pp. 201–232, 330–359.

Acknowledgements I dedicate this chapter to the memory of my literature professor, Juliette Hassine. I thank Guy Burak, The Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Librarian at New York University, for locating the sources and rights for the images reproduced here.

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Chapter 9 Colonial Violence, Law and Justice in Egypt Stephen Morton

I

n an extended preface to the play John Bull’s Other Island, entitled ‘Preface to Politicians’ (1911), the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, refers to the events at Denshawai, an Egyptian village in the Nile delta, in June 1906 as an ‘object-lesson’ in the use of ‘military coercion’ to maintain colonial power.1 Citing the official British parliamentary report on the events that took place at this village and the court martial of Egyptian villagers that followed, Shaw invokes the spectacle of the gallows to convey the violence of British military rule and colonial law in Egypt: Hanging . . . is the least sensational form of public execution: it lacks those elements of blood and torture for which the military and bureaucratic imagination lusts. So, as they had room for only one man on the gallows, and had to leave him hanging half an hour to make sure work and give his family plenty of time to watch him swinging (‘slowly turning round and round on himself’, as the local papers described it), thus having two hours to kill as well as four men, they kept the entertainment going by flogging eight men with fifty lashes each: eleven more than the utmost permitted by the law of Moses in times which our Army of Occupation no doubt considers barbarous. (pp. 858–9)

By dramatising the spectacle of lawful violence that took place in the aftermath of the court ruling, Shaw gives the lie to the liberal rhetoric of the British Parliamentary Report, which records how ‘due dignity was observed in carrying out the executions’ and that ‘all possible humanity was shown in carrying them out’ (p. 859). Shaw’s framing of the capital and corporal punishment of the Egyptian villagers who were sentenced in the trial as a form of ‘entertainment’ also underscores the way in which the sovereign power of the British colonial state in Egypt was maintained in and through representation. By beginning with the Denshawai episode, this chapter suggests that a consideration of the history of state violence in British-occupied Egypt and its representation in literary and legal narratives can help to shed significant new light on the colonial genealogy of violent forms of sovereignty in contemporary Egypt and the Arab world. Such an approach certainly challenges the neo-Orientalist framing of the Middle East as a space of violence and terror in the contemporary Western media. What is more, a consideration of literary and cultural responses to the Denshawai case can further elucidate the relationship between the law-preserving violence of

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the British colonial state in Egypt and the broader economic imperatives of late nineteenth-century European imperialism. By focusing on the ways in which the Denshawai episode has been framed in The Map of Love, the chapter proceeds to consider the gaps and contradictions in the liberal rhetoric of colonial government in Egypt. It is precisely in these gaps and contradictions, I suggest, that one can also begin to trace the fragments of what Walter Benjamin once called the history of the oppressed. A consideration of such a history not only gives the lie to the injustice of colonial law and the violent history of accumulation and dispossession underpinning the civilising mission of British colonialism; it also works to foreground the ways in which the socio-political and economic legacy of the British colonial occupation in Egypt impacted disproportionately on the lives and livelihoods of the rural peasantry. Such a history of dispossession is certainly given expression in the narrative structure of Ahdaf Soueif’s novel, The Map of Love. Yet, as I go to suggest, the novel also mediates this history through the elite liberal nationalist sensibility of Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi and Anna Winterbourne. This representation elides the significance of narratives that try to represent the lived experience of colonial dispossession and violence from the standpoint of the peasantry, such as Haqqi’s ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi. By re-reading Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s novella after The Map of Love, I suggest that we can better understand the ways in which literary narratives contribute to demands for justice in the face of the violence of colonial law. If The Map of Love returns to the history of British colonial rule in Egypt under Cromer and the rise of Egyptian nationalism in order to comment indirectly on the injustice of Hosni Mubarak’s foreign and domestic policies, ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi reminds us that such appeals to justice need to take account of socio-economic inequalities in Egypt. For a comparison of such narratives can help us to better understand the colonial genealogy of contemporary formations of postcolonial state violence, as well as the possibilities and challenges of contesting such formations. If the military tribunal at Denshawai and the state executions that followed became a trope for the violence of British colonial law, these events also draw attention to the ways in which colonial law worked in mutually reinforcing ways with other techniques of governmentality to control the imaginative geography of Britain’s imperial space. Indeed, it is well to remember that the etymology of the term ‘Middle East’ is itself bound up with the history of Britain’s territorial control over the Indian subcontinent. It was the US naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who first coined the term ‘Middle East’ in an article titled ‘The Persian Gulf and International Relations’ in the September 1902 issue of the London National Review magazine.2 In this article on the challenges facing Britain’s imperial control and influence, Mahan used the term to designate the region that connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. The term was subsequently taken up by the London Times correspondent and editor Valentine Chirol who used the term to include all land and sea approaches to India (see pp. 22–6). In so doing, he made clear that control of the ‘Middle East’ was of strategic geopolitical importance to the maintenance of British imperial control in India. Yet, if Britain’s imperialist ambitions in the Middle East were increasingly articulated in geopolitical terms, the mode of colonial rule was often experienced as a form of economic exploitation that was consolidated through the constant threat of military force. The intervention of Britain in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century is often understood as an attempt to control Egypt’s international debt. Roger Owen,

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in his biography of the former British agent and consul general in Egypt, Lord Cromer, explains how Egypt’s rulers . . . had taken advantage of the fast-growing capital markets of London and Paris to borrow increasingly large sums of money both in support of their own dynastic ambitions and for the development of their country’s infrastructures in terms of the railways, canals, and ports which they believed necessary for future economic progress.3 Such a rationale is certainly borne out in Cromer’s own reflections on the British military occupation in his book Modern Egypt. In his prefatory remarks on the first two decades of British military occupation, Cromer declared that ‘The origin of the Egyptian Question in its present phase was financial’.4 These words clearly emphasise the economic imperative that lay behind British intervention in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In response to this so-called debt crisis, Cromer introduced a form of colonial bureaucracy to put Egypt’s finances in order and to further consolidate British control over Egypt’s resources. To coerce ‘Egyptian villagers to cultivate export crops’, for instance, the British colonial administration used ‘methods such as the regulation of population censuses, taxation penalties, and the usurpation of land’.5 If this was a form of debt colonialism, it was enabled by a mode of governmentality based on ‘legal and bureaucratic . . . exceptions’ rather than ‘the regular rule of law’ (p. 351). As Yehouda Shenhav and Yael Berda put it: Cromer’s vision of imperial bureaucracy did not adhere to stable and predictable laws, employed secretive decision-making processes, and issued capricious bureaucratic decrees. To the subject races, the colonial bureaucracy . . . represented an illusive ‘phantom sovereign’ that did not respond lawfully to their appeals and challenges. (p. 349) This is not to suggest that a formal state of legal exception or of martial law prevailed in Egypt during the period of Cromer’s administration. For in the attempt to maintain the fiction that legal sovereignty ultimately resided with the Khedive, the British colonial administration tried to distinguish between a normal rule of law over which the Egyptian authorities exercised jurisdiction and exceptional acts, particularly crimes committed against the British military, which required a Special Tribunal to be convened. In this way, the practice of colonial governmentality in Cromer’s Egypt produced an ambivalent patchwork of rules, regulations and disciplinary regimes that built on a regime already established by the Khedival rulers of Egypt earlier in the nineteenth century. The effect of this ambivalent form of colonial governmentality was to produce a regime of indirect rule, which Lord Milner described as a veiled protectorate.6 Rather than a sign of failure, this ambivalent form of colonial sovereignty allowed the British to rule from behind the scenes while maintaining the illusion of Khedival sovereignty. In his far-reaching account of all aspects of Egyptian society, including justice, population, education, religion, the military and the interior, Cromer suggests that bankruptcy was one of the principle causes of the British occupation. In the so-called ‘Race against Bankruptcy’, ‘attention was concentrated on one object, and that was how to

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make both ends meet’.7 The urgent tone of Cromer’s desire to restore ‘financial equilibrium’ (p. 445) belies the repressive techniques of colonial governance that the British military administration mobilised to consolidate its political as well as economic sovereignty over Egypt’s human and natural resources. Indeed, such a tension is underscored in the English House of Commons debates about the vindictiveness of the sentencing meted out to the Egyptian peasants at Denshawai. In an address to the House of Commons of 4 August 1906, the Liberal MP for Tyneside, Mr J. M. Robertson, acknowledges that with ‘regard to the financial administration of Lord Cromer, that was above his criticism’ since Cromer ‘had greatly improved the condition altogether, and praise was due to him on that score’. On the other hand, Robertson states, ‘such great deeds’ were ‘no reason for putting Lord Cromer above the law’.8 Robertson’s suggestion that the success of Cromer’s colonial administration of Egypt’s economy is somehow separate from the violence of the Denshawai trial is telling. It may be true that such repressive techniques were contingent upon the particular legal-historical circumstances in which they unfolded. Yet it is also important to consider how the law-making violence of British colonial rule in Egypt aided and abetted the violence of financial capitalism. Indeed, by framing the reform of Egypt’s finances as a key part of Europe’s civilising mission in Egypt, Robertson implies without explicitly stating that the legal machinery of colonial governmentality in Egypt was inextricably bound up with the economic imperative of capital accumulation. To further clarify how the law-preserving violence of colonial rule in British Egypt worked to aid and abet Egypt’s position as debt colony in the late nineteenth-century European world-system, it is instructive to consider how Cromer’s machinic vision of colonial bureaucracy in Egypt subjected the population to a disciplinary form of power that sought to extract labour and tax revenue from the Egyptian body politic. In a discussion of Cromer’s Modern Egypt, Timothy Mitchell has suggested that Cromer’s mechanical conception of political rule in his book provides an idiom for modern political science. As he puts it: Politics is conceived mechanically, in terms of equilibrium and control, input and output – or in Cromer’s terms, raw material and finished article. The colonial official, [Cromer] wrote, ‘will soon find that the Egyptian, whom he wishes to mould into something really useful . . . is merely the rawest of material’.9 This figuration of the Egyptian as ‘raw material’ that is transformed into a ‘finished article’ by the machinery of the colonial state has a number of significant implications, which Mitchell does not fully explore. First, the suggestion that the colonial bureaucracy is like a machine in an industrial factory suggests a strong parallel with the logic of capitalist modernity. The implication here is that the colonial bureaucracy also works to integrate the Egyptian peasantry into the capitalist economy. In this way, Cromer suggests that colonial technologies of power, such as the school and the rule of law, also work to subject Egyptians to the economic laws of the global market. Cromer’s machinic metaphor of colonial bureaucracy prefigures Kafka’s image of colonial sovereignty as a violent technology of writing in his short story In the Penal Colony. In this story, a military officer outlines in gruesome detail the functioning of a mechanical apparatus, which is designed to inscribe a sentence on the body of the condemned with a series of needles referred to as a harrow. As the military officer

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explains: ‘“The condemned man has to have the law he has transgressed inscribed by the harrow on his body. This man here, for instance”, – the Officer gestured at the condemned man, “will be inscribed with: Respect your commanding officer!”’10 By closing the gap between the written sentence of the law and the execution of that sentence on the body of the condemned man, the story can be seen to offer a parable of the relationship between the violence of colonial law and the technology of writing upon which it depends. Kafka’s story is particularly helpful for understanding Cromer’s machinic metaphor of colonial order in Egypt because of the way that the colonial officer in Kafka’s parable imagines the rule of law as a perfectly functioning apparatus. Like Kafka’s officer, Cromer represents the European rule of law as a well-oiled machine. As he puts it: If one unacquainted with mechanics enters a factory where a quantity of steam machinery is at work, he is for a moment deafened with the noise, and his first impression will not improbably be one of surprise that any delicate bit of workmanship can result from the apparent confusion which he sees before him. Gradually, however, he comes to understand that the rate at which each wheel turns is regulated to a nicety, that the piston is of the steam-engine cannot give a stroke by one hair’sbreadth shorter or longer than it is intended to give . . . and that, generally, each portion of the machinery is adapted to perform a certain specified bit of work, and is under such perfect control that it cannot interfere with the functions of any other portion. He will then no longer be surprised that, with a little care in oiling the different parts of the machinery, a highly finished piece of workmanship is eventually produced. (p. 662) Against this metaphor of European colonial governmentality as one of engineering perfection, Cromer invokes an idea of Egyptian governance as irrational, arbitrary and dysfunctional. Continuing the extended metaphor of machinic governmentality, Cromer presents a defective vision of Egyptian statecraft: If, on the other hand, he finds on examination that the confusion is worse than at first sight appeared, that the movement of each wheel is eccentric in the highest degree, that the piston is liable at any moment to stop working, that there is no adequate machinery for adjusting the strength of the stroke to be given by the hammer, that safety-valves and other guarantees against accident are wanting . . . that some portions are of the latest and most improved patterns while others are old, rusty, and obsolete, that a strong centrifugal force is constantly at work impelling the different parts of the machinery to fly out of their own orbits, and that a mistake on the part of the engineer in not removing any small particle of grit betimes, or not applying the right amount of oil at the right moment, may bring about a collapse of the whole fabric, – he will then no longer look for the production of any highly finished article. Indeed, he will be surprised that the mechanical chaos before him is capable of producing any article at all. (pp. 662–3) The implications of Cromer’s extended metaphor are not difficult to grasp. By suggesting that the machinery of British colonial governance and the rule of law are more superior and just in their treatment of the Egyptian population than that of the

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Khedival rulers of Egypt, who were in power prior to the British occupation, Cromer provides a clear justification for the British colonial occupation. In mobilising this machinic metaphor, Cromer also rules out the possibility that the colonial rule of law might cause the machine to malfunction. Yet, if we re-read Cromer’s metaphor in terms of the Denshawai episode, we can begin to see how the colonial rule of law also functioned in an erratic way that destabilised its promise of effective governmentality. In this respect, Cromer’s account of the machinery of British colonial government resembles the colonial officer’s rational demonstration of the smooth operation of the legal writing apparatus in Kafka’s short story. For just as Kafka’s colonial officer demonstrates that there are serious faults within the machine, so the legal decision concerning the incident at Denshawai suggests that there are serious problems with Cromer’s legal apparatus. To further clarify this parallel, it is instructive to consider how the British colonial rule of law in Egypt also depended on the Khedival legal system, from which it also sought to distance itself. Samera Esmeir explains how ‘the decisions of precolonial sovereigns (the Khedival rulers of Egypt prior to British occupation) persisted under the colonial government yet were reconfigured under the new colonial legal order’.11 If, as Edward Said puts it in Orientalism, the Orient provides the West with a contrasting image of the other,12 Cromer’s representation of the Oriental rule of law as a chaotic, defective, eccentric and arbitrary machine (p. 205) disavows the ways in which the British colonial government reconstituted this older formation of sovereignty to suit its own economic and political ends (p. 202). Such a formation is important, I suggest, because it can help us to grasp the ways in which the British colonial government in Egypt made use of an Orientalist stereotype of an arbitrary and despotic Khedival sovereignty in order to disavow responsibility for acts of violence and oppression perpetrated against the Egyptian population, even as such acts were an effect of Britain’s indirect rule. In the chapter on ‘Justice’ in Modern Egypt, Lord Cromer offers a justification for his decision not to radically change the system of criminal justice in Egypt. He states The main difficulties arise from the character of the people, from the impossibility of creating a competent judiciary calculated to inspire confidence and respect, and, generally, from the circumstances which are the necessary accompaniment of a transitionary period from arbitrary government to a reign of law. (p. 866) By describing the legal situation in colonial Egypt as ‘transitionary’, Cromer produces a space of legal ambivalence between the ‘arbitrary government’ of the Khedival rulers and the British colonial ‘reign of law’, which promises to institute modernising reforms. Through this rhetorical strategy, Cromer also disavows the sovereign power and authority of the British colonial state in particular acts of law-preserving violence. Specifically, he suggests that it is the recalcitrance of an essentialist notion of Egyptian national character, which prevents the ideals of political liberty and justice – implicit in the civilising rhetoric of the colonial rule of law – from coming about. Such an essentialist trope of Egyptian character is echoed in Lord Milner’s account of Egypt in his memoir England in Egypt (1892). Milner, the former under-secretary for finance in Egypt, describes Egypt as a ‘place of almost general ruin and depression, of a total distrust in the possibility of just government, and a rooted belief in administrative

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corruption as the natural and invariable rule of human society’ (p. 7). In a metonymic chain of equivalence, Milner suggests that unjust government, corruption and ‘general ruin and depression’ can be explained away by a rigid and fatalistic mode of thinking that is implicit in phrases such as ‘rooted belief’ and ‘natural and invariable rule’ (p. 7). This stereotypical framing of the Egyptian mindset as rigid and fatalistic needs to be understood in the context of a liberal mode of British colonial governmentality that was itself profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, Cromer in Modern Egypt seems to admire Nubar Pasha’s ‘statesmanlike project of creating law courts, which should command the confidence of Europe’ and which also served as ‘a legal barrier between the population of Egypt and the capricious despotism of the Khedive’ (p. 706). Yet, on the other hand, Cromer is also disparaging about the judiciary in Egypt’s Mixed Courts, and describes them as ‘a law unto themselves’ (p. 708). To further clarify his dissatisfaction with the legal system in Egypt, Cromer cites the framing of the Indian penal code as a model of how to adapt the ‘provisions of European law and procedure’ to the ‘circumstances and procedure of India’ (p. 708), and bluntly adds that ‘No such care was taken in Egypt’ (p. 708). By representing the judiciary, the courts and the rule of law in Egypt as incomplete, Cromer also produces a grey area between competing legal traditions. Such a space of legal ambivalence helps to make sense of the precise way in which the British colonial government in Egypt ruled according to a particular logic of exclusive inclusion. It may be true, as Samera Esmeir has argued, that the rhetoric of colonial rule in Egypt was predicated on an idea of juridical humanity. In Esmeir’s account, the British colonial state, in the attempt to deliver the positivist legal traditions of British law to Egypt under the liberal guise of a civilising mission, defined the authority of positive law in the present in contrast to the Khedival laws, which it framed as arbitrary, irrational, violent, inhuman and backwards: Law, in colonial Egypt, gave birth to a juridical human that was supposed to exist in the presence of a particular legal regime – positive and liberal, singular and universal, autonomous and abstract. Promoting itself against what it articulated as the violence of the khedival legal order and its inhumanness, colonial law detached itself from the checks of the past and established its authority in its own present. This was law’s first arbitrary procedure. The law then inscribed the human in the body of its rules, which indicated the rise of a new system of bondage whereby the law decided on the presence or absence of the human. This second arbitrary procedure gave the law a power that was limitless and magical. In claiming to humanize the colonized, the law decided on the distinction between humanizing suffering and dehumanizing pain, thereby enabling the persistence of violence. (p. 17) For Esmeir, the rule of law was crucial to the maintenance of colonial sovereignty. If the British colonial state had the power and authority to confer or withhold the rights and freedoms associated with the legal norms of humanity, it did so by defining the project of colonial modernity in Egypt as incomplete. Repressive and exploitative forms of disciplinary power persisted in Cromer’s Egypt on the grounds that such practices were the legacy of an Oriental mode of government that would disappear at some indefinite point in the future, when the British liberal ideals of democracy and the rule of law would be implemented. Yet in framing this ideal of juridical humanity in relation to

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a future temporality that is always on the horizon, Cromer’s colonial administration also produced a state of legal ambivalence in the present, which attempted to abdicate responsibility for the worst excesses of state violence and repression. Esmeir’s argument that the liberal colonial promise of liberty implicit in the claim to ‘humanize the colonized’ by making Egyptians subjects of the rule of law, was, in effect, a technique of ‘subjugation to the state and its law’, is compelling (p. 17). Yet her gesture towards practices of ‘rebellion and struggle’ that might articulate other concepts of the human which do not reproduce the ‘sovereignty of the state and its positive law’ (p. 17) raises further questions about how such practices are articulated and made intelligible as demands for justice – questions and practices that Esmeir does not explore. How, for example, might the language and narrative strategies of literary texts help to create a space through which such practices can be shared and understood? If, as Walter Benjamin suggested, the expressionless in art and literature seeks to do justice to those deprived of the right to speak through a rhetorical mode, which interrupts the sovereign authority of the law, what alternative forms of justice might literary texts concerned with the violence of debt servitude, forced labour and capital punishment in colonial Egypt help to articulate? And how might a close analysis of the rhetorical force of such narratives shed light on the conditions of possibility for an idea of justice that is not subordinated to the sovereign power of colonial law? By addressing such questions, I suggest that a close reading of literary texts alongside the rhetoric of colonial law can help to do justice to the fragmented history of the oppressed in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. If the project of colonial modernity in Cromer’s Modern Egypt articulated a liberal humanist vision of democracy, justice and the rule of law, Ahdaf Soueif’s novel, The Map of Love (1999), explores the legacy of British colonial rule in late twentiethcentury Egypt. Part romance, part historical novel, The Map of Love re-assembles the journals of Lady Anna Winterbourne, a British aristocrat who travels to Egypt after the demise of her first husband following the Mahdist rebellion, and her relationship with the nationalist intellectual and aristocrat, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Focalised through the consciousness of Sharif’s grandniece, Amal al-Ghamwari, in late twentieth-century Egypt, the narrative raises questions about the history of empire and anti-colonial nationalism from the standpoint of a liberal, cosmopolitan woman. In its use of the autobiographical form of diaries and journals to register the private thoughts and feelings of Anna Winterbourne on the politics, economics and culture of Egypt during the British occupation, the novel may recall an epistolary tradition in Orientalist representation, which is epitomised in Lady Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters. This is not to suggest that The Map of Love is an epistolary novel in the conventional sense of a narrative that is staged as an exchange of letters presented in a linear temporal sequence; for the narrative is constructed in a discontinuous, non-linear sequence that re-frames the journals, letters, sketchbooks, drawings and Arabic exercise books of Anna Winterbourne from a contemporary perspective in late twentieth-century Egypt. The effect of such a narrative technique is to raise questions about the history and historiography of British colonial rule in Egypt. If colonial histories of the British occupation of Egypt such as Cromer’s Modern Egypt rehearse Orientalist representations of Egypt and the Orient, The Map of Love attempts to challenge the authority of such representations through its staging of translation. Many critics have suggested that the use of translation as a trope for love/

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desire and the cosmopolitan in The Map of Love offers a counterpoint to Orientalist stereotypes of Egypt. Waïl S. Hassan, for instance, argues that The Map of Love is a paradigmatic translational novel because it enacts a poetics of translation on several levels – plot, theme, language, and discourse. The novel, in effect, offers a map of translation practices: from literal to literary translations, from domesticating to foreignizing translations, and from epistemically violent translations that pursue the will to power to the extremes of forgery and sacrilege to loving translations that surrender to the experience of alterity.13 It is certainly true that the practice of translation has served the project of colonial expansion and the ‘will to power’ that it implies. In this respect, what Hassan calls ‘the translational novel’ can also be understood as a product of Oriental philology. Yet Hassan does not explore the wider implications of this observation for understanding the ways in which the novelistic form of The Map of Love also engages with the mechanical reproduction of colonial sovereignty in the printed form of newspapers, statutes and reports. By examining this aspect of the novel in closer detail, I suggest that we can also begin to identify the precise ways in which The Map of Love tries to question and interrupt the system of writing upon which colonial sovereignty is dependent. In a related discussion, Aamir Mufti has suggested that Oriental philology in India reorganised ‘language, literature, and culture on a planetary scale’ in such a way that makes it translatable and transmissible in cultural forms that can be exchanged in the global literary marketplace.14 By staging its translation of the colonial past in the recognisable cultural form of an Anglophone historical novel, The Map of Love clearly draws attention to its status as a literary commodity. Yet this staging also raises further questions about the novel’s engagement with the British colonial government’s use of technologies of writing and translation as techniques of military rule. If the British colonial administration used technologies of print and communication to reproduce its power and authority, how have nationalist writers and intellectuals used the medium of print to contest and challenge violent formations of colonial sovereignty? And does the use of such written technologies necessarily imply that the colonial technologies of state sovereignty and its positivist legal traditions also define the meaning of freedom for such writers and intellectuals in the neo-colonial present? In the specific context of colonial Egypt, Timothy Mitchell notes how the telegraph and the printing press transformed the use and understanding of writing from a rich and polyvalent system of meaning to a ‘precise system of signs, in which words are handled as though they were the unambiguous representatives of singular meanings’ (p. 153). The point of such an approach to writing, Mitchell explains, is that it produced the illusion of ‘a structure standing apart from things themselves, a separate realm of order and meaning’ which corresponded with ‘the realm of intentionality – of authority or political certainty’ (p. 154). In one sense, the British parliamentary papers on the Denshawai trial seem to reinforce this illusion. In a report presented to both Houses of Parliament in July 1906, entitled ‘Correspondence Respecting the Attack on British Officers at Denshawai’, printed copies of typed official letters and telegrams are assembled in chronological order to give the impression of due legal process. One of these documents refers to a Khedival decree of 1895, which was drafted by Cromer’s administration on behalf of the Khedive to empower the Egyptian government to institute special tribunals

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that could deal with ‘crimes of violence against officers and men of the army of occupation’.15 What is also significant about this document is the way in which it constructs an illusion of Khedival sovereignty, even as it also announces the fact that Cromer drafted this decree and the Special Tribunal it promises to institute. In so doing, the letter implies that decisions about the ‘very exceptional circumstances’ under which this decree ‘will . . . be brought into operation’ (p. 1) lie, in effect, with the British Consul General, even if the letter of the law suggests that power rests with the Khedive. If such printed reports worked to reinforce the idea of Cromer as a shadowy figure of veiled colonial sovereignty in Egypt, The Map of Love uses the conventions of historiographic metafiction to question the official framing of the Denshawai episode. More specifically, by suggesting that Oriental philology was used to fabricate Arabic documents and English translations as part of the colonial machinery of counterinsurgency and intelligence, Soueif encourages readers to consider how practices of translation and official historical writing are often subordinated to the exigencies of British colonial sovereignty. In a passing reference to Cromer’s ‘two-volume book published in 1908, which lists practically every detail of his Egyptian rule’, Amal observes that ‘Denshawai is never mentioned’.16 This assertion is framed in relation to a longer account of a fake Arabic letter that warns of a nationalist uprising against the British colonial government. This letter and its English translation were transmitted to the British Foreign Office ‘to serve as a warning . . . of general dissatisfaction among Egyptian people and notables’ and ‘was supposed to convey the plot of a big Nationalist rising, giving all particulars about the time, the strength, the manner of conducting the revolt against British rule’ (p. 494). The narrator’s detailed account of this forged Arabic letter – which Amal verifies by consulting Clara Boyle’s memoir, Boyle of Cairo – certainly reveals how the machinery of British colonial government made use of translation to construct a fictional idea of anti-colonial insurgency. Indeed, Amal intimates that this fictional idea of an imminent anti-colonial rebellion may have served to justify the harsh punishment meted out to the rebels at Denshawai, and reinforced demand for greater military support. What is more, by suggesting that Cromer’s resignation shortly after the Denshawai tragedy was connected to the revelation that the Arabic letter was a forgery, the narrator implies that the failures of Cromer’s colonial sovereignty might also be connected to the poverty of Orientalist representations of the Arabic language. Yet this marginal reference to Cromer’s Modern Egypt, to the fabrication of a planned nationalist uprising and to the Denshawai episode raises more pressing questions about Soueif’s representation of the British colonial occupation in Egypt, which have important consequences for understanding the limitations as well as the virtues of her fictional map of the modern Egyptian nation. To what extent does the novel’s historical representation of British colonial rule in Egypt reproduce an elite nationalist narrative of the Egyptian past, which elides the exploitation of the rural peasantry? And how far does the novel’s representation of British colonial violence in early twentiethcentury Egypt foreshadow violent techniques of postcolonial governmentality in contemporary Egypt? At key points throughout the narrative, Soueif makes reference to the economic and political events which precipitated the British military occupation in Egypt. Anna Winterbourne’s journals document a private life that is bound up with a patriarchal public discourse of the British Empire. Early in the novel, she recalls conversations between her father and father-in-law, Sir Charles Winterbourne, ‘of India and

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of Ireland, of the Queen and the Canal, of Egypt’; the conversation also extends to ‘the Rebellion, the Bombardment and the trial’ (p. 13). These references to the historical events that led to the occupation of Egypt lend a degree of historical verisimilitude to the narrative. Sir Charles Winterbourne was involved in the British military bombing of Alexandria and subsequent occupation of Egypt that sought to counter the nationalist rebellion led by Ahmed ‘Urabi against the British-backed Khedival administration, but subsequently opposes the British Empire on the grounds that it ‘had done so much harm to so many people that it deserves to perish . . .’ (p. 13). By juxtaposing the entries from Anna’s journals with contemporary newspaper clippings from The Times, Amal tries to reconstruct the social world that Anna Winterbourne inhabited. At the start of chapter three, Amal declares: I am obsessed with Anna Winterbourne’s brown journal. She has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke. I need to fill in the gaps, to know who the people are of whom she speaks, to paint in the backdrop against which she is living her life here, on the page in front of me. (p. 26) This meta-fictional address to the reader and the allusion to George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch serve to highlight the ways in which The Map of Love uses the realist conventions of the novel to make sense of Anna Winterbourne’s life writing. And yet, in doing so, it also foregrounds the ways in which Anna’s life writing is implicated in the history of Britain’s colonial occupation of Egypt, even as it offers a liberal critique of that colonial project. It is certainly true that Anna’s romantic relationship with the Egyptian nationalist figure, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, functions as a trope for the novel’s anti-imperialist stance. As Waïl Hassan puts it: The politically overdetermined love story is Soueif’s answer to the genre of Oriental romance. Mystery, intrigue, harems, veiled women, deserts, camels, not to mention a highly melodramatic love affair – all the ingredients of lurid tales are present in the story, but in ways that subvert the ideology of the genre. Anna’s diary and letters quickly become a historical record of bitter struggle against colonial policies and of dynamic social change that is often hampered, not accelerated as imperial historiography claims, by colonial policies.17 If the ‘historical record’ of ‘Anna’s diary and letters’ give the lie to the modernising rhetoric of colonialism, this is not quite the same thing as articulating the conditions of the rural peasantry under the debt regime of Cromer and the Khedive. Soueif’s translational novel may foreground the injustice of colonial violence, but it does so through the focalising consciousness of nationalist elite figures; as a consequence, it fails to do justice to the Egyptian peasantry, who are often relegated to the margins of the narrative. Before examining this aspect of the novel in more detail, discussion now turns to the novel’s engagement with the historiography of colonial Egypt, and the challenge it presents to the authority of colonial narratives of Egypt during the British military occupation, such as that documented in Cromer’s Modern Egypt. In one of the many chapters that form this extensive memoir, Cromer details the circumstances which enabled the nationalist leader Ahmed ‘Urabi to take political control over Egypt; this account serves to justify his subsequent assertion that ‘there can be no

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doubt that [the bombardment of Alexandria] was justifiable’ (p. 232). Cromer spends much time criticising the vacillation of Gladstone’s government on the Egyptian question, which, he claims, hampered the colonial government’s implementation of liberal reforms. In so doing, he also makes manifest the paradoxical character of Britain’s liberal colonial governmentality in Egypt under Cromer’s rule. In his account of the trial and sentencing of ‘Urabi, for instance, Cromer describes with some regret how the fiction was maintained that the fate of the prisoners depended, not on the strong Government which had suppressed the revolt, but on the weak Government which had proved itself powerless to suppress it . . . The Khedive was to have the appearance of dealing with Arábi, but he was not to move a step without the consent of the British Government. (pp. 260–1) This ‘fiction’ may illustrate the singular position of the British colonial government in Egypt – of being a ‘Veiled Protectorate’, as Milner called it. Yet it also highlights the way in which Cromer’s colonial government was at one and the same time a military government, in the sense that it depended on military force for the maintenance of its power and authority. The importance of the military for the maintenance of British colonial power in Egypt and Sudan (then a part of Egyptian territory) was made particularly apparent in the Mahdist wars of the late 1880s and 1890s. In The Map of Love, these wars are figured as a sign of colonial violence, which facilitates the narrative’s romantic narrative and Anna Winterbourne’s cosmopolitan identification with the cause of anti-colonial nationalism. This liberal, anti-colonial structure of feeling stands in direct contrast to the dominant public mood of the time, as Cromer explains in Modern Egypt. Following the fall of Khartoum and the death of Governor General Gordon at the hands of Mahdist forces in 1896, Cromer writes of how the ‘national honour was touched’ and adds that a ‘sense of shame was very generally felt that, under British auspices, Egyptian territory should have undergone such severe shrinkage’ (p. 521). This colonial structure of feeling, which Cromer elsewhere calls ‘a wave of Gordon cultus’ and a form of ‘national excitement’ (p. 352), is significantly re-framed in The Map of Love. Anna’s life writing is profoundly marked by the loss of her first husband, Edward, to the cause of ‘Jingo Imperialism’ (p. 27) after his untimely death following his involvement in the colonial war to ‘re-conquer’ Khartoum from Mahdist forces in 1898. The precise details of Edward’s involvement are elliptical since he does not speak of his experiences in the early chapters of the novel. It is suggested that he suffers from a form of post-traumatic stress after witnessing the deaths of thousands of Sudanese rebels who are killed by the machine gunfire of the British military forces. By foregrounding the unspeakability of colonial violence, the novel also gestures towards an impossible demand for justice, which is articulated in the crude figures that stand in for the magnitude of human loss: ‘The papers are full of it: an army of 7,000 British and 20,000 Egyptian soldiers loses 48 men and kills 11,000 of the Dervishes and wounds 16,000 in the space of six hours’ (p. 34). The reference to the history of British colonial violence in Egypt and Sudan that frames the beginning of The Map of Love sheds significant light on the mutually reinforcing relationship between colonial law and violence, which also underpins the Denshawai trial. The bombing of Alexandria and the trial and sentencing of Ahmed ‘Urabi could be taken to exemplify the law-making violence of the British colonial occupation of Egypt, even

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though the power to decide on the fate of ‘Urabi was officially delegated to the Egyptian legal authorities. Similarly, Kitchener’s military intervention to ‘reconquer’ Khartoum was partly defined in terms of a popular national sentiment, which ‘found expression in the feeling that “Gordon should be avenged”’ (p. 522). A principle of vengeance was also thought to underpin the harsh sentences that were meted out to the villagers at the tribunal following the events at Denshawai. In his address to the English House of Commons, J. M. Robertson refers to the punishment of the villagers at Denshawai as ‘acts of mere revenge which were unworthy of the traditions of the British Empire’ (HC Parliamentary Debates, 1906, col. 1829, n.p.). Implicit in Robertson’s criticism of Cromer’s colonial government is the suggestion that an economy of violence underpinned the use of capital and corporal punishment in the ruling of the Denshawai tribunal. In other words, capital punishment is presented as a form of symbolic exchange, or ‘mere revenge’, for the death and injury of British soldiers, even if the evidence that the villagers were responsible for the deaths of the British soldier is highly questionable. What Robertson does not quite say, however, is that lawful violence in one form or another was also crucial to the preservation of colonial sovereignty, and to the formation of the state structures of modern Egypt during and in the aftermath of the British colonial occupation. By re-framing the story of Anna Winterbourne’s relationship with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi in relation to the history of colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance in Egypt, Amal certainly foregrounds the way in which the British colonial government in Egypt made use of lawful violence, or violence that was codified with the terms of the rule of law, to shore up its sovereignty over the economy and society of Egypt. The specific circumstances of the trial of Ahmed ‘Urabi, the reconquest of Sudan and the Denshawai trial may seem entirely contingent when they are treated as separate events. When considered together, however, these events demonstrate how violence defined the practice of colonial governmentality in Egypt during the British military occupation. By re-assembling these events in the historical narrative that forms The Map of Love, Amal encourages readers to identify parallels between the British colonial government’s use of violence in these ostensibly disparate and singular events. In so doing, the novel implies that a violent form of colonial governmentality is the norm rather than the exception. Such a narrative also calls into question the liberal rhetoric of Britain’s civilising mission in Egypt. When Amal refers to Cromer as a ‘friend of the fellah’ (p. 495), she also alludes to the way in which Cromer defined the British colonial project in Egypt as one that sought to implement liberal reforms in agricultural working conditions for the Egyptian peasantry, as well as in areas such as education and the rule of law. The British colonial administration in Egypt attempted to present the rationale for the occupation as progressive, liberal and modernising. The ban on the widespread use of corvée labour or forced labour, and the use of the whip against peasant labourers in particular were presented as some of the most significant liberal reforms that Cromer’s administration implemented. Consider the following statement from Cromer’s Modern Egypt: Among the many achievements that England has achieved in the cause of suffering humanity, not the least praiseworthy is this act, that in the teeth of strong opposition, the Anglo-Saxon race insisted that the Egyptian-laborer should be paid for his work, and that he should not be flogged if he did not work. (p. 786)

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Yet, as Esmeir explains, forced labour did not entirely disappear as a consequence of these reforms (see pp. 89–92). On the contrary, the legal rule prohibiting forced labour produced an exception to that rule, which allowed forced labour to be used in situations that imperiled human populations, such as when the Nile flooded or locusts threated to destroy cotton plantations. Forced labour was also replaced in some districts with a system of taxation in which villagers could pay for their freedom. The crucial point here is that forced labour was regulated in order to support Cromer’s argument that the presence of a British military administration in Egypt was helping to facilitate the transition from what he regarded as a despotic Oriental regime to a modern liberal capitalist state, founded on principles that mirrored the British tradition of the rule of law. By invoking Cromer’s self-fashioning as a ‘friend of the fellah’ in the context of the Denshawai trial, Soueif certainly calls into question the liberal rhetoric of the British colonial administration in Egypt. Yet the irony of this particular statement in Amal’s narrative gestures towards more deep-seated ironies that are only touched on in her critical elaboration of Anna Winterbourne’s journals. If the specific circumstances of the Denshawai tribunal are considered in relation to the broader context of the colonial debt regime in Egypt and the exploitation of the peasantry through forced labour and taxation for the servicing of that debt, the history of colonial violence that is alluded to in Soueif’s brief representation of Denshawai in The Map of Love starts to seem less exceptional. In a letter to Sir Charles of 1901, Anna Winterbourne makes reference to the question of ‘the National Debt . . . of which [she had] heard so much at the Agency’ (p. 159), and assures her reader that she plans to find out more from her Egyptian nationalist friend, Layla, and her brother, the lawyer, Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Yet the significance of the national debt is only made clear later in the novel in a conversation between Isabel and Amal’s former professor, Dr Ramzi Yusuf, at the Atelier ‘am Ghazali in July 1997: ‘What happened?’ Isabel says. ‘We were a part of a dying Ottoman Empire. Our Khedive Ismail loved modernism and Europe and – le spectacle. He likes the Suez Canal project and so he borrows money. He is not careful where he borrows. He borrows from Europe – from Britain and the Rothschilds and France. At the same time – you see, here is the conjunction.’ The index fingers of [Ramzi’s] two hands come together. ‘Europe is strong and moving outwards’ – a huge expansive gesture with the arms – ‘colonialism is the spirit of the age. Their old enemy the Ottoman Empire is dying. So they use the Khedive’s debts to expand into our part of it. Into Egypt. The rest is history.’ (p. 223) Reading recursively, this conversation, taken from Amal’s journal, also helps to shed light on Anna’s tantalising reference to Egypt’s national debt, presented earlier in the novel. By suggesting that the British government used ‘the Khedive’s debts to expand into [Egypt]’, Ramzi Yusuf makes clear how a relationship of debt between Egypt and European banks provided the pretext for a colonial occupation that allowed the British government to better exploit the natural and human resources of Egypt. What Ramzi Yusuf does not mention, however, is that the burden of Egypt’s colonial debt fell disproportionately on the bodies and lives of the rural peasantry. Such an omission

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may be read as a sign of the novel’s privileging of an elite liberal nationalist sensibility, which stands in for the voice of the peasantry. In a critical discussion of The Map of Love, Mohammad Salama has taken issue with Soueif’s privileging of an elite bourgeois nationalist perspective on the Denshawai affair. While Salama praises Soueif for recollecting the details of British colonial violence in the aftermath of the Denshawai trial, he also challenges the way in which this memorialisation is rendered through the romantic narrative of Anna Winterbourne and Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. In contrast to some of Soueif’s other critical reviewers, the problem for Salama lies not in the romantic narrative per se but rather in the use of a romantic narrative to represent aristocratic figures such as Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi as ‘sympathetic, ethical, and critical of the English “barbarity”’.18 As a consequence, Salama suggests, the novel’s representation of British colonial brutality downplays the violence of Egypt’s Ottoman rulers. Salama’s criticism of the elite nationalist perspective of The Map of Love is compelling in many respects, but it does not fully explore the way in which violence and brutality were an expression of the economic exploitation of the peasantry by the elite, which were aided and abetted by the ‘liberal’ techniques of British colonial reform. If, as Ramzi Yusuf suggests in The Map of Love, Britain used the Khedive’s debts as the pretext for colonial expansion, it is important to recall that techniques of exploitation such as forced labour provided the British colonial administration with an indirect source of capital accumulation, even though the British colonial agency in Egypt sought to distance itself from such forms of ‘primitive accumulation’ through liberal policies that promised to liberate the fellahin from such harsh regimes of labour exploitation. The violent implications of this technique of indirect colonial rule that was managed through the promise of liberal reforms to be delivered at an indeterminate point in the future when Egypt was sufficiently modernised is brought to the fore in the Denshawai case of June 1906. We have already seen how the British colonial administration framed the violence at Denshawai as a sign of anti-colonial insurgency. Yet this framing overlooks the way in which the action of a number of British officers leaving their camp to shoot pigeons on land belonging to some villagers was itself a hostile act – an act that was insensitive to the living conditions of peasant labourers, who were already disproportionately subject to the socio-economic burdens of Egypt’s colonial debt. As Esmeir explains: The site of the hunt was the villagers’ precious cash crop; a peasant warned the officers that the villagers were angry about the pigeon hunting. After firing several shots, an officer accidentally set a field ablaze, at which point some villagers approached him, attempted to seize his gun, and were wounded. Furious, the villagers surrounded the soldiers, wielding sticks, and one officer was hit on the head. Although he managed to break away, he died of sunstroke while running for help. British officers beat another villager to death. Several villagers and four other officers were wounded but they all recovered. (p. 253) The rapid and heavy-handed trial of fifty-two villagers accused of involvement in the so-called attack on British officers at Denshawai exemplifies the way in which British colonial sovereignty took place in a separate jurisdictional space and time that was

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outside the normal rule of Egyptian law, as Esmeir explains. By convening a special tribunal that was sanctioned by a Khedival decree of 1895 relating to attacks and crimes against British military personnel (see Esmeir, pp. 253–4), the colonial administration under the aegis of the Egyptian legal authorities was able to push through a decision to try and sentence the accused villagers. The hasty decision to sentence four villagers to public hanging, four to terms of imprisonment with hard labour and others to public flogging symbolised the violence and injustice of the colonial administration in the minds of many Egyptians and British liberals at the time (see Esmeir, p. 253). Differently from Samera Esmeir, who is at pains to distinguish the lawful violence of the British colonial state in Egypt from Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the state of exception, I would suggest that the nuanced legal justifications that were encoded in the colonial records of the Denshawai case are less significant than the economy of force, which the Denshawai case represented. The violence of colonial law, in other words, can be understood as a different form of debt in the form of a legal punishment, which is exacted on the bodies and lives of the condemned Egyptian peasants, who are already subject to the debt regime of the British colonial administration. If the episode at Denshawai came to stand as a trope for the excessive violence of the British colonial administration in Egypt, it was literary narratives such as Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s novel ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi (1906) that contributed to the understanding of this event. This novella was first serialised in the Al-Minbar newspaper, and sold thousands of copies on first publication. In 1986, the Frederictonbased publisher, York Press, published Saad El-Gabalawy’s English translation of the novel. The El-Gabalawy translation of the novel follows the episodic structure of the Arabic novel, and also employs the techniques of third-person narration and multiple focalisation to imaginatively reconstruct the events at Denshawai that led to the controversial trial. On a first reading, the representation of the British soldiers and of Lord Cromer may seem somewhat stereotypical. The British soldiers wear formal evening attire, drink whisky and soda, and refer to the Egyptian people with casual contempt. What is more, the novel’s rendering of the execution scene and its exhortation to readers to always remember Denshawai may strike readers as melodramatic. But it is also important to recognise that some aspects of the reception history and the socio-linguistic cadences of the novel may have been lost in the translation from Arabic to English. The translator makes clear that ‘[Haqqi] enhances the effect of naturalness and spontaneity by using colloquial Arabic for the dialogue among the illiterate fellahin, classical Arabic for his sophisticated characters, and even occasional English words for the British officers’.19 By dwelling on the details of everyday life, Haqqi uses certain realist conventions to register the experience of the colonial encounter from the standpoint of the villagers. By beginning the story with a conversation between the eponymous Maiden and her fiancé, for instance, the novel evokes the social world of an agricultural village organised around family, work, prayer and social meetings in which disputes are addressed and resolved. The initial conversation between Sit al-Dar and her fiancé concerns the unwanted advances of a rival suitor, Ahmad Zayid, who indicates his desire to marry Sit al-Dar, even though her fiancé has already signed a marriage contract with her father. At a subsequent public meeting, Sit al-Dar accuses Ahmad Zayid of making such unwanted advances in spite of the marriage contract and the matter is seemingly resolved; however,

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following the accidental death of a British officer in the village, Zayid threatens to report her father to the provincial government as one of the people responsible for wounding the British at Dinshway. The novel ends with the public hanging of Sital-Dar’s father, Hasan Mahfuz, who is wrongly accused of the murder of a British soldier and summarily condemned to death. By framing the tragic historical events at Denshawai in terms of a tragic family romance, the novella may invite an allegorical reading that connects what Fredric Jameson has called the private conception of desire to the embattled situation of public culture in colonial and neo-colonial societies.20 If the maiden is an allegorical figure, however, this is not to say that she is simply or only a passive vehicle for a beleaguered Egyptian nation. In a related discussion, Marina Warner observes that the feminine figuration of abstract concepts such as justice or freedom in public monuments, paintings and literary narratives when women were also denied access to justice and freedom is one of the central paradoxes of allegory in Western art and literature from antiquity to the present.21 And yet, by interrogating such paradoxes, Warner explains, we can begin to listen to the voices and stories of women who have been silenced by such allegorical forms. In ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi, the eponymous maiden is both a gendered figure and one of the Denshawai villagers that witnesses the injustice of colonial law as it is written on her father’s body; this ambivalent framing of the maiden as both a subject of mourning and colonial violence and a symbol of justice interrupts the smooth functioning of the legal sign system that was so central to the order of British colonial sovereignty. The silent act of witnessing which the narrative stages may seem passive in the sense that the maiden is not given a place from which to speak in the colonial space of the courtroom. Yet by framing the colonial tribunal within a narrative that centres on the lives of the villagers, the novella creates a rhetorical space in which the maiden’s voice can be heard. In Haqqi’s novella, the plight of the maiden is thus connected to a lexicon of justice (‘Adl), which is distinguished from the force or violence of colonial law. In a later section of the novel that prefigures the scene at the court, two of the Egyptian villagers reflect on the disastrous implications of the shooting incident for the lives and livelihoods of the people of Denshawai: Do you think there is no justice in this country? What are you talking about? Is this country running loose, without a ruler to control it? What justice, brother? There is no justice in our land. These days, there is only the law of force. (p. 32) In this brief conversation, the novel foreshadows the proceedings of the military court and the arbitrary decisions to collectively punish the people of Denshawai. The literal meaning of the colloquial Arabic phrase ‘wa-bal-adrā’ in the original can be literally translated as ‘by the use of arms’.22 By rendering this colloquial Arabic phrase as ‘the law of force’, it might be argued that the translation runs the risk of effacing the specific social and cultural consciousness of the villagers. And yet the translation of this phrase is consistent with the narrative’s wider critique of the violence of British colonial justice. The use of the phrase ‘law of force’ in the English translation makes clear how British colonial sovereignty is inextricably bound up with the

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law-preserving violence of the state and its institutions, even if it does not do so in the dialect of Haqqi’s literary figures. Haqqi’s representation of the way in which the trial is conducted also makes clear how the use of Orientalist stereotypes takes the place of any sense of legal process. Many of the witnesses who are drawn from the same party of British military officers involved in the ill-fated pigeon shoot are unable to recall the faces of their alleged assailants. Rather than dismissing the statements of the witnesses on the grounds that they are not credible, the chief justice responds by sympathising with the British soldiers’ slips in memory. By drawing attention to the unreliability of the witnesses, and raising questions about the impartiality of the judiciary in this fictionalised account of the tribunal, the narrator thus invites readers to reflect on the injustice of the legal proceedings. In doing so, Haqqi’s narrator also foregrounds the gap between the normative ideal of the force of law, which underpins the rhetoric of Britain’s civilising mission in Egypt, and the exceptional violence of the colonial ‘law of force’ or ‘use of arms’ that was operating in colonial Egypt. In a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the tradition of the oppressed, Shoshana Felman has written of how ‘the court helps in the coming to expression of what historically has been “expressionless”’.23 Felman is thinking in particular here of courts as rhetorical spaces in which normative ideas of law and justice are ostensibly in play. She is not thinking about special courts or military courts where the law is subordinated to the exigencies of a violent and vengeful form of colonial sovereignty. Felman’s emphasis on the potential of Benjamin’s concept of the expressionless to refer to ‘those whom violence has deprived of expression; [to] those who . . . have been historically reduced to silence . . . made faceless, deprived of their human face’ (p. 13) is compelling. Yet her claim that ‘it is in the courtroom that the expressionless turns into storytelling’ (p. 14) raises further questions about legal spaces in which the histories of the oppressed are further deprived of expression. How might the space of the military courtroom or other extra-legal spaces of colonial sovereignty unwittingly give expression to the history of the oppressed even as they attempt to silence the expression of that history? And how might literary and cultural texts work to articulate the histories of the oppressed that are foreclosed in such spaces? Since Felman’s claim about the courtroom as rhetorical space follows in part from a discussion of Benjamin’s concept of the tradition of the oppressed, it seems appropriate to recall Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited eighth thesis on the Concept of History: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’24 This general claim about history can also be read as a claim about how the enlightenment ideals of liberal democracy, human rights and the rule of law are always also threatened by the sovereign power of the state – a power that is normalised in the violent spaces of the colony, as well as Nazioccupied Europe. Felman clarifies that there are some courts that ‘intentionally give a stage to the expressionless of history’ (p. 14); and that some courts unconsciously enact that expressionlessness and are forced to witness it and to encounter it. This latter statement has important implications for understanding the representations of the Denshawai tribunal discussed in this chapter. For if these literary narratives give expression to the plight of subaltern groups such as the Egyptian peasantry, they also help us to understand the potential force of literary narratives to question and interrupt the liberal rhetoric of colonial sovereignty.

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In ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi, Haqqi uses the narrative techniques of realism to frame the trial in the special military court through the focalising consciousness of the villagers, as well as the British military officers. Although the Egyptian characters standing trial are effectively silenced by the legal proceedings, the distance between the third-person narrator and the discursive performance of legal authority in the courtroom opens another rhetorical space in which the legal proceedings are open to question, critical scrutiny and judgement. In this way, the third-person narrator invites readers to act as judges in a trial of the legal foundations of colonial authority, and to trace the ways in which the colonial law of force has attempted to render expressionless the histories of the dispossessed through the specific legal spaces of exception enabled by British colonial rule in Egypt. If the juridical unconscious also names that which the lawful violence of sovereignty attempts to repress, literary texts can work to interrupt and defamiliarise the structures and rituals of legal narrative and rhetoric that work to legitimate routine forms of state violence and dispossession by presenting them as exceptional. By framing the fictional reconstruction of the trial in the special court in terms of a family tragedy, ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi uses the conventions of melodrama to give expression to the injustice of colonial sovereignty. In so doing, the novella invents a literary language to give expression to that which the special court tried to foreclose. If the atrocities at Denshawai exemplified the way in which the British colonial authorities sanctioned violence in Egypt through recourse to Khedival decrees, which were presented as exceptional, this rhetoric of exception has also provided a quasi-legal frame of reference for violent formations of sovereignty and dispossession in contemporary postcolonial Egypt. What Shenhav and Berda call the ‘legal and bureaucratic . . . exceptions’ (p. 348) of a shadow sovereign that the Denshawai episode came to symbolise are repeated in the more recent history of the Egyptian government’s use of torture to shore up its waning sovereignty. In an article that was first published as a blog post on the state killing of the Egyptian computer programmer, Khaled Mohamed Saeed, the novelist Alaa al Aswany draws a ‘saddening comparison’ between the circumstances of Saeed’s death at the hands of Hosni Mubarak’s security police and the sentences of hanging, flogging or forced imprisonment that Cromer’s administration imposed on the villagers at Denshawai in 1906. The scale of state torture perpetrated by Mubarak’s regime, al Aswany explains, may be significantly greater when compared to that of Cromer’s government: ‘After the Denshawai incident, the British occupation authorities had thirty-two Egyptians flogged’, whereas the number of documented cases of Egyptians tortured by the police between 2000 and 2008 ‘amounted to 275’.25 However, the crucial ground of comparison for Aswany concerns the way in which both Cromer’s colonial government and Mubarak’s ‘despotic’ government regarded the life of the Egyptian population: Despotic rulers, like an occupying power, seize and retain power by armed might. Despotic rulers, just like a foreign population, have no respect for the people they oppress. The occupiers see the natives as an inferior race; the despots see them as ignorant, lazy, and unable to behave democratically. In both cases, the people, in the eyes of their oppressors, are creatures of little understanding or competence. Respecting their wishes and their humanity would only spoil them and lead to their insurrection. (n.p.)

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Mindful of the risks at stake in flattening out significant historical differences between these two regimes of violence through superficial comparison, Al Aswany emphasises how the rhetoric of military occupation produced a particular mindset: ‘A British officer who tortured and killed Egyptians could claim to himself, falsely, that he was in a state of war, and that this entitled him to do things that would be banned in peacetime’ (n.p.). By contrast, Al Aswany contends that the Egyptian police who tortured and murdered Khaled Mohamed Saeed have no such excuse, since the ‘torturers know what they are doing is against the law, against custom, and against their faith’ (n.p.). By suggesting that the ‘prime responsibility’ for the murder of Khaled Mohamed Saeed lies with the head of state, however, Al Aswany also points to a more entangled history of state violence and law, which is embedded in the colonial foundations of the Egyptian state. This is not to suggest that the legal regime of contemporary Egypt under Mubarak was exactly the same as that of Cromer or that there is a relationship of simple continuity between these two historically disparate regimes. On the contrary, we have already seen how Cromer’s government produced a civilising rhetoric of normative ideals of justice and the rule of law, which were structured according to the temporal logic of a promise that was to be delivered at an indefinite point in the future. One effect of this liberal rhetoric was to reinforce the fictional idea of Cromer’s government as a veiled protectorate – a fiction that was finally abandoned in 1914, when Egypt was granted formal status as a British protectorate, and a state of martial law was declared. This shift in colonial policy prompted Cromer to reflect back on the period between 1882 and 1914, and the necessity of Egypt becoming a British protectorate. ‘After hanging in the balance for a period of thirty-three years [sic]’, writes Cromer, ‘the political destiny of Egypt has at last been definitely settled. The country has been incorporated into the British Empire. No other solution was possible.’26 The declaration of martial law in Egypt was of course consistent with the British government’s use of martial law elsewhere in the British Empire during the First World War. Considered in relation to the history of Britain’s liberal policy of indirect rule in Egypt between 1882 and 1914, however, the recourse to martial law in 1914 does not signal a straightforward break with Cromer’s government that can be explained away as a wartime measure. Rather, as Cromer’s comment intimates, martial law had always provided the British colonial state with a technique of governmentality that could be mobilised in conjunction with more liberal modes of power that encouraged compliance with the predominant colonial rule of law. If the British positivist tradition of the rule of law provided a broad legal framework through which to understand modern sovereignty, it also provided a set of terms in which repressive state practices that are conventionally understood as extralegal, such as the suspension of habeas corpus, the extension of police powers or the prohibition of public gatherings, can be framed and defined within the terms of the rule of law. The legal historian Nathan Brown has suggested that the emergency measures that have prevailed in Egypt from 1952 to 2012 have a ‘strong legal basis’ that ‘can be traced directly back to the British declaration of martial law in 1914’.27 Such measures may seem ‘contrary to any conception of liberal legality’ (p. 82), as Brown points out. Yet, in colonial Egypt, conceptions of liberal legality were themselves haunted by the spectre of state violence, as literary representations of the Denshawai episode suggest.

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If in the context of colonial Egypt, the positivist terms in which the law was expressed implied that the Egyptian peasantry would be liberated from a despotic Oriental past, it did so by subjecting their lives and bodies to the law-preserving violence of the modern colonial state, which was also a capitalist state. Such a detail is important because it makes clear how the British colonial state’s law of force was bound up with the system of international loans that became an increasingly important mechanism for European imperialist economies to expand across the colonial world. The civilising rhetoric of the colonial state might have promised to liberate the Egyptian peasantry from state regimes of forced labour; yet in the construction of the peasant as a subject of colonial law, the peasantry would nevertheless remain de facto subjects of colonial debt, who were forced to labour for private landowners in a realm that existed outside the jurisdiction of colonial law.28 That the subject of colonial law is at one and the same time a subject of debt may not seem surprising, particularly if one considers that the legal subject and penal law have their origins in commercial law, as Jacques Derrida has argued.29 Indeed, the Egyptian villagers who were condemned to death or corporal punishment following the events at Denshawai can be understood as paying a symbolic debt to a colonial state, whose veiled sovereignty over the territory, population and resources of Egypt was itself premised on the exorbitant financial debt that the Khedive owed to British and French banks. From the standpoint of Cromer’s administration, debt functioned as a technique of capital accumulation as well as providing a moral logic for the law-preserving violence of colonial sovereignty. If the brutal effects of such policies were codified in the liberal humanist rhetoric of colonial law and bureaucracy, literary representations of British colonial rule in Egypt can help to clarify the ways in which the colonial rhetoric of liberal reform belied the economic and political imperatives of Britain’s role in Egypt, and the violent measures that were used to achieve these goals. Literary representations of the practice of colonial governmentality in Egypt such as ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi and The Map of Love can shed significant new light on the ways in which the Egyptian peasantry were subjected to a regime of colonial debt – a regime that was aided and abetted by the bureaucratic machinery of the colonial rule of law. If the moral bankruptcy of such forms of subjection gave the lie to the liberal rhetoric of governmentality, it also foreshadows the waning sovereignty of neo-colonial regimes that continue to make use of legal and extralegal force in order to shore up their power and wealth. In this respect, a consideration of the ways in which the liberal rhetoric of rational economics, the rule of law and good government mask colonial practices of state execution, torture, forced labour and starvation have profound and far-reaching implications for understanding the colonial history of contemporary formations of liberal and neoliberal governmentality.

Notes 1. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Preface to Politicians’, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw Collected Plays with their Prefaces, vol. II (London: Bodley Head, 1971), p. 853. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 2. Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 22–6. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 3. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Consul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 95.

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4. Evelyn Baring Cromer, Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan & Co., 1911), p. 11. 5. Yehouda Shenhav and Yael Berda, ‘The Colonial Foundations of the State of Exception: Juxtaposing the Israeli Occupation with Colonial Bureaucratic History’, in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sārī Ḥanafī (eds), The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Boston: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 337–75; p. 351. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 6. Alfred Milner, England in Egypt (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), p. 34. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 7. Cromer, Modern Egypt, p. 445. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 8. House of Commons, Parliamentary Debates, 162 (4 August 1906), col. 1829, n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 9. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 158. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 10. Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 8–9. 11. Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 201. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 12. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 8–9. 13. Waïl S. Hassan, ‘Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 121:3 (2006), pp. 753–68; p. 757. 14. Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 145. 15. House of Commons, ‘Correspondence Respecting the Attack on British Officers at Denshawai’, Cd. 3086 (London: HMSO, 1906), p. 1. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 16. Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), p. 495. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 17. Waïl S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 176. 18. Mohammad Salama, Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History: Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion Since Ibn Khaldūn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 186. 19. Mahmud Tahir Haqqi, ‘The Maiden of Dinshway’, in Three Pioneering Egyptian Novels: The Maiden of Dinshway (1906), Eve without Adam (1934), and Ulysses’s Hallucinations or the Like (1985), trans. Saad el-Gabalawy (Fredericton: York Press, 1986), p. 8. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 20. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), p. 69. 21. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), pp. xix–xx. 22. Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Ḥaqqī, ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi (al-Qāhirah: al-Dār al-Qawmīyah li-al-Ṭibā‘ah wa-al-Nashr, 1964), p. 44. I am grateful to Islam El Naggar for her comments on this extract. 23. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 12. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 24. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, Selected Writings Volume IV 1938–1940, eds Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 392.

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25. Alaa al Aswany, ‘Alaa al Aswany’s Blog Post on the Murder of Khaled Saeed’, in Daniel Gumbiner, Diana Abouali and Elliott Colla (eds), Now that we Have Tasted Hope: Voices from the Arab Spring (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2012), n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 26. Evelyn Baring Cromer, Abbas II (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), p. xvii. 27. Nathan Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 82. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 28. See Esmeir, Juridical Humanity, pp. 150–61. 29. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), p. 218.

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Chapter 10 Peripheral Visions: TRANSLATIONAL POLEMICS AND FEMINIST ARGUMENTS IN COLONIAL EGYPT Marilyn Booth

F

rom mid-December 1909 through mid-May 1910, a Mademoiselle A. Couvreur delivered forty lectures in French on ‘Woman Across Historical Periods’ to an audience of about forty-five women under the auspices of the newly established Egyptian University, in a lecture hall in the fashionably ‘European’ new-build sector of downtown Cairo. Adolphine Couvreur was a teacher at the Lycée Racine in Paris, a beneficiary of French educators’ and feminists’ work on expanding females’ educational and professional opportunities.1 She was invited to lecture in Cairo by the university’s all-male founding board after Egyptian women requested a share in this new national educational institution. For nearly three years, 1909–12, the small ‘women’s section’ held its lecture series on Fridays, the weekly holiday when no male students or professors would be around; like most of the few European universities admitting women then, attendance did not lead to a degree.2 Although Egyptian and Syrian women would deliver lectures, the liberal men who instigated the university project responded to women’s request for courses not by going to local women – native speakers of Arabic who were already published writers and pedagogues – but by importing a French woman from Paris.3 Couvreur’s Cairo lectures frame this excursion into local engagements with gender politics in Europe in the context of feminist and gender-justice articulations in turnof-the-century Egypt. Although my focus is an 1892 exchange in print between two Arabophone women, as a debate illustrative of the compound sources of ‘local’ politics in colonial contexts, Couvreur’s invitation to speak in Cairo exemplifies the ongoing complexity of discursive and human networks that participated in constituting ‘East’ (the Ottoman Empire, Egypt) and ‘West’ (imperial nations of western Europe, the US) as distinct, mutually imagined ideological-social spaces, in the aftermath of the 1882 British occupation of Egypt. For that cataclysmic event and its long aftermath gave added focus to already-urgent questions about Egypt’s enmeshment in European political power, economic reach and cultural appeal – issues moulded everywhere by competing perspectives on gender management. This chapter is a critical consideration of how, in the wake of much postcolonial theorising, we should think about diverse moments of contact and exchange, which might (even simultaneously) both solidify and interrogate that ‘East’/‘West’ imaginary, but in ways that depart from the familiar paradigms about Europe-focused discourse in colonised or semi-colonised territories. For these seem particularly immoveable in discussions of the significance of gender to nationalisms in the shadow of imperialism in West Asia and North Africa. Couvreur’s presence in Cairo represents one familiar paradigm – ‘the West’ invited in, teaching the (very elite)

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‘rest’ – but even this equation seems quite problematic. However, her speeches and the role she was asked to play (and we cannot know what she thought about it all) are emblematic of European (and perhaps local haute-elite) assumptions about cultural hierarchies. In strong distinction to this, I juxtapose the earlier exchange between two Arabophone women born in the Lebanon, looking closely at how ‘European’ arguments underpinned their fierce debate. Between Couvreur and the 1892 debate, I ponder the usefulness of postcolonial paradigms for understanding these moments of connection and discursive appropriation.

Framing the Feminist Conversation Launching her first lecture, Couvreur announced that her series – and the invitation made to her – ‘respond to a liberal and generous idea: that women must associate themselves with the intellectual movement that is so lively in Egypt today’.4 Couvreur’s lectures were critical of French law and practice, respectful of local histories and usages (if mostly through overt reticence to speak about them), and wary of establishing civilisational hierarchies. She began her history proper with ancient Egyptian and Egyptian-Greek women. But in her opening words she appeared oblivious that since the 1880s, Egyptian and other Arabophone women had participated in a local-regional ‘intellectual movement’ (known as al-Nahḍa) as writers, readers and speakers – precisely the history of intellectual engagement that made conceivable women’s demands for a share in the national higher-education project. Not an area specialist, Couvreur presumably did not read Arabic. But as her subject was the social condition of the human female since antiquity (though mostly in France since the Gauls), and as she gestured to the contemporary moment and local scene, audience members might have hoped to find her aware that issues women discussed in turn-ofthe-century Parisian newspapers were also debated by women writing in Cairo and Beirut, and that many of those Arabophone women were familiar with sources and events referenced by Couvreur.5 Hers was not a ‘lite’ lecture series: the published version runs to 659 closely printed pages. Was this the first airing of the word féminisme publicly and in print in Egypt?6 (The lectures came out as a book in Cairo in 1910.) In the years when the term was becoming familiar to readers in Europe and North America, féminisme was part of a shared cosmopolitan lexicon for French and Egyptian elites ‘in conversation’ in Cairo even if this was, to use Shu-mei Shih’s term, an ‘asymmetrical cosmopolitanism’.7 But in this context, what did féminisme mean?8 Couvreur appeared initially positive about féminisme, but as her course wound on, references to acceptable (‘moderate’) and unacceptable (‘extreme’) feminism accumulated. To judge by her lectures, acceptable feminism was ameliorative, avoiding a thorough-going critique of patriarchal authority structures while gently critical of the everyday impacts on females of authoritarian masculinity as practiced within the family. It did not pose a structural challenge to the prevailing sex-gender system in France or that in Egypt. And then, there were Britain’s suffragettes.9 Couvreur did not oppose women’s suffrage outright but she expressed caution, and labelled the suffragettes’ doings folies. She would never call herself a feminist, she declared, out of fear of ridicule. Her gender-justice agenda (which included serious academic instruction for girls) assumed that biological differences defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ were fundamental to societies’ workings and individuals’ ambitions wherever in the world one was.

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Couvreur’s audience was crème de la crème – princesses of the Turkish-Egyptian royal family, wives and daughters of the highest officials and most elite families, European diplomatic wives, a few others. The historian longs to know what these women said amongst themselves in their parlours after the lectures. Some surely knew that such topics were not foreign to local newspaper readers, even if no Arabic term directly corresponded to féminisme. They might have recalled electric exchanges in mid-1890s periodicals, such as an escalating series of charges and counter-charges in al-Hilāl magazine (est. 1892) pitting a medical doctor writing from Ottoman Syria – his letters a spiral of misogynistic, pseudo-scientific views on women’s physiognomy and ‘nature’ – against a host of other readers (women and men) who expressed varying but not misogynistic attitudes. Both sides drew on European histories and texts. Surely, Couvreur’s audience remembered the furore over a book published by Egyptian lawyer Qāsim Amīn (1863–1908) in 1899, Taḥrīr al-mar’a (Emancipation of Women), precipitating an onrush of responses from supportive to intensely antagonistic.10 Couvreur’s elite audience was familiar with ‘Europe’ on many levels: this did not mean they were uncritical. (Some listeners likely came from families who would assume roles in the post-World War One movement that partially dislodged the British.) Couvreur’s opening words suggested hospitality to local women’s activism but seemed not to recognise that it already existed: that her lectures followed more than two decades of local women’s commentaries on the state of society, made public through print dissemination and women’s by-lines, not to mention women’s organising of intellectual and charity societies.11 These accomplished women in her audience were conscious of how engaged women already were in questions of gender justice, feminism and nation-building, but also of how vast the need was for educational materials and institutions for females. Labība Hāshim (1882–1952), founder-editor of Fatāt al-sharq (Young woman of the east, est. 1906), who attended Couvreur’s first lecture, criticised the decision to offer lectures in French as useless to ‘all but one out of every thirty thousand women’ in Egypt. She contrasted the audience – ‘no more than twenty nationals [waṭaniyyāt]’ attending the lecture to the ‘waves of women, like an entire ocean’ who had attended an Arabic-language speech by the Egyptian educator and writer Malak Ḥifnī Nāṣif (1882–1918) at the headquarters of one of Egypt’s recently formed political parties, Ḥizb al-umma.12 Couvreur in Egypt, féminisme in 1909 Cairo: ‘translations’ that remind us how prevalent the tendency has been to think feminisms through or from Europe and in its languages; to think of feminism as always elsewhere, borrowed or ever belated, rather than as coevally produced across locales, in the sense of ‘coeval’ established by Johannes Fabian – that is, as a recognition of existing and communicating in a shared time-space, a refusal to countenance the imperial notion of belatedness in a doctrine of civilisationally differential ‘progress’, a notion of contemporaneity that recognises difference but does not hierarchise it.13 Scholars of empire have drawn our attention to the work of European imperial feminisms, the channels and investments by which they were complicit in colonial histories. We witness that legacy as disastrously alive in the twenty-first century, providing neo-colonial pretexts and lexica for continued ‘interventions’ and also a usefully tainted history (feminism as forever a foreign body) invoked by local opponents of feminist activisms in order to reject them as inauthentic.14 But there are other histories, too; moments of listening, of feeling equally entitled, as a coeval subject, to take and reuse – even creatively misread, and certainly reframe. But of course that sense of coeval entitlement may not be reciprocated, may

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be misrecognised, may not be heard – may not, in the spirit of reciprocity which the term seems to embody – be coeval in the end. It is important in light of this to consider the broader discursive structures in which the cross-contextual conversation on feminism must be read.

Other Conversations, Other Sightings Postcolonial Studies has embraced poststructuralist critiques of binary cultural-political categories, the legacy of European-Enlightenment thinking and its entanglement with imperial projection. But postcolonial scholarship’s commitment to the histories that ‘East’/‘West’ and other binary formulations of civilisational difference conceal has not inoculated it fully against rhetorical binarities inherited from colonial and anti-colonial idioms. These have sometimes been assumed as descriptive – as empirical assessments rather than as rhetorical or prescriptive discursive strategies. Sometimes this view has been perpetuated by the diagnostics of Saidean Orientalism as a critical-analytic lens that focuses on difference and distance to the point that it keeps at a blurry periphery instances of crossovers and communications. Concerning gender management (and feminist articulations), overreading the colonial power grid as the organising determinant of political imaginations can obscure the nuanced, productive, argumentative uses that speakers in a colonised space made of ‘Western’ discourses and actions in the service of their own local agendas. Impressive historical scholarship over the past thirty years on gender activism, nation-building, changes to law and social mores in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, based on deep archival work and discourse analysis, has not fully erased the tendency to survey the discursive field of colonial-era Egypt’s ‘woman question’ in dichotomous terms. Commentator-activists of the time (and the newspapers they edited or in which they wrote) seen as Europe-leaning are assumed to have been more-or-less supportive of imperialist agendas – and so their stances on ‘the woman question’ are assumed to be Europhilic without further scrutiny. Other individuals are seen as implacably critical of European gender arrangements arising from what is seen as an authentically indigenous, politically resistant stance on imperialism. It is also usually not recognised that individuals articulating a revolutionary politics concerning governance, the state and the economy could be deeply conservative on gender, and in fact vice versa.15 Sometimes (though certainly not always) it is further inferred that politics followed individuals’ confessional-communal associations. Formation and experience do shape politics but not in predictable ways. And surely the opposite of contestation is not always complicity.16 Work on Egypt emerged in the scholarly penumbra of historical research engaging questions of gender in the imperialised Indian subcontinent. That scholarship has been crucial to the comparative assessment of how late-colonial politics were shaped by gender as a categorical organiser of the social, and to the recognition that ‘women’ constituted a key symbol, site and object for nationalists and imperialists both, on each cluster’s home ground and in defining the cultural-political territory of its adversaries.17 Partha Chatterjee’s influential formulation of male nationalists’ responses to the colonial challenge as (at least discursively) carving out private spaces of local impermeability to contain and protect women and the family has been refined and contested. This has meant recognising that women were not only objects but also

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actors in processes of nation formation and collective resistance; and that as much as feminist and gender-activist initiatives have been imbricated in nationalism, feminists have not always regarded ‘the nation’ as upholding their interests.18 But it remains important to recognise that, in Ania Loomba’s words, ‘women on both sides of the colonial divide demarcate both the innermost sanctums of race, culture and nation, as well as the porous frontiers through which these are penetrated. Their relationship to colonial discourses is mediated through this double positioning.’19 Thus, how and where to place ‘women’ in and outside the nation, or astride it, is a crucial issue because questions of gender as an organising social rubric sat at the very centre of formations of both colonialism and anti-colonial nationhood, in Egypt as elsewhere. Leila Ahmed’s reading of Qāsim Amīn’s Emancipation of Women as a misogynistic work of colonial mimicry gave impetus to the view that local stances on gender at the Egyptian fin-de-siècle were governed by pro- or anti-occupation views within overarching worries about Western influence. As will be elaborated below, while local attitudes to, and arguments over, the ideal society with gender arrangements at the core were shaped by differing views on ‘Europe’, we cannot extrapolate from this a neatly lined-up correlation between such views, attitudes to the occupying power (often with dissimilar attitudes towards other European nations) and agendas on the ground. Recent work has nuanced this picture by bringing other voices to the fore and rereading Amīn.20 But perhaps we can further destabilise paradigms of antinomy by looking at lateral relationships and connections across borders, ways that modes of resistance were mutually constitutive or inspiring, an ethos of conversation.21 Peripheral visions and adjacent histories: how our subjects were looking in more than one direction, parsing ‘the metropole’ through other, local and adjacent centres; and seeing ‘Europe’ not always as a model yet often as a talking point relevant to local debates in complicated ways.22 Through the nineteenth century, the status of women, the significance of this to society’s well-being, questions of legal rights within marriage, and the desirability, siting and content of girls’ education had been interrelated topics of public debate amongst intellectuals in Egypt and the Levant as they had been across Europe, the Indian subcontinent, China and Japan, and the Americas. Despite crucial local variability, the substance, tenor and heterogeneity of published debates over such issues would be as familiar to readers in Cairo, Beirut or Sao Paolo as they were in Paris, Hyderabad or Prague. The circulation of texts through translation, and specific ways texts were rewritten for diverse audiences, informed local discourses. We need to think more about the contemporaneity of such debates across many locales, their production contexts, and what intersections, cultural translations, parallel agendas – and incommensurabilities or mistranslations – they suggest.23 We need, in other words, peripheral visions. If the British occupation forced a new dimension to what was already recognised as a dilemma (namely, in what ways was ‘Europe’ internal to Arab societies?) then the era’s polemics ‘on women’ must be analysed doubly. This was a local discourse circulating among a growing constituency of readers, and also a response to or dialogue with European interlocutors who had fixed on ‘woman’ as a problem justifying (amongst numerous justifications) European tutelage and political control. Arabophone thinkers had generally seen this as conversation amongst equals, lateral discussion amongst differently sited intellectuals (mostly male), rather than as vertical-hierarchical, West-East

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pedagogical relationships.24 Vertical relations of pedagogy were constructed, rather, partly through local male intellectuals’ adaptations of and responses to European writings, which they redirected to a local audience, where women and girls were constructed as the ultimate tutees. In such works, actually existing women appear more objects than subjects. Women, on the other hand, whatever their perspective, tended to write from a collective ‘we’ that ranged between ‘society’ and gendered subject positions, using writings from imperial metropoles and reported actions sited in them to further their agendas, which might or might not coincide with those of their intellectual peers among men. For all, translational polemics re-presented European (and Ottoman, Persian and Indian) works, concepts and exempla to local audiences. Not only overt translations but also works rooted in Arabic writerly traditions translated concepts and rhetorics of European provenance into local debates. Attending to these engagements as complex cultural translations helps us to elucidate competing agendas locally in their searching ambiguity and overlaps. I consider a specific instance of the tactical discursive exploitation of ‘Europe’, seeing it as an intervention made not to dismiss European practices but rather to use and interrogate them for local purposes, and sometimes expressing contingent, distantiated solidarity. When we consider the discursive politics of gender less as a neo-patriarchal adjunct of colonialist-national/ist politics of contestation or accommodation, and more as a varied field of action intersecting with nationalism and other rhetorical loyalties, we can appreciate that some actors had crosscutting interests and possibly ambivalent philosophical and political loyalties, not to mention partial information. (We must also recognise the simultaneous presence of different positions in individuals’ writings, and submit that what appear to us as contradictory messages may not have seemed so to them or their readers, or were posed as tactical approaches to particular audiences.) It becomes more difficult to see local actors as imperial echoes, to identify them with statically pro-‘Western’ or anti-‘Western’ stances, or to read allegiances from origins. As we continue, as Leela Gandhi implies is needed, to ‘foreground those cultural and historical conversations which circumvent the Western world’,25 let us also listen to the translational polemics of creative, critical but locally useable appropriations of metropolitan texts and historical moments. For these were not passive readings. The historiographical task therefore becomes all the more urgent: attending closely to the many languages of local praxis (including how they defined ‘local’), and remembering with Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan that ‘the way terms get co-opted constitutes a form of practice’26 and that omissions and erasures are articulations too. At the University in 1912, Egyptian educator Nabawiyya Mūsā (1886–1951) offered a lecture series for women – this time, a woman-centric history of Egypt. In an article on her motives, Mūsā noted the performative possibilities of such endeavours: I want to make women come alive, even if in name rather than in reality. As it gets said that they were gathering today at the University to engage in discussion, so speech will become living reality. A person can acquire a particular persona merely by pretending it, and then growing accustomed to it. . . . Before long, we’ll see hundreds in the lecture hall . . . sworn to go every Friday until it becomes such a habit that we need not advertise.27

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Pointedly, Mūsā criticised male peers who – Arabising European sources on ancient Egypt – had deleted what those sources said on women (p. 40). A rejoinder of sorts to Couvreur’s France-heavy feminine history, Mūsā’s series also pushed back against local men, using European scholars’ work to attack local versions of Egypt’s ancient history on grounds that they deliberately erased women’s history, and drawing on stadial historiography to remind readers that women’s status in a given milieu was a gauge of society’s well-being. We must appreciate local, historically specific instances like this one of how representations of gender operating in Euro-American contexts were discursively exploited elsewhere, not least in colonised contexts, not always negatively. How did féminisme infuse local debates, not only through European visitors but within locally produced circuits of debate, even (or especially) if the term féminisme was not yet in local usage? How do we hear the localness of such ‘imports’ – their meaningfulness, their sensed tactical efficacy – without reducing them to versions of colonial mimicry?

Suffrage ‘There’, Suffrage ‘Here’ The summer of 1892 saw a heated exchange, mostly in the pages of one Cairo newspaper, between two women who did not speak French and would not attend Couvreur’s lectures seventeen years later. Towards the end of June, an article on ‘Woman and politics’ (‘al-Mar’a wa-al-siyāsa’) by the Lebanese writer Hannā Kasbānī Kūrānī (1870–98) appeared in issue 71 of the Ba‘abda, Lebanon based newspaper Lubnan.28 Kūrānī had published in Beirut venues for at least two years. A native of the town of Kafr Shīmā, Lebanon, born into a Maronite family, Kūrānī attended the American missionary school there, the British School in Shemlan and the American Girls’ School in Beirut. After graduating, she taught briefly in the American Girls’ School in Tripoli before turning to writing. In addition to periodical essays and a book on education and society, she is said to have translated two novels from English into Arabic.29 On 14 July a response appeared in the Egyptian newspaper al-Nīl (est. 1890) authored by another writer of Lebanese origin though from a different environment, Zaynab Fawwāz (c. 1850–1914). From the Shī‘ī community of south Lebanon, Fawwāz had immigrated to Egypt and was informally educated. Over a decade beginning in 1892 she produced a biographical dictionary of world women in history, a play, two novels and a series of newspaper and magazine essays republished in collected form in 1905.30 Kūrānī and Fawwāz were amongst the diverse group of women throughout the Ottoman Empire’s Arabophone territories – including Egypt and Lebanon – who were already part of the ‘intellectual movement’ of which Couvreur would later speak. In November 1892 the first Arabic journal for women would be founded in Alexandria by Lebanese sisters. Fawwāz and Kūrānī both published in al-Fatāt (The Young Woman). By the time of Fawwāz’s and Kūrānī’s exchange, the British occupation of Egypt was a decade old. Although the official British line remained that the occupation was ‘temporary’, by the early 1890s as more and more British men inhabited Egyptian government offices (drawing salaries from Egyptian coffers), and British ‘oversight’ became increasingly entrenched, Egyptians recognised that this was no passing sojourn. A growing constituency called for immediate withdrawal, a position elaborated in the impressively fierce columns of recently emerged nationalist newspapers. Egypt’s

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all-but-named colonial situation coloured local reception of practices associated with European societies, as did Europeans’ highly visible presence in Egypt’s economy and Egyptians’ awareness of European imperialisms’ broader geopolitical context. (The nationalist press reported regularly on British-controlled India and French-occupied areas of North Africa.) Concerned, critical admiration of European cultural and political institutions evident in pre-occupation writings was tempered further as writers emphasised the self-interested manoeuverings of European powers and warned of local ramifications. This political terrain grounded local arguments about how to attain national ‘advance’ (taqaddum) and ‘civic modernity’ (tamaddun), and what these processes meant, given the circumstances. In print, ‘Europe’ was a contentious signifier. Even as ‘Europe’ stood in for material phenomena and communications technologies that were allowed cautiously to be desirable, ‘Europe’ as a symbol of consumerism and moral degeneracy (seen as intertwined phenomena) loomed large. ‘Europe’ was at its most contentious when it came to family, sexuality and social space. Arguments about how young men, and women of all ages, were allegedly behaving, the spaces they were occupying, and the goods they were buying and wearing, stood in for competing notions of modernity as they did elsewhere, including in Europe itself. Stances did not line up with identitarian allegiances such as religious belonging and associated communal-legal apparatuses, or with cross-national networks that communal allegiances did sometimes foster.31 The continuous condemnation of behaviour was a shared focus, an artefact of this contentious imaginary of the gendered-generationalindigenous national-modern. In the thematically and generically overlapping venues provided by newspapers, novels, conduct books, advice columns and satirical magazines, young educated urbanites were portrayed as embracing superficially adopted, financially ruinous and morally perilous ‘European’ habits: young Arab men haunting bars and preferring European wives; young Arab women reading French novels, donning corsets, learning Italian, eschewing housework, having visiting cards printed, and spending their father’s or husband’s hard-earned income on luxury items. Local reportage in the nationalist daily al-Mu’ayyad (est. 1889) decried the presence of women in bars and on streets, and feared the consequences of ethnic, class and gender mixing.32 Whether or to what degree such things were happening was less important to ratcheting up public controversy than was the endless circulation of such representations, their ‘reality effect’. This is not to discount the real anxieties that no doubt many people did feel in a rapidly changing milieu. The ‘contagion’ of European ways provided convenient arguments for those wanting to keep women out of public spaces, gender-mixed gatherings and elite professions. Thus, a discursive binary was produced locally in the interests of policing behaviour and spatial access, a dichotomisation produced within colonised space, arising from and productive of genuine concern about the daily effects of cultural and political imperialism. In this context, not only did positive references to European women risk accusations of support for ‘westernisation’ as a shorthand for degenerate, almost nationally traitorous, behaviour; if the speaker was female, the autobiographical fallacy lurked: did her words indicate her habits, a fatal attraction to ‘European’ ways in their most provocative forms?33 Since the context of occupation heightened the significance and peril of using ‘Europe’ in the name of local agendas, especially concerning gendered spaces of work and sociality, for women in Egypt to draw approvingly on

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contemporary events in the colonising societies of Europe might be hazardous. Yet feminism (and other kinds of women’s public work) in Europe pervaded discussion on local gender politics in the historical moment when such practices were materialising and being contested on their home grounds. ‘Elsewhere’ was part of the local with regards to elite women’s activism and sense of history, long before Couvreur came to Cairo to lecture. Thus, the local visibility of practices defined as European and the introduction of European elements into local discourse generated accusations that (certain) intellectuals were practicing an unthinking emulation that could only encourage the vulnerable young – a betrayal of the nation’s future. As suggested earlier, scholars have sometimes taken such statements as indicative of an ethno-religious identitarian polarisation of views. But the actual exchanges were more nuanced and less predictable than a dichotomised categorisation allows. It is not that writers at the time were not genuinely perturbed by scenes they witnessed and things they read. It is also well established that certain periodical editors had allegiance to the British (and were funded by them), though support for British policy did not always translate into support for the adoption of European social institutions and behaviours associated with them (especially concerning gender relations and women’s spatial and professional access). Precisely because of the thoughtful engagement displayed in writings by well-known culture workers and those whose names have slipped into historiographical oblivion,34 and to appreciate the complexity of theorising around gender, it is worth contemplating the ways intellectuals took risks to ‘think Europe’ critically and positively, and rarely dismissively. The use of binarised figures in the era’s polemical exchanges notwithstanding, for some commentators on the politics of gender, ‘Europe’ was neither a figure of uncontextualised emulation nor of outright rejection. Thinkers were neither intellectually colonised, producing little more than derivative echoes of European thought that marked them as self-Orientalising subjects, in a kind of induced colonial passivity, nor authenticated voices immune to seductions of the West – a figuration that carries its own unfortunate, sexualised baggage. The material I consider allows an approach to the textual politics of invoking ‘Europe’ from the speaking position of a colonised subject as (sometimes) a connective move yet simultaneously a provocative commitment to disputation (munāẓara). Through citational practices and rhetorical frameworks that hailed indigenous modes of discursive engagement, women made women’s activisms elsewhere locally relevant. One extensively used citational practice was that of exemplary biography: Zaynab Fawwāz brought life histories of temporally remote or spatially distant subjects into the orbit of local readers’ lived experience and aspiration, a practice adopted by women’s magazines.35 More provocatively (because more rhetorically direct), Fawwāz exploited European women’s public political campaigns to signal desire and capability as both cross-societal and local, as a coeval presence ‘here’ and in the world, but simultaneously as (ambiguously?) distinct from local experience. Such articulations might put in question assumptions about the unalterability of uneven discursive power dynamics between colonised and coloniser (even as the seriously uneven quality of material and discursive power was also kept in play through public argumentation). In this and other essays and speeches, including one reproduced in Fawwāz’s biographical dictionary,36 Kūrānī argued for a divinely decreed, nature-bound, immutable gender order with well-defined impermeable boundaries of gendered work mapped

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onto a domestic-public divide. She blamed women for the tensions of modern marriage on the basis of neglect, vanity and a failure to exercise sufficient diplomacy in the marital relationship. She addressed tarbiya – home training and formal education as formers of character – but did not envision it as a pathway to a more flexible understanding of the sex-gender system as fixed onto clearly mapped social/spatial sites.37 In this essay, Kūrānī deplored women’s national-political aspirations as represented by suffragists in Britain and affirmed the value of women’s domestic work. Fawwāz assailed Kūrānī’s unequivocal assignment of appropriate spaces and activities along gendered lines. Fawwāz used strong language, overwhelming her diction of conventional polite published exchange, maintaining an ambiguity of subject (Is it Kūrānī? Or her writing?). Lubnān spoke [qālat] under the title ‘Woman and politics’ authored by the excellent litterateuse Hanā Kūrānī, the ultimate – and may I speak only the truth [‘alā dhimmat al-ḥaqq] – in form, a marvel at delicacy of meaning, except for going astray in her/its judgment, severely reproaching the daughters of her kind, imposing on them seclusion to the home, working to forbid them from any outside involvement concerning men’s occupations.38 Fawwāz paraphrased Kūrānī as claiming that if women exceed or transgress the domestic-public boundary, the order of the universe would be altered and human society annihilated: She directed the arrows of censure at the women of England for demanding to be involved in the business of politics. She is referring – as the honourable readers will recognize – to the election bill comprising the women’s demand, and how it was thwarted by Mr Gladstone in the Parliament of England. The respected writer accuses them of grievous error. The respected litterateur and editor of Lisān al-ḥāl [a major Beirut newspaper, est. 1877] agrees with her. I want to begin setting down the thoughts roaming through my head with this: Your remedy is within you, yet you cannot see it Your malady is your making, yet you will not sense it In your reckoning you are naught but a tiny body alone When enfolded within you is the largest world known.39 These lines gesture to the most local political body of all, the sensing individual in her body. Fawwāz appears to exploit Kūrānī’s emphasis on women’s childbearing capacity as defining women’s sphere wholly. She does not define ‘the largest world known’. It could refer to the children of the future – to women’s reproductive and educative faculties – or to the brain as seat of intellect, will and action. It might gesture to the world that encompasses but is beyond the home. It seems to press against Kūrānī’s division of that world into inside and outside along gendered lines. And it suggests women’s responsibility for failing to think expansively. In London, on 27 April 1892, the most recent of many woman suffrage bills presented in Parliament was narrowly defeated by twenty three votes, following publication of a letter from former and future Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809–98), MP, to

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evangelist Samuel Smith (1836–1906), MP. Both were opponents of women’s suffrage; as Prime Minister, Gladstone had rejected the 1866 bill John Stuart Mill (1806–73) submitted to Parliament. Gladstone’s letter (dated 11 April 1892) provoked protest, including from suffragist leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929). It was partially translated into Arabic and published in Lisān al-ḥāl, becoming part of a local Arabophone conversation.40 Fawwāz did not call her article ‘Woman and politics’, but rather, ‘Fairness’ or ‘Justice’ (‘al-Inṣāf’). The bulk of it did not address the suffrage bill directly, but offered a non-gendered account of human accomplishment as the outcome of human perseverance, with a world-history narrative that echoed European-Enlightenment accounts. The gender-inflected, diffusionist European-Enlightenment discourse of world history as a stadial temporality extending gradually to include more human groups, sharpened in its hierarchical assumptions by social-Darwinist ideas, was common amongst commentators on gender in many milieus. Those experiencing such views from the ‘receiving’ end of European imperialisms parsed them critically while utilising the prominence they could give women as makers of modernity. For local readers, did this difficult, even contradictory, balancing act make sense? That this European-provenant discourse envisioned Europe (or Britain specifically) as the envied endpoint of civilisational development was not a notion to be imported wholesale, nor did its convenience for the imperial doctrine of mission civilisatrice go unnoticed by that doctrine’s putative targets. But as a political strategy stadial history could offer a narrative of potential. Why not use its discourse on civilisation as a process of cultivating intellect and emotion as crucial to social relations to highlight women’s intellectual and social capacities as agents and models of change? The European-Enlightenment focus on pedagogy was exploited by proponents of girls’ expanded education everywhere. Feminists in Britain were quick to notice this narrative’s utility to a critique of gendered unfreedom at home – literally, in the home, and in British society at large – through the accusation that ‘home’ bore ‘remnants of Eastern despotism’.41 That an unreflective imperial and Eurocentric outlook marked such critiques did not necessarily obviate the notion’s translational possibilities. If its elaboration could ‘g[i]ve an air of inevitability to imperial expansion by taking it out of the realm of political decision-making’, in Margrit Pernau’s words (p. 55), it could also emphasise the civilising mission as aimed ultimately at securing a people’s freedom. Its ‘logical exclusions’ could be repurposed by colonialism’s targets. Fawwāz could have read versions of stadial history in writings and translations by her peers. She and others made the most of its multivalent potential while assessing its imperialist overtones and implications. Fawwāz and her contemporaries consistently modified the outlines of the European-Enlightenment narrative by privileging medieval Arab contributions to the entire arc of existing sciences and arts, noting Arabic origins and interventions as fundamental to Europe’s later flourishing. This renarrativisation repositioned stadial history as a locally available reform discourse based on a narrative of indigenous origins. And it was easy enough, within this resituated world-history narrative, to introduce examples of Arab female predecessors renowned for learning, artistry and innovative work in many areas. But Fawwāz’s account of global forward social movement, in her first rejoinder to Kūrānī, did position ‘the West’ as a contemporary collective subject of vigour, having ‘shaken off . . . the malady of lethargy’. The ultimate demonstration of its modernity

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was the fact that ‘the women have come to vie and share with the men in what they do’. She was echoing and reversing Kūrānī’s diction, for the latter saw women’s ‘vying and sharing’ as precisely what was wrong in the world. And since the general consensus among most people there is that man and woman possess the same mental ability and are full members of the social body – each unable to function without the other – then what can the objection be to women sharing in men’s occupations and taking up work in political circles. . . . Otherwise, what is the point of Western women getting educated in all the fields men are educated in? . . . [Women were] not created to not venture beyond domestic space.42 As focused as Fawwāz was on non-domestic work and national politics, her language addressed the ‘global’ question of public space as a feminine domain. As noted, this issue exercised writers across the Ottoman Empire, as middle-class and elite women were more visibly occupying public spaces bodily and through signed publication. (Their less-well-off compatriots had no choice but to be publicly visible; work in fields, factories and markets demanded it, as writing women, including Fawwāz, noted.) Fawwāz’s performative locution offered an image of ‘Europe’ that glossed over internal diversity. Moreover, it could hardly have been said that a ‘general consensus’ prevailed in Europe (‘there’) concerning women’s place in the social-political order (not to mention which women). Across the continent, to varying degrees and with different histories, the 1890s comprised a decade of visible organisation for women’s rights (however defined), and therefore also of fierce pushback.43 Against Kūrānī’s universe of divinely appointed natural sex-gender differences and their spatialisation, Fawwāz proposed – by assuming – a sort of gender utopia, constructed through her generalised historical account in order to argue for the rightness and indeed, inevitability (in a stadial framework) of women’s public and political work. This utopic space she presented rather as an existing heterotopia, always possible but occurring elsewhere, at a site called ‘Europe’, allowing some imaginative latitude.44 This is not to deny that Fawwāz may well have genuinely seen Europe from afar as a fairly homogeneous space of gender-neutral (or gender-inclusive) opportunity, though surely her acute sense of local economic disparities and what that meant for women affected her views of European societies, even if in this exchange she was silent on that issue, whether for lack of knowledge or tactical reasons of argumentation. What is significant is that Fawwāz’s proposition opened the possibility that coeval change locally was possible, but without actually calling for it. Her historical narrative – inclusive of earlier Arab-Muslim pre-eminence – subtly supported this. She instantiated another canny performative act in leaving ambiguous whether she was referring only to women in Britain or to women everywhere and anywhere. She and Kūrānī had both set up their universals. The ensuing exchange – the venom of it was unusual for women publishing in the press, but perhaps this was part of the point – was partly a working out of ‘universal’ positions on the grounds of the local, which included local understandings of the public politics of gender in Britain. Fawwāz highlighted Kūrānī as warning of the cosmic dangers of straying across the boundaries of decreed gendered tasks. She did not emphasise that Kūrānī forcefully noted her ‘irritation’ with those who sought to assign relative worth or importance to women’s and men’s spheres, and stated emphatically that they were of equal merit. Kūrānī’s views appear consonant with arguments made by opponents of women’s suffrage in Britain.

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Kūrānī made a ‘thin-end-of-the-wedge’ argument not dissimilar to the views set out in Gladstone’s letter to Smith. If women secured the vote, Gladstone argued, then logically women would soon sit in Parliament, which in turn meant women could not be denied the possibility of positions in government including the highest ones. Gladstone disavowed concern about what this might mean professionally for men, submerging that issue in another anxiety, with indirect reference to a ‘cosmic’ order: his overriding worry was that public life would destroy ‘woman’s character’. I have no fear lest the woman should encroach upon the power of the man. The fear I have is, lest we should invite her unwittingly to trespass upon the delicacy, the purity, the refinement, the elevation of her own nature, which are the present sources of its power . . . The stake is enormous.45 Kūrānī, too, feared for women’s ‘delicacy’ in her home-making tasks. Kūrānī and Gladstone shared a contradictory position, upholding a principle of fixed gender difference while suggesting the fragility or nullity of this by warning how easily it could be upset. Fawwāz saw nothing ‘natural’ about aligning gender assignment, character traits and spheres of work along a fixed sex-gender axis. She took a swipe at the argument that trained domesticity should be the overriding goal and substance of female education, commenting that women pick up the relevant skills ‘naturally’ from other women.46 She remarked that there existed no holy scripture in any revealed religion that decreed keeping women out of ‘men’s work’. Fawwāz gave examples of authoritative women wielding political power, from Zenobia to Cleopatra to Elizabeth I (‘and we did not see in their intrusion into the affairs of men anything that violated/upset the system of nature or detracted from the management of their homes, rather the family system continued as it was’). Likewise, ‘history informs us how Bedouin women participated with the men in work and wars’ (pp. 22–3). Ancient Bedouin women showed up frequently in debates on visibility and gender-appropriate work. (By referring to ‘wars’ without further detail, Fawwāz left open whether she was referencing women in combat or in supportive care roles.) Less typically, Fawwāz held up as examples women working in commercial establishments in European cities and the poor women amongst us in Cairo, Alexandria and everywhere, most working just like men – traders, artisans, those toiling alongside men in the building trade . . . In the countryside one sees as many peasant women as peasant men out working . . . Surveying the affairs of this world, the intelligent person notices that the two sexes are equal. Neglect, nothing more, has imposed backwardness on women. (pp. 23–4) According to Fawwāz, Kūrānī had deployed ‘neglect’ to characterise women’s attitude to their defined sphere of work; Fawwāz turned it around to signify society’s (or men’s) neglect of women. Now she returned to the suffrage question: I do not find fault with the women of England for involving themselves in political affairs and demanding the right to vote. Rather, I say: Yes, they have the right to demand this course as long as they are capable of performing their duties as men perform theirs. (p. 24)

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Like war work, Fawwāz left ‘duties’ undefined: did this signify domestic and family duties? Or wage-earning work and other ‘duties’? These women would have studied ‘the laws of politics’, added Fawwāz, since in Europe, women studied everything men studied. ‘Why should she not demand to be employed in politics as she is in commerce, commodity production and other areas of which human beings have need in this earthly life[?]’ (p. 24). But if human determination had produced the good(s) of society, it also systematically encountered setbacks, and the women of England were not to be censured for this one: Were it not for the opposition of those who hold the reins of power in their hands, like Mr Gladstone and others, the women’s bill would not have encountered this blockage. It was not stopped for any reason that would indicate either incapacity on their [the women’s] part or necessary caution about consequences [if the bill passed]. No, upon my life! They [the men] regarded it with the eye of envious rancour, considering it a sort of competitive struggle over rights. So there was a lot of clamour and din, and foolish talk, and it all got out of control. The crisis intensified and things played out as they did. (pp. 24–5) Fawwāz ended by assigning censure differently. As for the women who favoured rejecting this bill, they – and pardon me – are more properly to blame than are others, because they chose isolation and laziness, and preferred idleness to work, content with pageantry and dragging their hems across lethargy’s carpets. If they had striven like their sisters, they would have done what their duty requires, showing determination and desire to serve the species and nation. This would be more fitting of them. (p. 25) Fawwāz coupled al-‘amal, ‘work’, with ‘serving the homeland’, thus linking her focus on gender activism to active patriotism. That was a standard rhetorical move, and likely Kūrānī saw her own writing as marking an equally active, pro-woman, pro-society agenda, albeit a different one.47 Al-‘amal could signify spheres of work Kūrānī rejected for females, or it could denote ‘action’ more generally, including writing for publication, which Kūrānī approved. That Fawwāz used the suffrage issue in England to ground active patriotism may suggest a concept of political work founded on the rights of the ungendered political subject, though (significantly?) she did not further define ‘rights’. ‘Women’s persistence in demanding progress until they obtain their rights’, she concluded, ‘is not to be considered as either an error or a defect. Rather, they ought to take everlasting pride in doing so, and be praised for opening the door of success to their sisters.’ That Fawwāz titled this essay ‘al-Inṣāf’ suggests a parallel notion of ‘right’ – ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ in representing women (in both senses of ‘representing’) and/in their struggle for rights: ‘fairness’ as distinct from a concept of legal justice (‘adl), but also, as her second response to Kūrānī would suggest, justice in evaluating both sides of a debate. Kūrānī’s counter-response to ‘al-Inṣāf’, published on 7 August 1892, quoted Fawwāz’s criticism of women who opposed the bill and called it ‘insulting’. In her next response (14 August), Fawwāz berated Kūrānī for misunderstanding her. ‘I was

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astonished at the palpable sharpness that seized the aforementioned writer when she read my article, to the point that she did not understand what I wrote and did not distinguish among the meanings I cast amongst the waves of The Nile’.48 Her article had been ‘based on the concern and striving of Western women, not Eastern women; I took some Egyptian women as corroboration because of intimations of imitation and heavy censure discharged from her mouth to her pen’.49 Only in her final and longest response, published a fortnight later, did Fawwāz quote Kūrānī at greater length, as having said in her original essay: ‘A number of Englishwomen believed the statement of Mr. Gladstone and did not reckon his opposition to be prejudicial to their rights or dismissive of their situation, rather they thanked him for his devoted and sincere service.’50 Now Fawwāz explained that her criticism had been directed only at those women, whom Kūrānī had invoked. Yet, in the unspecified context of her first response, it was easily readable as a critique of Kūrānī herself and by extension, of any woman urging women to ‘stay’ in their homes. The ambiguity (or nastiness) of Fawwāz’s comment – with its interjected ‘and pardon me’, intimating an unpleasant target or topic, and perhaps mock-apologising for a hard rejoinder – suggests a shrewd self-positioning in local practices and politics but with gestures to cross-societal concerns. Her oeuvre makes clear her awareness of differences in women’s situations across class, region, society and communal-religious affiliation. Yet her writing intimated that responses to these conditions – and feminist initiatives around them – were not always so different the world over. She did not present a European feminism as universally valid, but as exemplary in its own site and only thus as translatable for others’ uses. Did her analysis of patriarchy offer a gesture of solidarity? At the least, she used an event in British feminism for a local and cross-societal perspective on gendered work and national politics, while supporting feminist actions in Britain. Both Kūrānī (who wrote from Lebanon) and Fawwāz were Lebanese Ottoman subjects; did anti-colonial thinking have valence for them? There are hints that Fawwāz was strongly Egypt-identified, and passages in her writing clarify that she was neither oblivious to the objectives of European imperial projects nor complacent about their impact, though her fiercest objections would surface publicly only eight years later. By 1900, in the context of escalating anti-Islamic rhetoric from European politicians, and the increasingly vigorous and obvious cooperation of rival European powers in the interests of preserving their acquisitions, it would become ever clearer that leading European politicians’ gestures toward alleged understanding of ‘the East’ were self-serving and ignorant, if not downright hypocritical, ill-intentioned and ominous. In the early 1890s, as emerging male nationalist trailblazers called on Britain to make good its ‘promise’ of withdrawal, impatience and critique had not yet turned fully to disillusion. Yet the spectre of European contagion hovering over the Fawwāz-Kūrānī exchange suggests no intellectual could avoid the implications of colonial energies. Fawwāz’s title, ‘al-Inṣāf’ (in the context, ‘fairness to women’), was picked up by Kūrānī, who called her response ‘Inṣāf al-ḥaqq’, ‘fairness to the truth’. Kūrānī sent this counter-response to al-Nīl, where Fawwāz’s attack had appeared: presumably and understandably, she felt it important that Fawwāz’s audience heard her, too. (She did not publish anything else in al-Nīl.) Like Fawwāz, she did not mince words. Pens were ‘the finely sharpened swords of the truth’ when used by ‘virtuous knowledgeable people’,

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while they became the poison of ignorance in the hands of a ‘wicked and stupid denier of the truth’ [or unbeliever; kāfir ghabī la’īm]. But ‘truth cannot be vanquished, be the greatest of forces ranged against it’. The tenor and content of Kūrānī’s response remind us that accusations of colonial mimicry are nothing new. We Easterners have been afflicted with an incurable illness whose poison runs so thoroughly through our veins that we face the peril of looming destruction. This malady is known as dā’ al-tashabbuh [the sickness of resemblance-making] . . . you can see in all of us that we have begun to imitate the Westerners unreflectively. This is proof of how low we have sunk, for the low always imitates the high, even if this leads one to humiliation.51 Although Kūrānī’s riposte on grounds of imitation was posed as an inclusive observation, it is easily read as an implicit slap at Fawwāz for taking up the suffragists’ cause, just as Fawwāz’s judgement on the bill’s British female opponents could be parsed (and apparently was taken) as critical of Kūrānī. The latter’s low-high distinction was in this sense as potentially nasty as Fawwāz’s ambiguously aimed accusation of ‘laziness’ and ‘pageantry’. Both writers used ‘the West’ to mount their attacks on local attitudes, whether aimed specifically at each other or more generally. Kūrānī’s ‘imitation’ referenced the superficial and imperfect adoption of habits of appearance, lifestyle and sociality. She recognised desires inhabiting colonised subjects (of a certain class and milieu), glossing this as an all-consuming, fatal illness. She echoed Fawwāz in noting that what ‘Easterners’ overlooked in the tableau of (European) modernity was the sense of purpose behind ‘progress’. But Fawwāz did not condemn ‘Easterners’ wholesale or attribute persistent work only to ‘Westerners’ as Kūrānī did. The argument between them pivoted on different understandings of rights based on different concepts of gendered personhood, a tension animating public debate on tarbiya and the formation of the modern political subject. Their divergent understandings paralleled but did not mimic divergent views about female and male bodies and subjectivities, the social spaces assigned to each, and assumptions about female and male ‘nature’ that undergirded the contemporaneous fight over suffrage in Britain. In various and complicated ways it was and is a divide that has shaped feminist thought and work across many sites, and feminism’s struggles with – to borrow Joan Wallach Scott’s formulation – the paradoxical nature of its own possibility.52 Kūrānī had her own Western models, as she referenced a cross-local concern with trained domesticity and maternalism, upholding marriage, household management and childrearing as full-time occupations and ‘rights’. These were the true seat of women’s humanity and honour, and ‘the greatest philosophers of the present age and the most famous scholars of ancient and later times spent their lives studying tarbiya’ as a science needed by mothers. All of this precluded ‘outside work’, whose proponents and practitioners she dismissed as ‘stagnant merchandise in the marriage market’. Was Kūrānī, who had married in 1887, aware that Fawwāz was single, as well as considerably older than herself? (When Lisān al-ḥāl published Fawwāz’s essay ‘Women’s advancement’ in May 1892, it announced her as ‘the literatteuse and writer Miss [al-ānisa] Zaynab Fawwāz in Cairo’.)53 Was Kūrānī’s remark another instance of generalised attack with personal overtones? Kūrānī went on:

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If the Europeans have been many stages ahead of us on the ascending paths of development, and were first to strengthen woman’s status . . . we do see amongst them those who have criticized present circumstances; who warn of harmful consequences if women are granted the right to toil in jobs along with men, the innumerable grave offenses and indecencies this is likely to bring. Moreover, when women crowd men in work, many men are left unemployed and penniless, suffering under the burdensome weight of poverty and the pains of need – not to mention the poor household management and child raising that result. If women were to leave men’s jobs to the men, Europe would be in better condition, especially in moral conduct: morality has slid into the deepest and lowest of abysses.54 Arguing her local agenda, Kūrānī aligned herself with critics of Europe in Europe who argued for women’s ‘return’ to the home as a ‘moral’ necessity (remaining silent on a capitalist industrial system’s need for unpaid reproductive labour). Kūrānī juxtaposed this with her own critique of local women who sought ‘jobs outside’ allegedly in emulation of European women (and, she implied, for no other reason). In service to local agendas, ‘Europe’ could be invoked for conservative-preservative outlooks (remaining silent on Egyptian and Ottoman women’s many labours in home economies and ‘outside’) as much as for agendas of change. Here, it was not a ‘westernised Arab Christian’ (Kūrānī, educated in American missionary schools) who upheld a Europe-based campaign as a model for change, but rather a monolingual, practicing Muslim who defended its appropriateness and used it as a platform to discuss gender as a contingent axis of social-political organisation. And it was the debater based in British-occupied Egypt who stood up for British women’s political rights. That both women drew on ‘Europe’ indicates the multivalent possibilities, the range of exemplars (negative, positive, ambiguous), for which ‘Europe’ could stand. If, from western European perspectives, an Orientalist civilisational hierarchy (‘despotic East’) could be used to contend sedimented patriarchal hierarchies in European societies, thinkers from colonised spaces could activate images of European gender hierarchies – and resistance to changing them – in an immediate sense to question (or support) local gender-management agendas, but also to partake in, or to possess, a global critique as well as varieties of cross-societal solidarity posed as coeval. Kūrānī ended her response with direct address to the ‘Eastern woman’, exhorting her to write in the service of refining others, and to ‘turn your gaze away from the Western woman who works, and toward the Western woman who is virtuous, a lady of the household and a mother of men’ (p. 3). For Fawwāz, putting ‘virtue’ and ‘work’ into opposition was anathema. Even if Fawwāz’s brief comment of 14 August, already quoted, dismissed Kūrānī’s response as unworthy of comment, Fawwāz followed this with a long countercounter-response, on 30/31.August, ‘The real truth about fairness to the truth’ (‘Ḥaqīqat inṣāf al-ḥaqq’). Kūrānī, as far as I know, did not carry the argument further (Fawwāz taunted her for her ‘silence’). Fawwāz assumed a ‘feminine’ subject position that singled out the active local woman; a second plural voice spoke from and about a ‘national’ or ‘cultural’ collective subject position in opposition to the active

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female subject. Women’s initiatives on behalf of women were met with reproach or worse, she complained. What is to be held against a woman among us, if she gets to work in order to invigorate womankind [al-naw‘ al-nisā’ī], trying to compensate for the severe censure, blame, and reproach that comes our way under the marque of ‘licentiousness’. When one of us with fervour, energy and zeal arises, we bind her hands [to keep them] from working, and we shackle the feet of her strivings [to stop them] striding forward on the path of success. We say it is impermissible for her to step out alone lest the earth convulse violently with all upon it.55 This echoed her earlier critique of Kūrānī’s scare-discourse about destroying the cosmos. Fawwāz was tackling an often-voiced assertion that exploited conventions of elite gendered segregation: that women venturing into public spaces were by definition ‘debauched’ – and the extension of this attempted disciplining of feminine visibility to attack women’s aspirations and opinions. It was women’s work for women that constituted a target of sexualised censure, she suggested. Fawwāz’s positioning of this complaint implicitly linked Kūrānī to the misogynist view Fawwāz described. Remarking that ‘we have been content with isolation and laziness’ echoed her earlier language lambasting women opposing the suffrage bill. Fawwāz then suggested ‘contradictions’ in Kūrānī’s discussion. These ‘contradictions’ highlighted the two writers’ opposed outlooks. Fawwāz noted that Kūrānī had referred to women regaining their ‘plundered right’ (ḥaqq maslūb, a catch-phrase at the time, generally used with regards to women’s sense of suppressed rights but obviously resonant with regards to colonial ideas of prerogative). Fawwāz asked: What were these rights? Were they ‘pregnancy, childbirth, tarbiya, cooking, kneading bread and the like? If these comprise her natural rights, then they were never stripped away and no one among the ancestors wronged her.’ Fawwāz called on Kūrānī to declare that in fact women’s natural rights were ‘knowledge and work’, as ‘fine men of knowledge and ability, and wise and excellent women of learning and refinement, have declared’ (p. 3). In this context Fawwāz directly refuted the accusation of mimicry as off-topic. Speaking of the election bill, she was focusing on specifics: British women’s demands. She quoted her first response to demonstrate that she had qualified her comments as pertaining to Western women. Yet, as in her critique of the bill’s opponents, Fawwāz’s framing of suffrage seemed to allow generalisation. One could easily read her discursive footwork as using British suffrage to open up local discourse on public, even political, rights for women – at a time, of course, when men in Egypt did not enjoy political rights, either. Fawwāz expounded a point mentioned in her earlier counter-response: by drawing examples of working women from Egypt, she was anticipating the potential accusation of mimicry by showing that women’s work outside the home, locally, was neither rare nor new. As for my examples of Egyptian women, whom the writer transformed with her cogent argumentation into persons unwanted in the marriage market, these are not women who have just emerged today. They hark from the most ancient times – and such women have never swerved from this path. Anyway, if they did take up work

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because they were ‘unmarketable’, then how could it be said that such work was ‘impossible’ for them and that this would engender corruption of the cosmos, shattering nature’s system, as her honourable self declared? (pp. 2–3) Fawwāz challenged Kūrānī’s logic in applying ‘globally’ a particular (and dubious) analysis of demographic, economic and social disruption in Europe (Kūrānī’s argument that women working drove men into poverty and societies into moral decay), while pushing against Kūrānī’s essentialist, cosmological argument on grounds of economic need, historical evidence and contemporary women’s work everywhere. Ultimately, it was an argument about the connection between ‘nature’ and ‘gender’, as Fawwāz recognised in concluding remarks that again reversed Kūrānī’s terms. To sum up our discourse: I say it is incumbent on women to work in the jobs men do when women have learned any of the skill sets [funūn] stipulated for men and women. And that our lateness to embark on work is unnatural, and indeed derives solely from neglect. If we can find the education and the attention, we will work as men do.56 Our household occupations will not hinder us in any work (except that which lies outside the basic rules of secluded privacy and the Islamic hijab, since we are Muslim women and thus such work would be excepted, of course). It behoves us most to acquire knowledge57 and work with it, for [true] knowledge comes only through action. The fine woman saying women ought not to intrude into [tatadākhilu fī] men’s work but rather ought to persevere in the work of the home – which comes from her belief that the line we follow now is natural, that it is impermissible for us to exceed it, and that we acquire knowledge only to teach it to our children, and not to work with it – this is the crux of the difference between us. Let those sitting in judgment judge – those possessed of virtue, the people of knowledge and learning.58 Much more could be unpacked in this rich exchange (such as the reference to Islamic practice, which was not Kūrānī’s reference point), highlighting the extent of argumentative rhetorical ability and forthrightness in public debate of some Arab women then. My point here has been to emphasise the seriously deployed discursive utility of European gender politics in debates at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where commentators may not have envisioned local suffrage but were debating parallel issues over gender as a fixed or contingent aspect of human sociality and what that meant for concepts of rights. That Fawwāz invoked the ‘judgment’ of wise people was a final blow, echoing her first article’s opening sentence in which she accused Kūrānī of ‘going astray in her judgment’.

London in Cairo, Beirut in Chicago A situational irony hovered over the stances taken by Fawwāz and Kūrānī. When this exchange occurred, Fawwāz was living as a single dependent in her brother’s Cairo household. Kūrānī’s whereabouts, however, require more contextualisation. For in 1892–3 Fawwāz’s and Kūrānī’s ‘amal intersected in another context related to the local debate on gendered work, communal practices and national reputations. Since early 1891 the local press had relayed news of an American project for a world exposition in

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Chicago, including a women’s building and library.59 Like Kūrānī and other Ottoman women, Fawwāz corresponded with Berthe Honore Palmer (1849–1918), the Chicago matron who chaired the women’s organising committee; unlike the others, it seems Fawwāz initiated her correspondence with Palmer, writing to enquire how to send her book manuscript to the women’s library.60 Al-Nīl published their exchange: one point of participating in such correspondence was to model for local audiences a feminine international intellectual outreach. Fawwāz then addressed articles to female readers in Egypt, exhorting them to send their handwork to Chicago for display. Kūrānī wrote in this vein to an Ottoman-Syrian audience, with a somewhat different emphasis. Fawwāz took the question of women’s place in the exposition a step further in her response to Palmer’s query: What was it in Fawwāz’s Islamic faith, the Chicago matron wanted to know, that prevented her from attending? Fawwāz’s answer distinguished religiously stipulated obligations from ‘custom’; noted historical and interpretational variability; and characterised Muslim women’s spaces as sites of knowledge and viewing platforms for regarding the world and commenting on it. This reversed European stereotypes of the ‘Muslim home’, let alone of its inhabitants. Defining herself here and elsewhere as a veiled and secluded woman, Fawwāz gave herself visibility locally by presenting herself to readers as a writer with international interlocutors. She was one of several 1890s Ottoman women who publicised their ‘dialogues’ with European women. It was Kūrānī – the apostle of women’s home work – who travelled to Chicago to speak at the Scientific Women’s Conference at the World Exposition. (She may have had useful in-law connections: one Shadīd Kūrānī and partners got the concession to run ‘the only café in the Ottoman section’ on the Midway.)61 Her speech upset some hearers with its wholly domestic agenda. She stayed in the United States for nearly three years, giving speeches and writing articles to support herself, returning to Syria for health reasons but succumbing to a fatal illness in 1898. How would Arab readers have processed her reports from Chicago, given her home-bound agenda for females? The Chicago Exposition was an extended moment of encounter that displayed the politics of imperialism – including the ‘internal’ politics of settler-colonialism, racism and class – in its spatial, discursive and consumerist layout, and which took on specific valences for differently positioned audiences across the world. In Egypt, the image of ‘Oriental’ dancers in the ‘Egyptian café’ on the Chicago Midway sparked consternation and outrage in the local press, building on growing disillusionment and feeding nationalist sentiment. For Arab women to avail themselves of opportunities engendered by the exposition required a careful balancing act, although when Arab women were calling on peers to participate, it was before controversies surfaced. Yet, to seek women’s handwork for the Women’s Building displays did not challenge local patriarchal understandings of gendered spheres of work. Using the example of suffrage activism in Britain was a challenge, as is evident when we turn to the discursive context in which Fawwāz and Kūrānī wrote.

Reading in Beirut and Cairo, 1892 Lisān al-ḥāl, to which Fawwāz referred in her first response, a major newspaper in which she and Kūrānī published, carried copious news of women in the world, its tone ranging from cautiously approving to sceptical, paternalistic and sarcastic. This was

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not random. Article after article in the early 1890s reported women’s engagement in public political work (in Europe and North America), juxtaposing this with news of women as violent subjects, whether instigators of crime or (as in an article on ‘American Amazons’) determined martial-arts practitioners. Supportive of women writers, and cautiously so on women’s accession to waged work, Lisān halted before the issue (or as it saw it, non-issue) of national political rights (and its reports on women in local politics – that is, local politics in Europe and North America – were caustic). Its politics of gender was both complex and simple. This is important contextually for my argument but space constraints prohibit elaborated analysis. I only touch on Lisān’s suffrage-debate coverage, leaving more thorough treatment of the larger reporting context to another occasion. The day before the suffrage bill’s defeat in London, Lisān published an effusive article on the emergence of Arabophone women writers, congratulating itself (and reproducing an al-Ahrām article congratulating it) for apparently being their most energetic publicist. The newspaper was less effusive about London events. Only on 4 May did a brief telegraph inform readers of the suffrage vote: ‘27th last: London: The House of Commons rejected the plan for a law to give women the right to vote at the second reading. . . . Mr Gladstone voted [iqtara’a] against it’.62 And only now, after the defeat, did Lisān al-ḥāl report on ‘Mr Gladstone and women’s electoral rights’,63 a partial translation and summary of Gladstone’s infamous public letter addressed to Smith64 with significant if subtle differences between original and translation that cannot be addressed here. That Lisān dedicated so much space to the topic is itself worth remarking. Suffice it to say that Gladstone’s words on the immutability of sexed differences, when translated closely into Arabic, show how smoothly transferable such views were. Spoken by a British politician, they could have been the words of any number of Ottoman men, amongst them the prominent Khalīl Sarkīs (1842–1915), Lisān al-ḥāl’s publisher-editor and a pillar of Beirut culture who prided himself on championing female writers.65 In back-translation from the Arabic, Gladstone said: You see that God Almighty, creator of the two sexes, made in the forms of man and woman a vast difference. Indeed the mutual distinction [takhāluf] in their social positions is based on originating causes that are not flexible or expandable, unlike many attributes of mind; indeed they are primal, unchanging in their nature. As for me, I do not judge which of the two sexes has obtained higher authority or lower. But I understand and know the function of the strength of difference between them, and I see myself obliged to contemplate once and again, and yet again, before I could extend my hands to aid in realising what I see as an invitation from the public’s authority [al-sulṭa al-‘umūmiyya] requesting the first group to give up a known measure of its position, such that the other group can obtain it. The next week saw detailed coverage of a meeting that had been held in St James Hall, London, convened on the eve of the vote. Meant to demonstrate support for the bill, it became tense as antagonistic factions participated. Reporting on it gave the newspaper a platform for commentary. Although the meeting was attended by men and women – coverage of it in Britain included attention to the words and actions of

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both – Lisān’s multi-sized-font headline highlighted the women, with the phrase ‘The women’s dispute’ running as the headline, and the smaller-font subheading outlining the context: Their meeting to demand their rights The St James Hall session Cut down the disturbance Disappointment66 Despite this editorialising title, Lisān set itself up as a moderate-voiced arbiter: Our intent was to not report these events in detail, fearing it would lead some to express malicious joy [shamāta]. But our aim in communicating it is to demonstrate the harms of getting too deeply and hastily involved [in anything]. It is always best to steer a middle course. Readers remember that the women of England arose [nahaḍna] demanding to obtain electoral rights . . . The article noted contending viewpoints and summarised the gist of acting chair J. H. Levy’s speech67 and responses to it; but it highlighted the event as riot or uproar [shaghab], with shouting and physical damage to the premises. Speeches by Levy and George Bernard Shaw – and the ensuing exchange between Shaw and Herbert Burroughes – received more attention than did speeches by women; describing the actual physical disruption, the article did not note that it lasted only moments.68 The narrative left an impression that the very topic of women’s suffrage was bound to engender discord, disturbance, noise, violence and destruction – echoing the newspaper’s earlier coverage of women’s public-political activities as disturbances to a natural order. In London, the satirical news magazine Punch was offering a similarly toned coverage, highlighting disorder and defeat as the lot of the suffrage-supporters, and portraying suffragists as hapless, unattractive ‘Amazons’.69 Even as it portrayed disorder in the house of gender, Lisān’s article constructed a gender-essentialised division of social space. Female suffrage leaders, it said, were seated to the male chair’s right and left on the speakers’ platform: at the start, ‘the place had the appearance of a tea party’.70 Lisān’s coverage ended with description of a later meeting. (The Times reported that this was held in the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, Piccadilly, but its long article was not the source of Lisān’s editorial line). People scattered, going off in groups to nearby hotels and restaurants to talk about what had happened, leaving the women to bewail their fortune and the poor fate awaiting their aim. Fortunately, several women gathered at a nearby hall where they could receive comers. Men and women came to them offering condolences for what had happened, trying to lighten the affliction. And how amazing to see the reaction, the reversal of what had been: while in the hall the men resisted and opposed the women as hard as they could, now they became more obedient to [the women] than were their own little fingers to them. Thus did they revert to their accustomed

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submission to the female . . . Their eminences stood waiting to serve, vying to offer drinks and refreshments. Here was the man all subdued who earlier had thrown his weight around powerfully [tajabbara] in the hall; over there was the tyrant, now a child unable to withstand darts shot off by others’ eyes when before he had repelled them with the armour of his rage. Thus was the upshot of the session at St James Hall. And thus ended the women’s demand for their rights. This finale displayed men ‘unmanned’ by the feminine, from the domestication (‘tea party’) of politics to the spectre of women’s suffrage, even in its postponement. The text sexualised event and cause, reducing women’s efficacy to a narrative of seduction, with uneasy intimations of reducing men to childlike states. Contrary to the article’s reportage of the meeting, the finale framed the issue of women’s electoral rights as both a battle between the sexes and a tempest in a teapot. In an uncanny parallel to its earlier sensation story on the American Amazons, the newspaper glossed the meeting in St James as marking inevitable defeat for ‘women’s demand for their rights’ – even though it took place before the parliamentary vote. Two issues earlier, Lisān had published Fawwāz’s essay ‘Woman’s advancement’.71 Although that article had already appeared in al-Mu’ayyad before the suffrage debate and vote – and thus cannot be seen as a response to events in London – when read in the immediate publication context provided by Lisān’s coverage, it seems a prescient reminder that, as Fawwāz would say in her first response to Kūrānī, defeats happened, but were only temporary setbacks. Fawwāz mentioned women in France obtaining rights to vote locally, and professional achievements of American and Russian women, after mentioning accomplished Arab women of the deep past: Fawwāz’s inflection on the stadial narrative, the pre-story to European women’s difficult advances in the 1890s. But more consistently noticeable in Lisān al-ḥāl was the message of closely conscribed and policed possibility: women were welcome to speak and work in defined circumstances, but not to challenge public or family hierarchies. One of many possible examples of this articulation was an unsigned article on ‘Women in France’, describing demands for paternal responsibility and equal pay, which also mentioned the British suffrage campaign, an Italian initiative to remove ‘obedience’ from the marriage vows, and American women’s rights, and concluded: ‘France has begun to keep pace with women’s demands, granting some. We hope not much time passes before they obtain the rights and equality they desire. And women’s obedience is obligatory in every case [wa-ṭā‘at al-nisā’ wājibatun fī kull ḥāl]’.72 It is not surprising, given the repeated expansion-cum-hierarchisation of Lisān al-ḥāl’s coverage on women and political rights, that it weighed in on the Fawwāz-Kūrānī exchange (on 1 August 1892, thus before Fawwāz’s longest response). The intervention attests to the intensity of public sensitivity on gender rights. Quoting its previous articles extensively, the editor manifested concern about clarifying its ‘middle’ position: It reached us that al-Nīl newspaper, edited by the famous and excellent writer Ḥasan Bek Ḥusnī, published an article recently signed by Zaynab Fawwāz, whose beneficial articles in Lisān are renowned. Her purpose in this article was to oppose the view of one of the female writers, who went so far as to say women ought not to share in the kinds of work men do. Then she [Fawwāz] said Lisān agreed with her [that is, ‘one of the female writers’].

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Perhaps the esteemed opponent [mu‘tariḍa] saw our words in issue 1414 speaking of the women of England’s demand for electoral rights: ‘It is better for a woman to be content with how far she has gotten, and not fling herself into swift, deep embroilment73 in what is men’s special area . . .’ May the honourable objector know that we did not agree with the writer of the article to which she objects, in terms of women not sharing in the kinds of work that men perform. Rather, what we denied to women was the demand for involvement in politics. We said: ‘Woman was not created for politics; we do not say this out of a belief that she would fall short in the work were she to take it up. Our point is that God Almighty’s wisdom is manifest in His creating humanity male and female: For each, He made a position [mansib] to occupy, according to its appropriateness [munāsabatih] from every aspect . . .’ ‘If we permitted woman to penetrate the gates of politics, indeed to bear its burdens, she would be as able as man, but to a particular extent and for a limited and specific period of time. Just as, if man diverged into caring for the house and raising the children, he could do it, but for a limited time and extent.’ We denied women entry to politics and we still do. We said: ‘We acknowledge that woman is obliged by the law of contemporary progress to emerge visibly from the world of concealment, working with man and equal to him in what she can do . . . [sic], but if she focuses her energies precipitately on demanding influence, she eviscerates the power granted to her and thwarts the benefit expected of her.’ . . . In sum clearly we did not agree with the author of the article objected to, on woman not sharing work with man. We were opposed to her entering politics, and we still are.74 If Kūrānī attacked Fawwāz’s local use of British feminist politics, Kūrānī’s and Lisān al-ḥāl’s responses suggest that ultimately it was the feminist, anti-patriarchal politicalequality argument and not its Western or imperial provenance that sparked objections. In Cairo and Beirut as in London, the question of political rights raised – or more accurately, stood in for – an issue not publicly debated: male guardianship over females, a tenet that not even ‘liberal’ men – or most women – questioned. Issues of control over female property, including female bodies and their disposition in space, and authority within marriage and the family, were nested or masked in a discourse of ‘harm’ to ‘feminine nature’ (thereby reifying gender as nature); locally, the more palatable shorthand was women’s ‘acquiescent obedience’ – a notion that Fawwāz punctured in other writings.75 Kūrānī and Fawwāz represented British suffragists and their opponents in service to an ongoing local debate but one with iterations throughout the world. They did so with nuance and productive ambiguity, as well as hard-hitting, fairly impolite insinuations. Fawwāz, through support for the suffragists’ actions and praise for their determination, along with her carefully distantiated plotting of cultural locations, reminds us that parsing the meanings of comparison, as we study co-opted feminist imaginaries and the work they have done historically, requires recognising coevality and incommensurability of circumstances (as a local woman saw this) together. Fawwāz ‘used’ Britain to talk about (if not demand) women’s national-political rights. The exchange exposes the boundaries of the discursive order in which they wrote, boundaries of the acceptable that Lisān al-ḥāl attempted to police with its embrace of women writers, its cautiously

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expansive view of women’s work, and its firm rejection of national-political rights for women, both directly and by yoking images of violence and crime to representations of women’s national-political aspirations in what Fawwāz saw as a heterotopic elsewhere. Nearly two decades later, Couvreur, speaking in Egypt, did not reference this history of debate occurring partly in the city where she orated on féminisme, in French, to a set of elite Egyptian and European women. Announcing her own unease with the woman-suffrage campaign in Britain, Couvreur perhaps would have agreed with the editor of Lisān al-ḥāl, had she even been aware that such topics had long been discussed in Arabic. Instead, she lectured on modern France as a model of ‘appropriate’ gender progressiveness, though she could admit to its imperfections. In gender politics as in much else, the 1890s remain a shrouded decade, the complexity of its engagements and the intensity of its conflicts partially obscured by later, more dramatic encounters. Possibilities for dialogue and recognition, including uses of ‘Europe’ that limned local arguments, gave way to more implacable divisions as it became unavoidably clear to subjects in Egypt (including Fawwāz) that Europeans themselves had not acquired the civilisational aptitude – the humanity – that the stadialhistory narrative might have seemed to promise.

Notes 1. Loukiya Efthymiou, ‘Récits de voyage: Quatres enseignantes á la Belle Époque’, Clio, 28 (2008), pp. 133–44. A school principal’s daughter, Couvreur earned her aggrégation in 1883. On this context, see Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 2. Donald Malcolm Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), notes small numbers of women attending regular lectures in early years (pp. 51–6). In 1910, the University’s second annual report mentioned 403 students, 307 male and 68 female, among them (said al-Muqtaṭaf’s report on the Report) 35 ‘nationals; the rest are Ottomans and foreigners’. ‘Al-Jāmi‘a al-miṣriyya: Taqrīruhā al-sanawī al-thānī’, al-Muqtaṭaf, 36:4 (April 1910), pp. 399–400. 3. Possibly Couvreur was invited at the suggestion of French Orientalist scholar Gaston Maspéro, the one non-Egyptian committee member (Reid, Cairo University, p. 53), and seconded to the University as Women’s Section head. She gave a second lecture course – and several Egyptian and Ottoman Syrian women gave lectures in Arabic – before the section closed following sustained public hostility concerning women’s ‘invasion of public space’ (Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 54–5, and Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 184–5). See Efthymiou, ‘Récits de voyage’, pp. 135–6 and Reid, Cairo University, pp. 53–65 (mentioning only her second lecture series, p. 55). 4. Mlle A. Couvreur, La femme aux différentes époques de l’histoire: Conférences faites aux dames égyptiennes (Le Caire: Université égyptienne et Librairie Diemer; Le Puy: Imprimerie Peyriller, Rouchon et Gamon, 1910), p. 1, lecture dated 13 December 1909. 5. One example: Couvreur mentions Munich professor Theodor von Bischoff, notorious for his theory of women’s inferior intelligence based on relative brain sizes. He wanted his brain weighed after his death; it weighed less than his estimate for the ‘average’ female brain (Couvreur, ‘Reflections on feminine psychology’ [lecture dated 9 May 1910], in Couvreur, La femme aux différentes, pp. 613–29; p. 617). Fifteen years earlier, in an exchange on

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

the colonial encounter women’s rights, Marūm al-Anṭākī (responding in al-Fatāt to Amīn Khūrī in al-Hilāl) mentioned Bischoff as a discredited professor of medicine. Marūm al- Anṭākī, ‘Al-ḥaqq aḥaqq an yuṭba‘’, al-Fatāt, 1:12 (16 March 1894), pp. 560–7; p. 564. According to Badran, ‘feminism’ was first used in Egypt in 1923: the French name of the first organised, explicitly named feminist organisation, al-Ittiḥād al-nisā’ī al-miṣrī was l’Union féministe égyptienne (Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, p.19). An 1880s French word, it became common parlance there from the 1890s. See Karen Offen, ‘On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist’, Feminist Issues, 8:1 (1988), pp. 45–51; Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 20–3; and Florence Rochefort, ‘The French Feminist Movement and Republicanism, 1868–1914’, trans. Amy Jacobs, in Sylvia Paletschek and Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (eds), Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century: A European Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 77–101; pp. 78–9, 91–2. Shu-mei Shih, ‘Toward an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or, “When” Does a “Chinese” Woman Become a “Feminist”?’, in Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (eds), Minor Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 73–108; p. 78. ‘Feminist’ as I use it comprises recognition of gender-categorical prejudicial treatment as a systemic outcome of patriarchally arranged societies and attempts to change attitudes and practices. ‘Gender justice’ or ‘gender activism’ indicates perspectives marked by critique of present gendered social arrangements but not necessarily rejection of the idea of genderspecific roles, duties and spaces. Notions of ‘natural’, essentialised gender attributes are not incompatible with the latter perspective. Couvreur uses féminisme for both outlooks. The terminology of feminism and gender rights remains contested; on variations in historical usage, see (for example) Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century and Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994), pp. 14–18. How have translation and circulations of ideas affected usage? See Karen Offen, ‘Challenging Male Hegemony: Feminist Criticism and the Context for Women’s Movements in the Age of European Revolutions and Counterrevolutions, 1789–1860’, in Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, Women’s Emancipation Movements in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 11–30; pp. 16–19, 23. ‘Suffragette’, coined as a derisive usage by the Daily Mail in 1906, was adopted proudly by the Pankhurst-led Women’s Social and Political Union. The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies headed by Millicent Garrett Fawcett retained ‘suffragist’. See Lucinda Hawksley, March, Women, March (London: André Deutsch, 2015), pp. 115–16 and Couvreur, La femme, pp. 438, 654, and throughout her final lecture, ‘Le féminisme’ (14 May 1910). This is the exchange referred to above. It was published largely in al-Hilāl, January–June 1894, and is briefly discussed in Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, Gendering Culture in Greater Syria: Intellectuals and Ideology in the Late Ottoman Period (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 32–3. Qāsim Amīn, Taḥrīr al-mar’a (Cairo: Maṭba‘at al-taraqqī, 1899). Apparently, during her time in Egypt, Couvreur did express admiration for and a sense of connection with elite Turkish and Egyptian women (See Efthymiou, ‘Récits de voyage’, p. 141). She mentioned efforts for girls’ education (see Couvreur, La femme, p. 634). If Couvreur did not initially recognise Egyptian women’s engagement in public life, perhaps this view changed over her Cairo sojourn. Labība Hāshim, ‘al-Jāmi‘a al-miṣriyya wa-al-muḥāḍarāt al-nisā’iyya’, Fatāt al-sharq, 4:4 (January 1910), pp. 123–7; p. 126. Fabian’s critique of anthropology’s continuing embeddedness in imperial relations yielded his argument that this has been enacted through a ‘denial of coevalness’ particularly in acts of anthropological writing. See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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14. See Leela Gandhi’s overview of ‘fractures’ haunting this relationship in Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 83–90. 15. A good example of the former is Shiblī Shumayyil. To my knowledge, examinations of his socialist thought have never been accompanied by scrutiny of his conservative, and often misogynist, views on women. 16. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, p. 5. 17. That scholarly elaborations of this are by now too numerous to list is indicative enough! 18. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lydia Liu, ‘The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: The Field of Life and Death Revisited’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 37–62; pp. 38–40; Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, pp. 81–101; Himani Bannerji, ‘Pygmalion Nation: Towards a Critique of Subaltern Studies and the “Resolution of the Women’s Question”’, in Himani Bannerji, Shahrzad Mojab and Judith Whitehead (eds), Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 34–84; Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 44–5; and Shefali Chandra, The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 24–6. 19. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 160. 20. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). See also my review, Marilyn Booth, ‘Review of Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, 1992) and Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed. and trans., Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s ‘Bihishti Zewar’ (Berkeley, 1990)’, Gender and History, 5:1 (1993), pp. 148–52. Re-evaluations include Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Yaseen Noorani, Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Kenneth M. Cuno, Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015); and Hussein A. H. Omar, ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Cage’, in Faisal Devji and Zaheer Kazmi (eds), Islam After Liberalism (London: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2017). 21. An important volume in this regard is Lionnet and Shih’s Minor Transnationalism. ‘[O]ur battles are always framed vertically, and we forget to look sideways to lateral networks that are not readily apparent.’ Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, ‘Introduction: Thinking through the minor, transnationally’, in Minor Transnationalism, pp. 1–23; p. 1. 22. An example of a somewhat parallel argument appears in Andrew Sartori, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). But I think the implications of this accumulation of counter-argument to earlier postcolonial thinking are not yet worked-out in Middle-East-focused gender studies. 23. Focusing on connections among anti-colonial elites and new understandings these facilitated, Elleke Boehmer emphasises lateral conversations. See Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24. On the politics of doubled address, see Marilyn Booth, ‘Before Qasim Amin: Writing histories of gender politics in 1890s Egypt’, in Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman (eds), The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 365–98. 25. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, p. x. 26. Grewal and Kaplan, ‘Introduction’, in Scattered Hegemonies, pp. 1–33; p. 2. 27. Nabawiyya Mūsā, ‘al-Muḥāḍarāt al-nisā’iyya fī al-jāmi‘a al-miṣriyya’, al-Ahrām, 16 April 1912, reprinted in al-Ahrām, Shuhūd al-‘aṣr 1876–1926 (Cairo: Markaz al-Ahrām lil-tarjama

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28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

the colonial encounter wa- al-nashr, 1986), pp. 38–41; p. 39. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Mūsā was the first Egyptian female to sit for the baccalaureate, after a campaign to do so; she was spectacularly successful. Hanna Kūrānī, ‘al-Mar’a wa l-siyāsa’, Lubnān 71 (6 Dhūl-qa‘da 1909 [20/21 June 1892]), p. 1. I was able to acquire this text only as the chapter was going to press and thus have not been able to discuss how Fawwāz takes up the diction of Kūrānī’s essay and reverses its meanings, with heavy irony. ‘Umar Riḍā al-Kaḥḥāla, A‘lām al-nisā’ fī ‘alamay al-‘arab wa-al-islām, V (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-risāla, 5 vols, 5th pr., 1984), pp. 213–15; Zachs and Halevi, Gendering Culture, p. 118. See Marilyn Booth, ‘Zaynab Fawwāz al-‘Āmilī’, in Roger Allen (ed.), Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1850–1950 (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), pp. 93–8. I follow Boehmer in preferring cross- to trans-, emphasising ‘formations of national [and other] selfhood alongside intersubjectivity, and on exchanges (crossings) between different political and cultural contexts’. Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, p. 9. See Marilyn Booth, ‘Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s’, in Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (eds), The Press in the Middle East and North Africa, 1850–1950: Politics, Social History and Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 58–98. Without assigning positionality in advance on the basis of gender, we must be alert that the gendering of the signature (or pseudonym) likely affected how a text was read. See Marilyn Booth, ‘Liberal Thought and the “Problem” of Women’, in Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (eds), Arabic Thought beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 187–213. See Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Marilyn Booth, Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). On this speech and the timing of its insertion into the dictionary, see Booth, Classes of Ladies, pp. 259–60. On Kūrānī’s views, see Booth, Classes of Ladies, Chapter 7. Zaynab Fawwāz, ‘al-Inṣāf’, al-Nīl, 1:151 (12 July 1892), pp. 2–3; p. 2. See also Zaynab Fawwāz, al-Rasā’il al-zaynabiyya [henceforth, RZ] (Cairo: al-Maṭba‘a al-mutawassiṭa, n.d. [c. 1905/6]), pp. 19–25. Fawwāz, ‘al-Inṣāf’, p. 2; Fawwāz, RZ, p. 20. The second line (hemistiches pp. 3–4) appears only in al-Nīl. See ‘Parliament: House of Commons. Wednesday, April 27’, The Times, no. 33624, 28 April 1892, p. 6; Anne-Marie Käpelli, ‘Feminist Scenes’, in Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (eds), A History of Women: Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 482–514; p. 491; Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 52, 117; and Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Pugh sees this vote as marking the beginning of a decline in Gladstone’s influence. This moment is part of a longer, complicated history and the varying interests that woman suffrage brought to the fore. On Gladstone and suffrage, see Jad Adams, Women and the Vote: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 96–105. Margrit Pernau, ‘Great Britain: The Creation of an Imperial Global Order’, in Margrit Pernau et al., Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth-Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 45–62; p. 54. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text.

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42. Fawwāz, RZ, p. 21. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 43. See Offen, ‘Challenging Male Hegemony’, pp. 19–21 and Paletschek and Pietrow-Ennker, Women’s Emancipation Movements, passim. 44. The classic work on this concept remains Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16:1 (1986), pp. 22–7. 45. See W. E. Gladstone, Female suffrage. A letter from the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. to Samuel Smith, M.P. (London: John Murray, 1892), no pagination to letter but quote appears on fourth page. 46. Fawwāz, RZ, p. 22. In this, she differed from most contemporary commentators. In essays and her biographical dictionary, she argued for informed mothers but not in the sense of trained domesticity. She emphasised the importance of mothers knowing the histories of their societies and the historical context of their sacred texts, as guides to the present. Her work suggests she believed historical knowledge led women to recognise how varied and yet consistent were women’s capabilities outside the home. 47. Zachs and Halevi argue Kūrānī was concerned about women’s exploitation in the workplace, noting her work with various women’s groups in the US after her arrival mid-1893. There is no sign of this concern in texts I have seen, and this exchange does not indicate it. Perhaps it developed later, though they imply its relevance throughout. See Zachs and Halevi, Gendering Culture, pp. 117–22. 48. Zaynab Fawwāz, ‘al-Murāsalāt’, al-Nīl, 1:177 (14 August 1892), p. 2. See also Fawwāz, RZ, pp. 32–3. The text is blurry but it looks like she says Kūrānī’s article appeared in no. 173. 49. Fawwāz, ‘al- Murāsalāt’, p. 2. 50. Zaynab Fawwāz, ‘Ḥaqīqat inṣāf al-haqq’, al-Nīl, 1:190 (20 August 1892), p. 3. 51. Hanna Kūrānī, ‘Inṣāf al-haqq’, al-Nīl, 1:172 (6 August 1892), p. 3. Fawwāz published others’ responses to her work in RZ, but not Kūrānī’s. 52. See Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 53. Zaynab Fawwāz, ‘Taqaddum al-mar’a’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1409 (18 May 1892), pp. 3–4. 54. Kūrānī, ‘Inṣāf al-ḥaqq’, p. 3. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 55. Fawwāz, ‘Haqīqat inṣāf al-ḥaqq’, p. 3. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. See also Fawwāz, RZ, pp. 34–40. 56. Possibly, women’s state of ‘attention’ or alertness; or men’s and women’s attention to making education and work available for females. 57. In al-Nīl, Rā’id al-nīl, and the original RZ we find ‘an nata‘allima al-‘ilm wa-na‘milu bihi’. Fawwāz, ‘Haqīqat inṣāf al-ḥaqq’, p. 3. In the ‘republished’ RZ, without comment we find ‘an nata‘allima al-‘amal wa-na‘milu bihi’. Zaynab Fawwāz, al-Rasā’il al-zaynabiyya (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘āmma al-miṣriyya lil-kitāb, 2007), p. 83. This is a significant difference. 58. Fawwāz, ‘Haqīqat inṣāf al-ḥaqq’, p. 3. 59. On the debate and context, see Booth, Classes of Ladies, Chapter 7. 60. ‘Lisān al-ḥāl wa-qism al-nisā’ fi ma‘raḍ Shīkāghū’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1434 (15 August 1892), p. 1; ‘Mutafarriqāt ‘an ma‘raḍ Shīkāghū’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1438 (29 August 1892), pp. 2–3. 61. ‘Al-Qahwa al-waḥīda fī al-qism al-‘uthmānī min ma‘raḍ Shīkāghū’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1463 (23 November 1892), p. 1. 62. ‘Akhbār tilighrāfiyya. 27th: London’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1405 (4 May 1892), p. 2. See also Adams, Women and the Vote, p. 103. 63. ‘Al-Mistir Ghalādstūn wa-ḥaqq intikhāb al-nisā’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1405 (4 May 1892), p. 3. I could not consult a full run of Lisān. This article begins: ‘In a previous issue, amongst the political telegraphs we published one from London concerning Mr Gladstone’s views on

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64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

the colonial encounter women’s right to elect [members] to the English House of Commons: that he was against this [pro-suffrage] view and desirous of getting the House to abandon it’. See Gladstone, Female suffrage. On Sarkīs, see Ami Ayalon, ‘Private Publishing in the Nahḍa’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40 (2008), pp. 561–77. ‘Jidāl al-nisā: ijtimā‘uhunna lil-muṭālaba bi-ḥuqūqihinna: Jalsat Sānt Jāms Hāl. Ḥalshū al-shuwwash. Khaybat al-‘amal’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1407 (11 May 1892), p. 2. I am not sure of the translation of the third line. Hava gives a verb ḥalasha as ‘to pluck out’; shawwash and variants can signal disorder, impairment or illness, misunderstanding. The phrase has puzzled Lebanese acquaintances whom I have asked. If it is a colloquial Lebanese usage, might it signal a certain disparagement? See J. H. Levy, ‘The Enfranchisement of Women, a speech by Mr J. H. Levy at St James’ Hall’, Piccadilly, 26 April 1892. Published as Joseph Hiam Levy, The Enfranchisement of Women (London: The Personal Rights Association, 1912). ‘The Women’s Suffrage Bill: Riot at St. James’s-Hall’, The Times, no. 33623, 27 April 1892, p. 9. There is enough consonance (in theme, motif and timing) between these varied modes of coverage to be intriguing; at the same time, such images circulated far more widely. See Punch, or the London Charivari for the following issues: ‘Arming the Amazons’, 101, 5 December 1891; ‘Repulsing the Amazons’, 102, 30 April 1892; ‘Essence of Parliament. Extracted from the Diary of Toby, MP’, 102, 7 May 1892; and ‘The Seven Ages of Woman’, 102, 14 May 1892. Gladstone comes in for his measure of satire: ‘“Not at Home!” (A Dialogue on a Doorstep)’, 102, 14 May 1892. Lady Dixie’s letter, Mrs Morgan-Thomas’s motion and Mary Elizabeth Cozens’ ‘elegant dress and broad smile’ are mentioned. Morgan-Thomas ‘persisted courageously’ in the face of audience shouts. See Zaynab Fawwāz, ‘Taqaddum al-mar’a’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1409 (18 May 1892), pp. 3–4; in al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1892. Fawwāz’s first article, ‘Laysat al-sa‘āda bi-kathrat al-māl’ – published previously in al-Mu’ayyad – appeared in no. 1402. ‘Al-nisā’ fi Faransā’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1415 (8 June 1892), p. 3. Repeated use of tawaghghul (here, in the St James Hall article, and others), is rhetorically significant: diving into something deeply, getting embroiled, entering into something without permission. ‘Khāṭir mulāḥiẓ’, Lisān al-ḥāl, 1430 (1 August 1892), p. 2. All earlier articles referred to are missing in the Bodleian collection. In his study of the British case, Griffin emphasises ‘marital authority’ as a reason why many resisted the vote at least for married women. As he notes, it was perfectly possible to argue that women had equal mental capabilities yet should be kept out of politics. Griffin, The Politics of Gender, p. 276.

Acknowledgements I thank Anna Ball and Omnia Shakry for their extremely helpful comments, and Susannah Ferguson, Kathryn Gleadle and Rebecca Rogers for source suggestions, while reminding readers that the result is entirely my responsibility. All translations from French and Arabic are my own.

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Chapter 11 Reimaging the Ottoman Legacy1 Erdağ Göknar

Nûn [‫ – ]ﻥ‬By the pen and what they write . . . The Koran, Sura 68:1 (‘The Pen’ (‘Al-Qalam’))2

Türkiye devletinin dini, din-i İslamdir (‘The religion of the Turkish state is the religion of Islam’). Republic of Turkey Constitution 1924, Article 23 Everything rested in the story [‘hikâye’] that no one understood. Orhan Pamuk, Beyaz Kale4

I

n Orhan Pamuk’s two Ottoman novels – The White Castle (Beyaz Kale; 1985, trans. 1990) and My Name is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı; 1998, trans. 2001) – archival manuscripts comprise the basis for innovation in the modern Turkish novel. Similar to the function of the Ottoman archive in The White Castle, the Ottoman artists’ workshop and miniaturists’ studios in My Name is Red become the setting for the development of Pamuk’s recurring theme of textual production and authorship. Such intertextual and intertemporal spaces enable Pamuk’s innovations in Turkish literary modernity. Through the focus on a dissident ‘archival mode’ of writing in The White Castle and My Name is Red, Pamuk develops sites of literary authority based in Islamic tradition and Ottoman history that supersede the limits of Republican state authority.

Orientalising the Ottoman Legacy An Ottoman archive construed as ‘pre-modern’ by Republican historiography provides the context from which Pamuk’s fiction overcomes the Orientalist legacy of Turkish modernity. The White Castle is among other things a political subversion of the captive’s tale, a genre that reifies the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binary, constructing the figure of an Orientalised ‘Turk’ to denigrate Islam. The novel subtly argues that the inverse of this process is at work in Republican secular modernity, which constructs the figure of a nationalised ‘Turk’ to civilise Muslims. The attempt to construct national authenticity is complicit with the Orientalist thought that instrumentalises ‘Turkishness’. The result is the establishment of an Orientalist-national paradigm based on the same underlying binary power relations. By conflating these two dominant images of the ‘terrible’ and

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the ‘terrific’ Turk, Pamuk identifies constructions of ‘Turkishness’ as being contingent on contexts of din (religion), devlet (state), or both. His novels, striving to transcend both poles, describe a dissident Turkishness freed from its early modern (Islamic) and modernist (secular) confines; that is, one that is no longer a symptom of Orientalism or nationalism. In this framing, Republican Turkish dilemmas of the Ottoman legacy are thus recast as narrative dilemmas of an Orientalist legacy. As such, Pamuk’s Ottoman novels are complicit in engaging Orientalist tropes; however, they do not qualify as examples of Orientalism per se due to the fact that they deconstruct its binary logic. In other words, his fiction works within the structures that they ultimately subvert. This paradox is central to his work: by representing Ottoman Islam, he reifies Orientalist categories in the process of de-Orientalising representations of Islam, Istanbul and the Ottoman legacy denigrated by official state discourse. Because Pamuk reintroduces urban Ottoman Islamic forms into the Republican novel, his work is sometimes misread as being retrograde, regressive or even Orientalist by critics in Turkey. Pamuk’s texts are dependent on the Turkish novel tradition yet undermine their own ‘Turkishness’ by displacing it from essentialised contexts of din and devlet. In this chapter, I examine how Pamuk’s introduction of Ottoman material culture in his Ottoman novels becomes subversive in the Republican present. By conjuring an alternative Ottoman-Islamic past to inflect the discourses of secularism, Pamuk politicises Turkish literary modernity in a sustained challenge to Republican nationalism. I argue that this process revises the received binary opposition of Ottoman tradition and Republican modernity, in which the former is Orientalised and denigrated to allow for the emergence of the secular modern. It is through this process that we can begin to trace Pamuk’s fixation with the Ottoman legacy. His novels, I demonstrate, argue that achieving an aesthetics of postOrientalism demands both an engagement with Orientalism and de-Orientalising transgressions. His is, in short, a literary position of dissent and compromise.

The Ottoman Decline Paradigm In an attempt to counter the negativity of the Ottoman legacy as decline and despotism, historians in the field of Ottoman studies have been engaged in various revisions.5 This has led to a modification of what has come to be known as the problematic ‘decline paradigm’. The decline paradigm is an Orientalist-nationalist historical perspective that constructs a steady and unwavering three-century imperial decline from the end of Süleyman’s reign (1566) to the establishment of the Republic (1923). Both Islamic autocratic rule and secular modernisation are implicated in the paradigm, which broadly supports the argument that decline necessitates either authoritarian implementation of the Islamic state or of the secularisation thesis.6 As stated earlier, Pamuk’s references to the historiographic framing of the ‘decline paradigm’ are indicative of a modern-secular authorial position, one which emphasises the Ottoman past as an icon of Islamic decline. By asserting the existence of an early modern Ottoman era, scholars have questioned decline as the dominant historiographic framing for understanding the Empire.7 Pamuk, in his own way, provides a literary revision of dominant Empire to Republic historiography. However, he does not completely abandon the Ottoman decline paradigm, which reveals his adherence to a legacy of Republican modernity. Pamuk’s two Ottoman novels accept

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the decline paradigm. This conflicts with his otherwise intense intertextual revision of the Republic’s out-of-hand dismissal of the Ottoman past and its Muslim cosmopolitanism. As stated, this constitutes another instance where Pamuk maintains a tie to secular modernisation while inscribing challenges to that same ideological perspective. A comparison of two passages in The White Castle and My Name is Red will serve as an example. [. . .] Toward the end of The White Castle, the narrator of the captive’s tale states: Did we [master and slave] understand ruin to be the loss of the nations under the [Ottoman] empire one-by-one? . . . Or did ruin mean the transformation of people and beliefs without their knowledge? . . . Maybe ruin meant witnessing the superiority of others and then trying to mimic them. . . . [maybe it was] war after war that ended in nothing but defeat . . .8 The consciousness of decline expressed in this quote is anachronistic for seventeenthcentury Istanbul, which witnesses the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. It is part of an Orientalist-nationalist historiographic vision that has been projected back into time by the author. The anachronistic consciousness of decline is also woven into the narrative of My Name is Red through the metaphor of the changing sensibilities of an Islamic art form that is finally abandoned completely. Master Osman’s lament at the end of the novel, the anxiety and lament of obscurity, echoes a well-known Ottoman legacy of decline: Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the illustrations we’ve made won’t understand anything. Desiring to take a closer look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the embarrassment, the joy, the deep pain and pleasure of observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this freezing Treasury – but they’ll never truly know.9 These depictions of decline instrumentally enable the possibility of two reactions: the imposition of more orthodox Islamic rule (which happens at the end of My Name is Red when Ahmed I takes the throne) or the forced implementation of secular modernity (which The White Castle alludes to). In the face of political obstacles, Pamuk develops characters that champion painting in the first novel and forms of writing in the second, art forms that excavate traditions of din. A subtext of the novels is thus the critique of the authority of din or devlet from the perspective of artistic freedom. Generally, Pamuk argues for the possibility of redefinitions of literary modernity in the face of authoritarian impositions. Nevertheless, the restriction of those freedoms and the lament and melancholy (hüzün) of Ottoman cultural loss and illegibility permeates both novels. Pamuk’s approach to new formal innovations in literature begins with the historian’s dilemma of the Ottoman legacy and reimagines it to conceive of, excavate and describe an alternative modernity in Republican historiography and literature. In My Name is Red an early modern cosmopolitan Istanbul inflects the impoverished narratives of the secularisation thesis with tropes of din. In The White Castle Pamuk’s vehicle for the transformation of Republican literary modernity brings together tropes of the Ottoman archive and conversion to re-sacralise Turkish writing after the epistemic violence of the cultural revolution and manifest in the coup, a legacy of the Kemalist revolution.

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The Writer Manqué and the Writing Subject The White Castle and My Name is Red focus on dilemmas of textual production and authorship as agency. The White Castle begins with a Republican historian in a ‘forgotten’ Ottoman archive. Though he is a historian by discipline, Darvınoğlu is also the figure of a writer manqué, a dominant Turkish trope.10 The White Castle is a novel of repeated scenes of writing and rewriting that leads to treatises and textual production. Indeed, the novel traces the painstaking birth of a narrator, or ‘writing subject’ (a presence indicated passively through the referent ‘Him’), whose authority transgresses and merges the identities of the two main characters. Pamuk’s novel is thus a recapitulation of a dominant trope in Turkish literary modernity as well as a revision of that trope. The narrator succeeds in writing a complete text, thus replacing the writer manqué with the writing subject, though the text remains unpublished for two centuries. Pamuk’s fiction performs repeated exorcisions of the spirit of the writer manqué. The author-figure ‘Orhan’ makes passing cameo appearances in his first two novels (Cevdet Bey and His Sons (Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları, 1982) and The Silent House (Sessiz Ev, 1983)) as an aspiring novelist. Afterward, his novels trace the emergence first of an unnamed dissident voice, or narrator (as in The White Castle), and then, over the course of four novels, of an authorial figure of dissident agency (as in Snow (Kar; 2002, trans. 2004)). In The Black Book (Kara Kitap; 1990, trans. 1994, 2006), the author-figure appears tentatively as an unnamed surrogate, ghost writer for a journalist. (The New Life (Yeni Hayat; 1994, trans. 1997) focuses on the reader ‘converted’ by a book rather than on the author.) In My Name is Red, this figure, now explicitly named ‘Orhan’, is represented as a child (who grows up to write the novel). In Snow, ‘Orhan’ is incarnated as a famous author. In The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi; 2008, trans. 2009), the writing subject ‘Orhan Pamuk’ is a famous author who is commissioned by the protagonist to write his novel. In tracing the rise of the ‘writing subject’, Pamuk is also recording a political change in power relations between author and state; in other words, his ten novels chronicle an ironically modernist epic of the incarnation of the author liberated from confinements of Orientalism, nationalism and modernity. This is nothing if not an account of redemption and a political story of deliverance. In both of Pamuk’s Ottoman novels, it is the writers’ dependency on the state (in the form of the sultan’s patronage) that either enables or denies the possibility of authorship. Each time Hoja and his slave are able to convince the sultan of the worthiness of a project, they are able to continue their intellectual pursuits. They mostly end in failure and defeat. However, it is only the character that returns to Venice who is able to become a published author of some renown for texts such as A Turk of My Acquaintance. The one who stays behind, secretly becomes an author, who remains unpublished. Likewise, in My Name is Red, Enishte Effendi is able to pursue his book through the sultan’s patronage. It is the state that determines the possibility of these books. Black (the writer manqué) fails to complete the book. It is only little Orhan who later does so. The author, in Pamuk’s world, stifled and frustrated in secular modern contexts (they include an impressive genealogy of full or partial writer manqués including Cevdet Bey, Refik, Muhittin, Darvınoğlu, Galip and Ka) finds the possibility of his birth in Ottoman contexts as revealed by the narrator of The White

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Castle and ‘Orhan’ in My Name is Red. He then reappears in secular modern contexts as a famous author: the ‘Orhan Pamuk’ of Snow and The Museum of Innocence. Despite Pamuk’s metafictional techniques, the reification of the author is an ironically anachronistic development that recuperates aspects of a deconstructed Republican modernity. Pamuk’s author-figures are secular subjects who are compromised, and even suspect, in their simultaneous critique and construction of secular modernity. Pamuk pairs representations of the writing subject with themes of manuscript production. These themes are repeated and further developed in My Name is Red through a focus on the art of the book, which conflates the aesthetics of text and illumination. In the classical Ottoman book-arts workshop, artists produced books of various genres devoted to theology, science, literature and history.11 In his development of the novel from The White Castle to My Name is Red, Pamuk expands contexts of drafting, writing and rewriting by incorporating a visual realm of illustration and illumination. In The White Castle, the focus is on a first-person manuscript (‘The Quilter’s Stepson’), the details of which constitute the novel’s plot; here, the narrator emerges as an ambiguous, doubled, and even mystical/Sufi, figure. In My Name is Red, one final incomplete manuscript is the focus, the account of whose production is told by the author-figure, ‘Orhan’. This symbolic ‘secret book’ is meant to commemorate the first Islamic millennium and to represent the power of the House of Ottoman to Venice in a European pictorial idiom. The book fails, a metonym for an Ottoman legacy of decline, and functions as an absent text that Pamuk overwrites in his reconstruction of Turkish literary modernity.

The Art of the Book as Blasphemy: My Name is Red Pamuk’s Ottoman novels fundamentally reorient Turkish literary modernity by reimagining the Ottoman legacy. The White Castle is a novel concerned with textual production based in an early modern context peripheral to the Enlightenment. In the novel, the scientific experiments and treatises that preoccupy master and slave are alluded to as being blasphemous from the perspective of orthodox Islam. My Name is Red, set in an early modern context peripheral to the Renaissance, is concerned with image and textual production that is deemed blasphemous from the same Islamic perspective. (These perspectives are inversions of the secular authority that dominates in the Republican present.) In this novel, both the thrill of artistic transgression and the potential consequences of blasphemy through artistic representation drive the plot. The White Castle and My Name is Red each allude to the cultural influence of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance on Ottoman Islam, respectively. These early modern Ottoman contexts, denied by Republican modernity, serve to question and qualify the dominance of the secularisation thesis. The theme of blasphemy in Pamuk’s Ottoman novels parallels his own literary transgressions of the sacredness of secular modernity. Pamuk’s blasphemies, in recuperating narratives based in Ottoman material culture, target the authorising discourses of secularism. My Name is Red captures the texture of a medieval compendium that crosses multiple genres from autobiography to murder-mystery and from love story to historical novel of Istanbul. With the English publication of My Name is Red in 2001, Pamuk’s name began to be mentioned in print in conjunction with the Nobel Prize for the first time.12 The

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importance of the novel to Pamuk’s oeuvre and his place in world literature is attested to by its winning of the International IMPAC Dublin literary award in 2003, and more recently, its selection as part of the Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics series in 2010.13 For the first time, Pamuk was being read widely as a global author whose international readership exceeded his Turkish national audience. Professor of Comparative Literature Azade Seyhan states: My Name is Red is arguably the novel that made Pamuk a household name among literature professors and literary critics in the Unites States. Shortly after its release in English translation, it received rave reviews. In addition, it began appearing on the syllabi of college courses and among the recommended-books lists of prominent writers.14 My Name is Red is the first Pamuk novel to incorporate all of the narrative strategies used in previous novels such as multiperspectivalism, doubles, synchronic narration, the absent text, intertextuality, metafiction, metahistory, multiple genres, and Sufi and Ottoman themes. Structurally, and in terms of narrative, it is his most complex novel and the first to incorporate all four of Pamuk’s dissident modes of writing. In terms of form, My Name is Red recapitulates Pamuk’s development of literary modernity. It includes the historical aspect and autobiographical familial descriptions of Cevdet Bey and Sons, reintroduces the multiple first-person narrator structure of The Silent House, maintains the Ottoman/Republican allegory of identity in The White Castle, incorporates the detective story framing and encyclopedic cultural history entries of The Black Book, and revises the Sufi quest of unrequited love in The New Life in favour of reunion. It is the first of Pamuk’s novels to consciously evoke the Ottoman past and Quranic tradition together, and appeared a week before the attacks of 11 September 2001, after which texts that addressed Islam became valuable as insights into what was portrayed as an inscrutable religion and culture.15 My Name is Red not only redefined the Turkish novel, at the same time, it became a milestone of world literature. This chapter points to the combined workings of modes of Pamuk’s dissident writing in My Name is Red.

Artists and the Islamosecular State At the height of the Ottoman classical age, political power was expressed in the formula din ü devlet. The dual formula had its corollary in law, where secular law (kanun) and religious law (şeriat) coexisted. Politically and legally, the Empire was what might be termed an Islamosecular state. In My Name is Red, a guild of miniaturists must grapple with the strictures of religious and secular authority. The Ottoman Sultan (Murad III) commissions a secret manuscript to celebrate the glories of the Empire in the first Islamic millennium, the 1000th anniversary of the Hegira, Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina. The Sultan maintains the secrecy of the book project because it threatens Islamic orthodoxy through potentially sacrilegious figural representations. He orders the book’s images to be rendered in Renaissance styles of perspective and portraiture under the guidance of art aficionado, Enishte Effendi. Although the book has the patronage of the Sultan himself, an orthodox

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cleric, Imam Nusret Hoja, targets the book for destruction on the grounds of blasphemy. This blasphemy is described through the following details: In [the book’s last] picture, objects weren’t depicted according to their importance in Allah’s mind, but as they appeared to the naked eye – the way the Franks painted. This was the first transgression. The second was depicting Our Sultan, the Caliph of Islam, the same size as a dog. The third transgression also involved rendering Satan the same size, and in an endearing light. But what surpassed them all . . . was drawing Our Sultan’s picture as large as life and his face in all its detail! Just like the idolators do . . . Or just like the ‘portraits’ that Christians, who couldn’t save themselves from their inherent idolatrous tendencies, painted upon their church walls and worshipped. (p. 391) When first one of the artists, a guilder, and then Enishte Effendi himself is murdered, the book triggers an investigation that breaks up the account of the project into the multiple genres of a murder-mystery, a philosophical treatise on Islamic book arts, a romance, an autobiography and an allegorical tale of modern Turkey. Meanwhile, the search for the culprit continues in earnest through detective-work based on clues hidden in illuminations that requires the expertise of Master Osman and access to the imperial Ottoman treasury. The characters must negotiate the contradictions posed by two poles of authority – secular devlet and religious din – in order to discover the murderer’s identity and complete the production of the book – which remains unfinished, manifesting the trope of the absent text. As with The White Castle, one of the subtle narrative innovations of My Name is Red is that it manipulates the discourses of European and internalised Republican Orientalism to explode the limits of Turkish secular modernity.

Orders of Time and Intertemporality Pamuk’s literary reimagining of the Ottoman legacy is based on novels set in early modern cosmopolitan Istanbul contexts that address the process of textual production. Forms of cultural history, emerging out of the Ottoman ‘archive’, become a commentary on, and the basis for, reconfiguring literary modernity and critiquing the secular modern. In My Name is Red, Pamuk’s novelisation of miniature illumination transforms this pictorial medium into an intertextual model of literary form. This new form is constructed from mixed genres including autobiography, mystic romance, Quranic-style parables, philosophy of Islamic text and image, murder-mystery, and allegories of the modern Middle Eastern nation state. The conflation of text and image runs throughout the novel. Themes such as ‘style’, ‘signature’ and ‘time’ emerge as the representational perspective vacillates between the profane first-person everyday and the sacred omniscience of the divine. The tension between the sacred and the profane is reflected in the allusion to two texts that are described as being ‘beyond depiction’ (p. 7); namely, the sacred word of the Quran and the secular text of Pamuk’s novel. The literary text is thus conflated with a sacred text. To reinforce the innovative aspect of this secular-sacred form, Pamuk delineates an absent text (the ‘secret book’) in the plot that in turn becomes

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the vehicle for formal experimentation. My Name is Red entwines ‘premodern’ and modern, secular and sacred, and image and text. As such, Pamuk conceives of the absent text as a narrative space of potential transformation in literary modernity that is both a plot element and a structural aspect of the novel itself. Pamuk questions the Republican conviction that ‘Ottoman’ is simply a signifier for the ‘premodern’ by revising the denigrated Ottoman cultural context as being an early modern cosmopolitan one.16 In My Name is Red, the Ottoman cultural archive is a source of literary reimagination that becomes a commentary on the modern present. To emphasise this synchronic aspect of My Name is Red, Pamuk uses two narrative devices: (1) he makes his sixteenth-century characters conscious of the present-day reader or observer, and (2) he situates contemporary autobiographical elements into the Ottoman historical novel. Take, for example, the self-description of Shekure (Pamuk’s own mother’s name) early in the novel: ‘with one eye on the life within the book and one eye on the life outside, I, too, long to speak with you who are observing me from who knows which distant time and place’ (p. 43).17 The novel is told by multiple first-person narrators who are conscious of themselves as well as the reader/observer. The literary inversion of ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’ periods produces a synchronic (and ironic) effect that argues for a revaluation of secular values. The narration of the miniaturist-turned-murderer reinforces the same dual relation of orders of time: One side of the warriors, lovers, princes and legendary heroes that I’ve illustrated tens of thousands of times faces whatever is depicted there, in that mythical time – the enemies they’re battling for example, or the dragons they’re slaying, or the beautiful maidens over whom they weep. But another aspect, and another side of their bodies, faces the book-lover who happens to be gazing at the magnificent painting (p. 98). Here, the past (whether mythic or historic) is described as perpetually intersecting with the time of the reader to produce a synchronic effect. In other chapters, the reader is addressed directly (particularly in the ‘I am Esther’ and ‘I Will be Called a Murderer’ chapters), foregrounding Pamuk’s focus on the reader’s integral role in constructing his fiction.18 The depictions in the plot, like the miniatures themselves, mediate between the Ottoman past and the modern present. Such mediation becomes the basis for Pamuk’s literary reimagining of the Ottoman legacy and of the Republican state project that delimited and dismissed its influence, the cultural revolution. In establishing this relation, I argue that Pamuk revises the Empire-to-Republic historiographic mode [. . .] in favour of a layered and synchronic (archival or intertextual), rather than linear and diachronic, narrative structure. When combined with his dissident writing, Pamuk’s technique of using cultural history (in this case, book arts) in the reformulation of modern literature defines a politics of form. As a result, My Name is Red writes against the dominant secular discourse of the Ottoman legacy as ‘premodern’ and ‘backward’.19 Instead, Pamuk attempts to recoup an early modern Ottoman cosmopolitanism. From the Republican perspective, the Ottoman legacy is cast as a blank space by the obfuscating policies of the cultural revolution, over which formations of the secular modern are inscribed. Pamuk’s reformulation of narrative through the ‘Ottoman archive’ thus becomes the basis for a transformation in literary modernity and a political critique of secular modernity.

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In My Name is Red, characters are on the threshold of two worlds represented by two distinct historical periods: their own Ottoman Islamic era and the reader’s modernity. Each character is furthermore depicted as being part of an ordered world represented in art by the perspective of the divine (Allah’s perspective and memory), but is also a first-person voice in a manuscript ‘beyond depiction’ (the novel we read). Pamuk melds the omniscient divine perspective (conveyed by discussions on image and perspectivalism) with the profane everyday of individual characters (represented by first-person narration). The disruption of the traditional representational hierarchy, between what is known as the ‘two pens’ of sacred calligraphy (because it conveys the word of God) and profane illumination (because it competes with divine creation) occurs through the unfinished ‘secret book’. The secret book is blasphemous because of its form, in which, for the first time profane illustration supersedes the sacredness of the text. (The Sultan’s ‘secret book’ functions as the absent text of My Name is Red.) The failed attempt at the representation of Ottoman material worldly power and authority echoes the decline paradigm and foreshadows the eventual encroachment of secular modernity; however, Pamuk overwrites the privileged position of the secular modern with his own literary modernity.20 He tells the story of a half-born and forestalled textual ‘modernisation’ and produces a literary text of his own constituted by both secular and sacred elements.21 In short, I argue that My Name is Red updates understandings of Ottoman Islamic tradition rather than dismissing them as being ‘premodern’. Pamuk, in effect, inverts the secular Empire to Republic trope, perpetually reintroducing Ottoman cultural history and Islam to the reader and into the Republican present. In My Name is Red, obviously, tradition is represented by manuscript illumination and production. Like Enishte Effendi, whose blasphemous ‘secret book’ questions accepted Islamic cosmography by separating the image from the text and allowing the illustration to stand on its own, Pamuk also performs his own transgressions by (re)textualising, or novelising, the image and making this traditional (archival) form the model of form for the modern novel. These transgressions are blasphemous with respect to secular modernity. Both gestures invert the received epistemologies of Islam and secularism from the state perspective. Reconfigurations of the established hierarchy of text and image, known as ‘the two pens’, involve epistemic challenges to contexts of religious, traditional or Ottoman state authority. This transgression is reflected in the violence of the plot, where the motive for murder is in fact changes to the traditional world view represented by the ‘secret book’ – changes that represent epistemic violence to Ottoman-Islamic cosmography.22

The Theory of the Two Pens: Image/Text Intertextuality The Encyclopedia of Islam states, ‘According to the traditions quoted by al-tabarī . . . the kalam was the first thing created by God so that He could write down events to come’.23 Another way to conceptualise the vacillation, as I have been arguing, between contexts of din and devlet in My Name is Red, is through reference to the so-called ‘theory of the two pens’ or qalams.24 The first ‘pen’, the more sacred of the two and closer to din, is text-based writing or calligraphy. Qalam signifies the ‘reed pen’ and calligraphers were esteemed artists for they wrote the sacred words of the Quran. Illuminators, however, were not looked upon so positively since they could depict and thus create human figures, challenging the creative authority of Allah as Al-Hāliq, the

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Creator. This negative perception was countered by describing the painter’s brush as a second qalam, on a par with that of the calligrapher’s pen. The second ‘pen’ is the brush of illumination. The two qalams (or text and image) worked together in the bookmaking workshops of classical Ottoman Istanbul where calligraphers and painters collaborated to produce a treasury of illustrated manuscripts. In the theory of the two qalams, the pen had a dual force in that it could inscribe texts (specifically the holy word) as well as represent images through illumination.25 With respect to Pamuk and in the perspective of contemporary fiction, it bears emphasis that such image/text hybridity is a literary device common to contemporary metafiction.26 Pamuk makes innovative literary use of both ‘pens’ as they correlate to sacred and secular contexts.27 In My Name is Red, Pamuk first posits an inversion of the established hierarchy of the two pens (through the ‘secret book’). He cleverly appropriates both and establishes a new hierarchy between them through the authority of his own novelisation. Pamuk’s writing arguably constitutes a ‘third pen’. In other words, the ‘third pen’ represented by Pamuk’s writing subject (the author-figure ‘Orhan’) is prefigured by the other two. Pamuk’s third pen is one of personal and political redemption before the authority of Republican secular modernity. As such, the third pen maintains the sacred essence first attributed to the qalam in Islam. The epigraph from the Quran’s ‘Al-Qalam’ surah that begins this chapter alludes to this sacredness. The sacredness of the pen, as it conveys the word of God, is transferred to Pamuk’s own secular novel writing. If the divinity of the word is conveyed by the pen, Pamuk both sacralises the secular act of writing (by relating it to a divine origin) as well as demystifies the divinity of the word (by revealing its materiality based in paper, ink and scribe). What emerges is a double blasphemy: one against the orthodoxies of secularism and devlet and the other against the orthodoxies of sacredness and din. Writing, as Pamuk’s author-figure in The Black Book avows, is the ‘sole consolation’ because of its secular-sacred authority. Writing affords a means of secular resistance (or blasphemy) that is ironically redemptive in the godless world view of the state. This is a clue to understanding Pamuk’s overall project: to establish an intersection of secular and sacred tropes in acts of transgressive or dissident writing. What emerges in My Name is Red is the intertextuality of text and image as the foundation for innovations in literary modernity. My Name is Red is the only Pamuk novel to begin with epitaphs (three) from the Quran. As a literary device, Quranic allusions in the novel articulate a discursive field characterised by injunctions of orthodox Islam. Against this backdrop, he introduces the process of Ottoman aesthetic production through the art of the book. Not only is the art of the Ottoman book revealed as an artefact of cultural history forgotten in the ‘archive’ and elided by European and Republican modernity, it serves as a metaphor for novel writing, a parallel, but no less important, literary art of the book. Through this doubled thematic structure, Pamuk is able to engage overarching matters of textual production and the possibility of authorship – two dominant tropes in his work. From the first chapter, My Name is Red places the reader in a framework of Islamic cosmography and eschatology. The novel’s opening scene establishes the circumscription of the representative force of illustration and the plot-driving tension between the two pens (sacred text and profane image). Furthermore, the murderer is an illustrator, and his victim, a guilder, calligrapher and artisan of traditional forms of decorative

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arts. The first-person narrator, Elegant Effendi, representing an orthodox ‘first pen’, speaks from the afterlife, warning of a threat to the Muslim faith by way of changes in representation contained in a ‘secret book’ meant to celebrate the first Islamic millennium.28 The secret book manifests the blasphemous inversion of the two pens and is meant to contain the sacrilegious portrait of the Ottoman Sultan, the shadow of God on Earth, as part of its central two-page image.29 The book is intended to convey the worldly power of the Ottoman Islamic state to Europe. Enishte Effendi explains: I wanted the things I depicted to represent Our Sultan’s entire world. . . . But unlike the Venetians, my work would not merely depict material objects, but naturally the inner riches, the joys and fears of the realm of which Our Sultan rules. . . . It was Our Sultan who ought to be thus portrayed! Our Sultan ought to be rendered along with everything He owned, with the things that represented and constituted his realm. . . . A manuscript could be illustrated according to this idea. (pp. 25–7) The innovative book project, which focuses on objects, figures and portraits removed from and independent of a narrative, must remain secret due to its sacrilegious challenge to the traditions of the book, the hierarchy of the two pens and Islam. In keeping with Pamuk’s trope and structural device of the absent text, the project remains incomplete and the scribe, Black, fails to write the book’s text. The absence and failure in authorship is overwritten by a ‘writing subject’, an author-figure who appears in the novel (in this case ‘Orhan’), a reflection of Pamuk himself. As a figure of redemption, the author-figure represents the possibility of literary agency and is a symbol of Republican literary modernity that is present in all of Pamuk’s mature novels. The fixed identity, and persistence, of this realist and modernising writing subject sits in direct contrast to Pamuk’s postmodern literary techniques, which by elevating text, intertext and metatext, challenge that very authorial agency.30 This is a central unresolved conflict in Pamuk’s work. It is also the central tension between Republican secular modern and postmodern approaches to fiction. (In consideration of the contingencies of Turkish literature and the constructions of Turkishness, I argue that this tension is better described as an aesthetic of ‘postOrientalism’.) While Pamuk challenges the internalised Orientalism of much of the secular modern world view, he clings to the representation of the male author-intellectual as a figure of transformation and redemption – and as a legacy of the secular masterplot of the Turkish novel. The Republican intellectual-historian Darvınoğlu, whose main preoccupation is a dilemma of textual representation, disappears at the start of Pamuk’s third novel; however, his shadow or spectre reappears as the narrator-author in the last chapter. Subsequently, the ‘author’ reappears at the end of all other Pamuk novels, in effect, replacing the writer manqué of his plots. Black (representing the scribal pen) is the ‘writer manqué’ charged with writing the secret book, but he never does so. This absence opens the possibility for narrative revisions in the retelling. As with other novels, Pamuk effectively overwrites the absent text of the plot with literary formations that are secular and sacred, and thus embody a double-blasphemy against the authority of din (in the Ottoman plot) and of devlet (in the Republican present). My Name is Red recuperates the theory of the two pens by containing both in the modern form of the novel. Furthermore, the novel revalues the subordinate role of the profane image, challenging its ‘dependence’ on the sacred

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text of calligraphy. Pamuk inverts the traditional opposition of the ‘pens’ by making (early modern Ottoman Islamic) images prefigure (Republican) textual narration and literary modernity such that literary modernity is guided by an ostensibly ‘premodern’ aesthetic of illustration.31 Two fables in particular, related early in the novel, allude to the two pens and the inversion of the accepted hierarchy between them. These legitimise figural representation by linking illustration to divine contexts. The first fable, told by master miniaturist Stork, refers to the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 and Ibn Shakir, a calligrapher who undergoes a ‘conversion’ to illustrator after witnessing the end of the Islamic caliphate: He thought about how all those volumes he’d transcribed in beautiful script . . . hadn’t in the least served to stop this horrifying massacre and devastation, and in turn, he swore never to write again. Furthermore, he was struck with the desire to express his pain and the disaster he’d witnessed through painting, which until that day he’d belittled and deemed an affront to Allah. . . . We owe the happy miracle of the three-hundred-year renaissance in Islamic illustration following the Mongol invasion to . . . the truly agonizing depiction of the world from an elevated Godlike perspective. . . . [Thus] the notion of timeless time that had rested in the hearts of Arab calligrapher-scribes for five hundred years would finally manifest itself not it writing [text], but in painting [image]. (p. 70) Believing that violence and desecration could not be prevented by the written word, Ibn Shakir begins to represent the world visually, from the elevated Godlike perspective afforded by a minaret. This inversion of the two pens (echoed by the accounts of the storyteller, or meddah, which are based on giving voice to things) sets the foundation for the emergence of Pamuk’s own revision. This revision unites image and text in the manifestation of an authorial ‘third pen’ of novel writing that reintroduces contexts of din while nevertheless profaning them. The second fable, told by Olive, describes illustration as a means of attaining the divine perspective of Allah. The old miniaturist in the fable states: Allah created this earthly realm so that, above all, it might be seen. Afterward, He provided us with words so we might share and discuss with one another what we’ve seen. We mistakenly assumed that these stories arose out of words and that illustrations were painted in service of these stories. Quite to the contrary, painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He sees the world. (p. 79) Both fables invert the traditional hierarchy between the two pens. As an author, however, Pamuk all the while valorises narrative and text as the preferred medium of his secular-sacred themes, tropes and literary formations. Pamuk relies on both image and text to sacralise a novel form that is ‘premodern’ and modern both. The resulting literary modernity appropriates contexts of Ottoman cultural history – such as miniatures – that redefine narrative form and disrupt the diachronic temporal logic of the secular modern. Other examples of the literary text overwriting image and thus rewriting traditional stories are reflected in the plot through Pamuk’s process of novelising miniature

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depictions of traditional literary scenes. The opening chapters of My Name is Red are expositions linked to well-known miniatures from traditional stories that Pamuk overwrites in the plot. The illuminator’s murder of Elegant Effendi is alluded to in the context of Shiruye’s murder of Hüsrev (from Nizami’s Hüsrev and Shirin). The context of Black seeing Shekure is alluded to through Hüsrev visiting Shirin’s palace in the same account. Black’s declaration of love is echoed in the image of Shirin falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture with Black and Shekure in the place of lover and beloved.32 Pamuk revises these scenes by removing them from their traditional contexts and rewriting them. This process is alluded to repeatedly in My Name is Red, as conquering rulers and sultans have themselves edited into the books of literature and history that filled the libraries of a defeated rival.33 Though depicted in the plot, the incorporation and revision of traditional aesthetic forms becomes a template for literary innovation.

The Meddah: Prefiguring Parody The storytelling meddah’s accounts, punctuating the novel’s plot, maintain the thematic inversion of the two ‘pens’ of text and image while manifesting an innovative third perspective, that of narration. Rather than constituting part of an existing story, the vignettes by the meddah are narrated from the perspective of objects, animals and stock figures. Professor of Turkish literature Talat Halman describes the traditional vocation of the meddah as follows: Using secular topics and tales, the Meddahs, became storytellers with their repertoire concentrating on heroic deeds, daily life of their regions and communities, gnomic tales, and exhortations. Gradually satire started to form the core of their programs: humorous anecdotes about human foibles, impersonations of stock types as well as familiar individuals, mockery of social mores, and guarded or open stabs at people in high office, including sometimes the sultan.34 In My Name is Red, the storyteller functions as an authorial figure who relies on parody as a mode of dissent. First, he consistently satirises the figure of orthodox Islamic authority, Nusret Hoja. Here, Pamuk situates the satiric mode of his fiction, which first appears in The Black Book, in the Ottoman figure of the meddah. Secondly, the meddah gives narrative voice to the images of stand-alone objects and figures. Pamuk identifies the character of the meddah as a type of author of oral literature who is integral to narrative production, and the tradition of the modern Turkish novel [. . .]. Literary critic Berna Moran among others, identifies meddah stories as the local basis of the modern Turkish novel in the nineteenth century.35 The fate of the meddah in My Name is Red is telling: he is the victim of an Islamist ‘Erzurumi’ mob lynching and murder, before which he is ritually ‘silenced’ by having his tongue cut out. Though the site of punitive authority is Islamic in the Ottoman context of the plot, in Pamuk’s fiction it is always an allegory for secular state authority [. . .]. In light of the allegorical framing, it is evident that Pamuk is critiquing din and devlet as actual sites of authority (from a historical perspective) as well as excavating them as figurative sites of narratives and tropes (from a literary perspective).

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The storyteller is also responsible for giving voice to the memory of things. He speaks for the objects and figures intended for the secret book: voicing their memories through improvised stories. In A Sense of Things (2003), Bill Brown states, ‘Taken literally, the belief that there are ideas in things amounts to granting them an interiority and, thus, something like the structure of subjectivity’.36 Brown’s work, which is concerned with the ways inanimate objects enable human subjects to form, construct, reform and reconstruct themselves, provides new insights into Pamuk’s fiction. Pamuk’s foregrounding of material culture in My Name is Red is significant for the way it imbues the objects of the Ottoman past with an alterity that is legitimate and political before the discourses of Republican secularism.

Object Lessons: Things that Speak Pamuk’s writing overwhelms us with objects and things, at times in exhausting lists. These things are found in archives, in treasuries, in rooms and workshops, and most of all, in the streets of Istanbul itself. Pamuk’s naming of these things is also a literary excavation and archaeology that he adopts from the work of A. H. Tanpınar, who first expressed the possibility of a ‘novel of material objects and discarded life fragments’ in A Mind at Peace (Huzur; 1949, trans. 2008). The things accumulate, and in the process of accumulation, assume the character of what Brown calls a ‘material unconscious’. As Brown explains: [The material unconscious] grants material objects (toys, cash registers, amusement rides) and material practices (amateur photography, cinematography, football games) a good deal of explanatory power when it comes both to understanding literary texts and to reading those texts as a way of writing history.37 Such an understanding is revealing to Pamuk’s aims in My Name is Red, especially in consideration of the fact that objects both are given voice in the narration and have itineraries whose changing contexts give them various meanings. Narration in these scenes is predicated on the itinerary of the object in relation to various subjects. In My Name is Red, Pamuk delineates an Ottoman material unconscious focused on the tools of illumination and book production: a sea-shell used to burnish paper, reed pens, gold leaf, black and coloured inks, sized paper, binding glue and ink wells. Furthermore, he meticulously describes material practices related to the art of the book; of note, the three short chapters that detail how master miniaturists Olive, Stork and Butterfly each produce the image of a horse – a symbol of military power in the Turco-Mongol imperial tradition.

The Mongol Inkpot and the Colour Red Some of these things become the focus of important scenes in the novel. The heavy Mongolian inkpot reserved for the colour red is a gift from Black to Enishe Effendi and is an embodiment of tradition. It is an object whose meaning is inflected by two historical and literary narratives. In one, it is the symbol of a Mongol tradition of painting and illumination passed down to the Ottomans; in another, it becomes a

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murder weapon that symbolically takes vengeance on Enishte Effendi, the would-be Renaissance-influenced innovator of book-arts illumination. Furthermore, this object becomes a metonym for the violence spread by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which ended the Islamic caliphate and changed the course of regional history. The red ink it carries merges with and becomes the blood of its victim, the dilettante illustrator and bibliophile Enishte Effendi: What I thought was my blood was red ink; what I thought was ink on his [the murderer’s] hands was my flowing blood. . . . He struck my head once more. His face and his entire body had become bright red from the ink splattering out of the inkpot, and I suppose, from the blood splattering out of me. (pp. 173–4) The murderer is marked (for retribution, for sacrifice) by a red that is a combination of the sacrificial blood of his victim and the vibrant red ink of illumination. Later in My Name is Red, this sacred and profane red ink, treated as another ‘thing’, itself speaks in an omniscient, quasi-divine voice: I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. . . . As I bring my color to the page, it’s as if I command the world to ‘Be!’ Yes, those who cannot see would deny it, but the truth is I can be found everywhere. (pp. 186–8) The base materiality of the colour, which is made out of insects, is conflated with its life-giving, spiritual force. The voice of such things in Pamuk’s novel is the voice of alterity. ‘Red’ is a colour whose existence begins humbly with the Kermes beetle and extends to the divinity of artistic expression and the divine itself (for example, as Enishe Effendi approaches God, everything is suffused in red). Red represents the material spirituality of spilt blood and lifeblood – it giveth and it taketh away.

The Persian Plume Needle The account of the plume needle also reveals part of a material unconscious that contains an alternative historiography. The plume needle was sent as a peace offering to Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim along with other gifts by Shah Tahmasp including a copy of the Book of Kings. Discovered in the Imperial treasury, the plume needle, meant to affix plumes of status and honour, was also used for an entirely different purpose. In this case, it was used by the exalted Persian master Bihzad to blind himself. Designed to affix plumes of prestige onto royal turbans, the needle, as an instrument of blinding, bestows the status of ‘master’ upon the artist: the blinded artist can only ‘see’ through memory, a refined and exalted memory that approaches the sacred memory of Allah. In My Name is Red, Master Osman, in a ritual blinding, repeats Bihzad’s act. Shortly afterward, he states: Men like us have no choice but to try to see the world the way God does and to resign ourselves to His justice. . . . And here, among these pictures and possessions, I have the strong sensation that these two things are beginning to converge: as we approach God’s vision of the world, His justice approaches us. See here, the needle with which Master Bihzad blinded himself . . . (p. 325)

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The act of blinding, thus becomes a subtle intersection of the secular and the sacred; that is, an act in which the two meet as loss of sight leads to divine vision. Later, as punishment, the other master miniaturists use the same needle to mete out their own justice: they blind the confessed murderer in their midst to prevent him from ever illustrating again (echoing the death of the meddah after being silenced). The material unconscious conveyed by these two objects is aesthetic and historical, transnational and transgressive. Both objects have a primary and secondary (concealed) purpose. The Mongol inkpot and the Persian plume needle together tell a story of artistry, status and violence. They reveal how objects of tradition and the past can function to inflict epistemic and ontological violence. It is this very function that Pamuk uses to politicise and historicise his novel.

The Illuminated Manuscript The irony of the Sultan’s ‘secret book’ rests in the mundane things and figures meant to portray secular-sacred Ottoman power: a dog, a tree, a gold coin, Death, the colour red, a horse, Satan, two dervishes and a woman. The parody of both state power and religious injunction is none the more evident than in the storyteller’s bawdy narration. The objects and figures, their ‘voices’ and their ‘memories’, rage against various targets of ridicule. The Dog ‘speaks’ against Islamic orthodoxy; the Tree against the traditional hierarchy of text over image; the Coin against envy; the Horse against the incongruence of representation and reality; Death against fear; Dervishes against the distortion of Orientalist representations; Red of synesthesia and the divine; Satan of fallen grace and pity; and the Woman of sustenance and love. All of them, everyday images from ‘archival’ representations to be found in miniatures, are presented in a narrative sweep that moves from the mundane and profane to the divine and sacred. As such, the storyteller – the narrator of the memory of things and pictures – moves the novel’s plot beyond the dualism of the two pens and prefigures a third pen that unites oral narrative tradition and textual narrative innovation. By connecting the Ottoman past with the modern present through storytelling predicated on objects and memory, Pamuk’s authorship supersedes the two pens in a way that makes a political statement. The resulting new ‘form’ of literary modernity emerges out of an early modern aesthetic model of miniatures and a revised theory of the two pens that enables the transgression of ‘painting with words’.

The Third Pen An example of the personification of the two pens occurs in the novel’s climactic imperial treasury scene that centres on Black, the scribe and writer manqué, and Master Osman, the head illuminator who senses that ‘everything is coming to an end’. Aside from the far-flung accumulation of plunder from borderlands ranging from Central Europe to Central Asia, the treasury contains a concealed history of Islamic book arts in rare historical and literary manuscripts. Black (representing the first pen) and Master Osman (the second pen) pore over books and illustrations in the novel’s main archive scene set in the Ottoman Imperial Treasury. The traditional sacredness of the word is symbolically muted because Black cannot write. (However, the text is re-sacralised

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through the writing subject, ‘Orhan’, representing a kind of ‘third pen’). In this scene, the narrative ‘I’, switching between the two characters, is an embodiment of the two pens (text and image). Often, in one continuous scene, broken by chapters, the narrative voice moves from one character to another, so ‘I’ becomes ‘He’ and vice versa. This technique could be described as a literary reverse-angle shot.38 The first-person point of view is given over to each character in turn as the ‘I’ both ‘sees’ and narrates. Master Osman’s act of blinding himself (of doing away with the eye/‘I’) enables the revelation of a divine perspective; the blackness of Allah’s memory, which in Pamuk’s world is also the blackness of ink, text and writing (the redemptive ‘sole consolation’). In My Name is Red, the narrative perspective is doubled and fragmentary, as each character is represented repeatedly through first- and third-person points of view.39 Pamuk’s vacillation between first- and third-person perspectives runs throughout his work. In The White Castle, the same technique is used. However, it is complicated by the emergence of a third narrative perspective. If the ‘I/he’ represents a material, secular or worldly perspective, the ‘He/Him’ that emerges in the last chapter, stands for one that is mystical or divine. As in The White Castle, the narration of My Name is Red also mediates between the secular and the sacred. Developing this literary technique, Pamuk structures My Name is Red so it occupies two narrative positions: the ‘profane’ limited first-person and the ‘sacred omniscient’ perspective. (We learn retrospectively that the writing-subject ‘Orhan’ is the author of the scene and novel.) The narrative is thus fragmented in a way that delineates a kind of secular-sacred ‘first-person omniscience’. This point of view, vacillating between a limited and an omniscient ‘I’, first appears with the narrator in chapter 11 of The White Castle. At the conclusion of My Name is Red, text and image are once again brought together in a secular-sacred revision of literary modernity that signifies the manifestation of a ‘third pen’. The third pen is a narrative iteration that reintroduces the archival cultural forms of the pre-Republican past (Ottoman-Islamic image and text) into the present. This is none other than the secular-sacred pen of Pamuk’s literary authority. In other words, the third pen signifies a dissident mode of secular-sacred writing in My Name is Red.

Pamuk’s Terkip Borrowing from Tanpınar’s notion of terkip, or cultural ‘synthesis’, Pamuk merges the two pens in his articulation of a third. In My Name is Red, the third pen represents the synthesis of text and image in a novelisation that redefines literary modernity through innovative ‘style’ (üslup). Enishte Effendi’s remarks on the third space that emerges to foster innovation in illumination also apply to literature: ‘In the realm of book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made . . . I can be certain of the following: two styles heretofore never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous’ (p. 160). For Pamuk, these two styles are an extension of the two pens, image and text, or Ottoman illumination and manuscript writing. But Pamuk’s literary synthesis is bringing together the supposed ‘premodern’ Ottoman past and the secular modern to redefine the Turkish novel as a complex transnational form that is both postsecular and postOrientalist. The multifaceted process of book production described in the plot is also a reference to Pamuk’s process of formal innovation. Rewriting and revision are emphasised in the way texts are reused (disassembled and reassembled) and in the way images and ideas travel to inhabit different books throughout the novel. Pamuk

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constructs My Name is Red through a process of intertextual writing that relies on the merging of text and image. The novel emerges as the re-constitution of narrative and visual traditions that, in turn, reformulate literary modernity. In the process, the literary text, disenchanted by Republican secularisation, becomes re-enchanted by tradition and religious history. The scene describing Enishte’s accension, or Mir’aj, is a symbol of such cultural re-enchantment.

Secular Mir’aj The Mir’aj, the Prophet’s ascension to heaven, is a common topic of miniature illumination.40 Pamuk, however, makes a secular revision of the scene by describing the ascension of the murdered Enishte Effendi: I opened my mouth [to release my soul] and abruptly all was color just as in the pictures of Our Prophet’s Mir’aj journey, during which he visited Heaven. Everything was flooded in exquisite brightness as if generously painted with gold wash. . . . Events I’d once endured briskly and sequentially were now spread over infinite space and existed simultaneously. As in one of those large double-leaf paintings wherein a witty miniaturist has painted a number of unrelated things in each corner – many things were happening all at once. (pp. 176–7) As the passage indicates, the experience and perspective of the Mir’aj, involves a transformation in notions of time, memory and point-of-view. The realism of the first-person present is qualified by the omniscience and omnipresence of a divine perspective, represented by ‘He’. As discussed, the expansion in scope of the first-person perspective to an omniscient one is a technique with which Pamuk first experimented in The White Castle. This scalar variation is constantly at play in My Name is Red, represented by the distinction between first-person limited narration and the omniscient ‘memory of Allah’ and is conveyed by debates the miniaturists have about the ideology of visual perspective. Representations of synchronic time and memory inform the formal innovations in Pamuk’s work. Enishe Effendi, in the Mir’aj scene, represents this secular-sacred perspective by narrating from the in-between state (and perspective) of berzah.

Narrating Berzah In Islamic eschatology, berzah (or barzakh) is an intermediate state of waiting for judgement and redemption.41 Enishte Effendi narrates a chapter of My Name is Red from the vantage of this realm, where souls reside after death. From a literary perspective, qualities of berzah such as the synchronicity of historical events and space as memory are reflected as transformations in narrative point of view. Enishte Effendi states: I beheld Creation with awe and surprise as if for the first time, but also as if it had somehow emerged from my memory. What I called ‘memory’ contained an entire world: With time spread out infinitely before me in both directions, I understood

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how the world as I first experienced it could persist afterward as memory. . . . I’d been liberated from a straightjacket. From now on nothing was restricted. . . . I knew I was close to Him. . . . Looking down from the height of a minaret, the whole world resembled a magnificent book whose pages I was examining one by one. . . . From the intermediate state of Berzah, past and present time appear at once, and as long as the soul remains within its memories, limitations of place do not obtain. . . . I begged of Exalted Allah to grant us souls-without-bodies in Heaven and bodies-without-souls in life. (pp. 229–31) This intermediate perspective is consonant in terms of point-of-view with the firstperson ‘omniscient’ narration Pamuk establishes in the last chapter of The White Castle. Enishte Effendi’s brief ‘exchange’ with Allah reveals that the perspective of Enishte Effendi in berzah is also the secular-sacred perspective of a character examining the world like a text from a vantage between the material (body) and the spiritual (soul) and between the worldly and the divine. This relates to an important theme in My Name is Red: the tension between a two-dimensional image (the miniature, the page), and a third dimension of narrative self-reflexivity (looking at the self/object from the outside). Conceptually, this reflects the notion of the three pens discussed above. The third, triangulating dimension is interpretive or hermeneutic. In Pamuk’s work it is often a metahistorical or metafictional perspective. Ottoman historian Cemal Kafadar describes the sixteenth-century diary of a dervish as being part of a tradition of Ottoman arts and letters that did not develop a third-dimensional, self-reflexive perspective, but rather was ‘characterized by a miniaturist’s flat depiction of neatly contoured figures that are not quite distinguishable from each other except in their social functions’.42 Elsewhere, referring to this important third-dimension of interpretation, he states: ‘There is no third dimension in any of these narratives, no obvious distance between the narrator and the narrated self’ (p. 138). In his work, Pamuk brings this very distance to sixteenth-century cultural history, updating it as an innovation in literary modernity. The horizon of identification implied in Kafadar’s analysis is group, social or corporate identification. If ‘first-person’ individuality emerges at all, it is only a partial, half-born emergence. Pamuk introduces a full-fledged first-person formulation in My Name is Red that reimagines the Ottoman legacy as an archive of literary reformulation. By structuring his novel with this aesthetic guide, Pamuk returns to the overarching problematic of the individual artist and the restrictions of religious or secular state (whether Ottoman or Republican).43 The author-figure, occulted in the pages of Pamuk’s novels, repeatedly emerges by the end as the agent of transformation in narrative. Turkish scholars have claimed that Pamuk’s work, and much of Turkish literature, is situated between broader movements of modernity and postmodernity.44 The authorial emergence at the end of Pamuk’s novels is evidence in support of such a claim. In short, Pamuk reimagines the Ottoman legacy to achieve a triangulating perspective on Republican literary modernity. By so doing, he is playing with Orientalist expectations about Islam and redirecting them toward an unlikely target: Republican secularism (an embodiment of Enlightenment values). What is ultimately revealed in My Name is Red is not an exotic world but a lesson in how to ‘read’ and understand a cultural history elided by the twin forces of Orientalism and Republican nationalism. ‘Reading’ miniatures, which Pamuk himself states on first glance seem ‘off’ because

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they lack a familiar perspective and context, is a metaphor for this new interpretive reading of Istanbul cosmopolitanism and its Ottoman Islamic culture. Though sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul provides the setting, the dilemmas experienced by the characters, including issues of style, ideological affront (whether to Islam or the nation), breaking with aesthetic tradition, money and fame, family, love, authority, belonging, jealousy, rage, all relate to present-day Turkey, and specifically, Pamuk’s cosmopolitan world of the Istanbul author. More than love story, detective story, philosophy of art or historical fiction, My Name is Red is a narrative of transnational literary modernity that liberates the author from constraints of secular modern time, geography, history and ideology. This allows him to do what he does best, that is, pen Sufi-inspired elegies on separation between lover and beloved, lament the loss of cosmopolitan cultural histories, interrogate identity, and valorise Istanbul as the site of narrative production; and in the process, redefine what the novel can be. [. . .]

Conclusion: PostOrientalism [. . .] Pamuk [is an] Istanbul author whose Ottoman historical fiction critically engages with and writes back to Orientalising discourses of secular national modernity. In this Orientalist-nationalist paradox, cultural formations of Islam are denigrated in the process of national self-determination. Pamuk’s [. . .] revisions of the Ottoman legacy target secular nationalism, which, by extension, relies on an internalised vision of Orientalist modernity. In other words, [he] writes against the political control mechanisms of narratives of devlet. [His] literary interventions into established positions of secularism, in terms of content and form, can be characterised more instructively as post-Orientalist writing.45 Broadly, postOrientalism is a critique of the historical function of Orientalism (and, by extension, nationalism) in the construction of identity and subjectivity. A postOrientalist understanding, which involves critical responses to the secular state (whether colonising, nationalising or both), encourages a politically engaged reassessment of Turkish modernity. PostOrientalism has been advocated by critics with postcolonial concerns such as Gyan Prakash (subaltern studies), Aijaz Ahmad (in a critical Marxist vein), as well as more recently by representatives of national literary traditions such as Hamid Dabashi (Iranian studies and comparative literature).46 Thus, it is a theoretical intervention situated at the intersection of the colonial, the secular social and the national modern. It also characterises many of the political ambiguities of Turkish modernity. Understandings of postOrientalism have been used by these scholars to open sites of resistance in historiography and national culture and would likewise bring new insights to literature in nationalised, secularised and modernised Muslim societies such as Turkey. PostOrientalism accommodates varieties of national and transnational resistance, as represented by Pamuk [. . .]. The interrogation of historiography that Prakash describes involves the examination of the nation-form as a first, though compromised, attempt at postOrientalism. The nation-form, Prakash writes, accepts Orientalist essentialisations, but makes them active rather than passive. In this sense then, the early narratives of Republican literature by Ömer Seyfeddin, Halide Edib, Yakup Kadri, Peyami Safa, and others, are something of an attempt at postOrientalist practice of ‘writing

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back’ in a nationalist vein. However, they are based on a simple discursive inversion in representations of ‘self’ and ‘other’. In this scenario, the Orientalised ‘Terrible Turk’ has become a kind of noble savage, a nationalised ‘Terrific Turk’. Taking the debate beyond the nation-form, in a way that resonates with Partha Chatterjee’s argument in The Nation and its Fragments, Prakash states, ‘[PostOrientalist scholarship] posits that we can proliferate histories, cultures and identities arrested by previous essentializations’.47 Though he is speaking about history writing, his conclusions, reminiscent of Darvınoğlu’s search for historical form, would also hold for literature and literary modernity. The postOrientalism that is prefigured in [. . .] this chapter is also transnational and ‘proliferates’ new representations. [. . .] Pamuk sets My Name is Red in sixteenth-century Istanbul such that national boundaries give way to vast transregional networks based on alternative affiliations. [His] novel subversively situates [. . .] early modern Ottoman cosmopolitanism into secular Turkish cultural logic. The Ottoman legacy – as a space of negotiation, transgression and dissidence – is a contested space of politics and literature, of Islam and modernity, and of din and devlet, that allows Pamuk [. . .] to develop a critical Turkish literary modernity. In the Turkish context, postOrientalism arguably functions to: (1) interrogate the effects of the Kemalist cultural revolution as a sustained engagement with, rather than an overturning of, European and Ottoman imperial power; (2) support the epistemological continuity between Turkish secular modernity and varieties of Orientalist thought; (3) acknowledge that an internalised Orientalism divides the modern Turkish subject and creates an on-going crisis of modernity in the intellectual, the author and society; (4) belie the political fantasy of a Turkishness based on mutually exclusive, rather than mutually implicating, narratives of din and devlet; and (5) serve as a process of emancipation from the discursive confines and impositions of Turkishness backed by a state power that prevents the representation and legibility of subjects with agency. Thus, a postOrientalist approach foregrounds political and cultural representations that are not delimited by dominant discourses of Orientalism and nationalism. As the late Ottoman state fell into the position of being semi-colonised, the legacy of this semi-colonisation, or colonial encounter with Europe, informed the breadth, scope and severity of the Kemalist cultural revolution that gave shape to the Republic of Turkey. Though it is commonplace to hear modern Turks declare that ‘Turkey’ – often ambiguously meaning both the Ottoman state and the Republic – was never colonised, history presents us with quite a different account, one of a local authoritarian modernisation that usurps the place of a colonial civilising mission. It is by subverting the dominant legibility of the Orientalist-national binary through new practices of narration that Pamuk [. . .] establishes a ‘postOrientalist aesthetic’ beyond the binary logic of reductive iterations of ‘East’ and ‘West’. As an author critical of the state, he represents a voice of dissent vital to the creation of Turkish literary modernity. The Ottoman legacy and its Sufism, material culture and cosmopolitanism afford Pamuk [. . .] a triangulating perspective on the secular denigrations of din and the control mechanisms of devlet. My Name is Red presents classical sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul as a site of cultural production vying against secular and religious authority. The novel is both a depiction of Ottoman everyday life as well as an allegory of late Republican-era tensions between artist/author and state. [. . .] It offers a frank and revealing depiction of Turkish Muslim family life, with a strong urban [woman] at its centre (Shekure). It thus consciously reimagines dominant Orientalist

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tropes of the Ottoman legacy including women (as enslaved), Islam (as anti-modern), the Ottoman Empire (as backward), and the Oriental city (as anti-cosmopolitan). Pamuk’s Ottoman novels work to de-Orientalise the Republican approach to the Ottoman legacy by revising attitudes toward Istanbul cosmopolitanism and Turkish Islam; that is, toward the archive of Ottoman Islamic material culture and cultural history. By providing his local and international readers with access to this occulted archive, Pamuk’s novels constitute a politicised counter-archive to Turkish modernity and a postOrientalist site of resistance. [. . .]

Notes 1. This chapter was originally published in Erdağ Göknar, Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 127–62. Minor edits have been applied here. 2. The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 401. 3. Republic of Turkey Constitution, ‘Article 2’, 1924, http://tr.wikisource.org/wiki/1924_ Anayasası (last accessed 21 January 2012), n.p. 4. Orhan Pamuk, Beyaz Kale (Istanbul: İletişim, 1995), p. 93. All translations of this text from the original Turkish mine. This passage comprises the response given by Hoja to the Sultan when asked what evidence he used to predict the end of the plague in two weeks’ time. 5. These include works by Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj, Suraiya Faroqhi, Haim Gerber, Leslie Peirce, Gabriel Piterberg, Donald Quataert, Dana Sadji, Heath Lowry, and others. 6. Abdülhamit II’s reign is an example of the first reaction and Kemalist rule is an example of the second. 7. See, for example, Cemal Kafadar, ‘The Question of Ottoman Decline’, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, 4 (1997–8), pp. 30–75; Donald Quataert, ‘Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes Towards the Notion of “Decline”’, History Compass, 1 (2003), pp. 1–10; Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultans: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005); and Dana Sajdi, ‘Decline, its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History: By Way of Introduction’, in Dana Sajdi (ed.), Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), pp. 1–40. 8. Pamuk, Beyaz Kale, p. 122. 9. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red, trans. Erdağ Göknar (New York: Vintage International, 2002), p. 315. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 10. See Jale Parla, Türk Romanında Yazar ve Başkalaşım (Istanbul: İletişim, 2011). 11. See Esin Atıl, Turkish Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980). For a useful primary Ottoman source on the lives and work of calligraphers, painters, limners and book-binders in Istanbul and the region, see Esra Akın-Kıvanç, Mustafa ‘Ali’s Epic Deeds of Artists: A Critical Edition of the Earliest Ottoman Text about the Calligraphers and Painters of the Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 12. Reviews that explicitly mentioned the Nobel Prize in conjunction with My Name is Red include those by Richard Eder and Maureen Freely. This was a first for Pamuk, indicating his changed status from national to global author. See Maureen Freely, ‘Novel of the Week: My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk’, New Statesman, 130 (27 August 2001), p. 41 and Richard Eder, ‘My Name is Red: Heresies of the Paintbrush’, New York Times Book Review, 2 September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/books/heresies-of-the-paintbrush. html (last accessed 25 February 2018), n.p.

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13. The IMPAC Dublin literary award is one of the largest monetary awards for a single novel and the only one to recognise and award both author and translator as producers of the work. See Dublin City Public Libraries, ‘International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award’, http://www.impacdublinaward.ie (last accessed 14 March 2012), n.p. 14. Azade Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (New York: Modern Language Association, 2008), p. 185. 15. For a political reading of My Name is Red in conjunction with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, see Djelal Kadir, Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 41–63. 16. For more on the Ottoman Empire as participating in an early modern European context, see Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 17. In The White Castle, the historical and allegorical mediation between Ottoman and Republican narrative times is accomplished through Darvınoğlu; in My Name is Red, such intertemporal mediation is more subtly accomplished through an implied reader. 18. Pamuk argues that a novel prefigures an ‘implied reader’ (following Wolfgang Iser) as well as an ‘implied author.’ His emphasis on the incarnation of the author here and elsewhere in the plot reveals a modernist rather than postmodernist literary orientation. (The ‘author’ in Pamuk’s work is protected and reified rather than killed off). See Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 3–10. 19. Historians have made similar arguments regarding Ottoman historiography. See L. Carl Brown (ed.), The Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 20. For more on the decline paradigm, see Quataert, ‘Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes’ and Sajdi, ‘Decline, its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History’. 21. Pamuk makes another iconic reference to twentieth-century Turkish literary modernity through an allusion to ‘the poet Blonde Nâzım of Ran’. (Pamuk also makes an explicit reference to Hikmet in Cevdet Bey and Sons and an implied one in The White Castle – to the ‘Encyclopedia of Famous Men’). Here, the poet Nâzım Hikmet (who assumed the last name ‘Ran’ in 1934) is recast as a writer of mystical mesnevi verse romances. The specific reference is to Nâzım Hikmet’s challenge, made in a poem, to the painter Abidin Dino to paint a ‘picture of happiness’. Hikmet warns him not to take the easy way out by depicting a mother and child. The happiness that is then conjured in the poem is the manifestation of socialist revolution. In My Name is Red, the image of happiness is indeed a ‘mother-andchild’ depiction that conjures the sacredness of ‘Madonna and child’ and profane worldliness of Shekure standing in as Madonna with Orhan as the prophet-author as child. The picture of happiness is undercut by the incestuous Oedipal context (Shekure is also the name of Orhan Pamuk’s actual mother). Yet the revisionary work of Pamuk’s ‘third pen’ is evident as it functions to separate image from text, rewrites the contextual story and resacralises it. Pamuk’s revolution, updating Hikmet’s, is one of literary reformulation. 22. As opposed to the text-based Ottoman archive represented in The White Castle, My Name is Red introduces a visual archive focused on miniatures. Both novels focus on literal and figurative ‘translations’ of Ottoman texts into secular modern Turkish contexts. The White Castle, so to speak, translates from the Ottoman language to modern standard Turkish and My Name is Red, from illuminated manuscript image to modern literary idiom. In The White Castle, Pamuk’s use of translation to introduce a mystical context into the Republican literary field finds its corollary in My Name is Red, through the adaptation, or ‘translation’, of illumination as a modern textual form. Instead of sacralising a Republican secular field through translation (as in The White Castle), Pamuk secularises the sacredness of Islamic scribal arts in My Name is Red. From the perspective of Republican secular modernity, the

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25. 26. 27.

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the colonial encounter former case is blasphemous, whereas from the perspective of Ottoman Islamic orthodoxy, the latter case is blasphemous. C. Huart, ‘Ḳalam’, Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, http://www.brillonline.nl/ subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-3806 (last accessed 23 January 2012), n.p. See Yves Porter, ‘From the “Theory of the Two Qalams” to the “Seven Principles of Painting”: Theory, Terminology, and Practice in Persian Classical Painting’, Muqarnas, 17 (2000), pp. 109–18. Ibid. pp. 109–18. See Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 114–36. In The White Castle, Pamuk sacralises secular narrative contexts through translation/ writing that emerges out of an Ottoman archive. In My Name is Red, relying on a ‘third pen’, Pamuk in effect secularises a sacred context through, as it were, ‘painting in words’. The Quran, the sacred book, is set in opposition to this profane secret book being overseen by Enishte Effendi with the Sultan’s patronage. The first murder victim, a devotee of the imam from Erzurum, is a guilder and calligrapher, and takes a higher moral ground than the illuminator who has killed him. The opposition of the two pens is dramatised through these characters. However, the murderer and master miniaturist who has absconded with the pages of the book attempts and fails to make a portrait of himself in place of the Sultan. This failure of illustration, like Black’s failure of inscription, is an intentional commentary on the absence of innovative or ‘modern’ artistry. Pamuk’s literary modernity compensates for the absence. For more on the domain of the text, see the classic texts, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) and Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in William Irwin (ed.), The Death and Resurrection of the Author? (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 3–8. The realism of the ‘Ottoman style’ is reflected in the subject matter of Master Osman’s pictures in the Book of Festivities. That the images depict real events is emphasised over and over again in the plot. In Turkish Art, Atıl states that the greatest contribution of the Ottoman workshop was a characteristically Ottoman genre: ‘illustrated histories of the empire documenting events with historic personages and actual locations’ (Atıl, Turkish Art, p. 140). For more on the intertextuality of Islamic miniature painting and storytelling, see Petra De Bruijn, ‘Bihzad Meets Bellini: Islamic Miniature Painting and Storytelling as Intertextual Devices in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red’, Persica, 21 (2006–7), pp. 9–32. See also Enishte’s description of murals in Venetian palazzos (pp. 22–7). Talât Sait Halman, Rapture and Revolution: Essays on Turkish Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 110. See Berna Moran, Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış: Ahmet Mithat’tan Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’a (Istanbul: İletişim, 1983). William Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 8–9. William Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 247. See Feride Çiçekoğlu, ‘Difference, Visual Narration, and “Point of View” in My Name is Red’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 37:4 (2003), pp. 124–37. Pamuk’s technique of doubling first- and third-person points of view first appears in The White Castle, in which ‘I’ and ‘he’ are literally doubles. See B. Schrieke, J. E. Bencheikh, J. Knappert and B. W. Robinson, ‘Mi‘rād̲ j̲ ’, Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM0746 (last accessed 23 January 2012), n.p.

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41. See Christian Lange, ‘Barzakh’, Encyclopedia of Islam, THREE, http://www.brillonline. nl/subscriber/entry?entry=ei3_COM-23704 (last accessed 23 January 2012), n.p. and B. Carra de Vaux, ‘Barzakh’, Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, http://www.brillonline. nl/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-1249 (last accessed 23 January 2012), n.p. 42. Cemal Kafadar, ‘Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in 17th c. Istanbul and First Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature’, Studia Islamica, 69 (1989), pp. 121–50; p. 147. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 43. This act is necessary to manuscript/novel production. The murderer in My Name is Red both desires and eschews innovation in style. His motivation for killing Enishte Effendi is a combination of self-doubt and the revelation that his aesthetic past will not persist in any meaningful way but will be lost to history due to a host of political and social forces – as one style gradually replaces another. The murderer’s motive for killing Elegant Effendi is based on a slanderous accusation: Elegant Effendi claims the murderer’s participation in creating the secret book is blasphemous. The murderer has two victims: he kills one for being overly bound to Eastern tradition and one for being too slavish to Western innovation. Much like Pamuk himself, the murderer tries to juxtapose, synthesise or transcend both poles. Once these obstacles are out of the way, the murderer moves on to the real task at hand: trying (and failing) to depict himself in an aesthetic experiment with portraiture. Pamuk’s own ‘mixed style’ in Turkish reveals his response to the presence of a number of stylistic forms: mix them as if you were mixing colours to produce an unusual hue. 44. See Yıldız Ecevit, Orhan Pamuk’u Okumak: Kafası Karışmış Okur ve Modern Roman (Istanbul: İletişim, 2004) and Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies. 45. Critics such as Yıldız Ecevit and Azade Seyhan conclude that Turkish literary formations are often modern and postmodern at one and the same time. In addition to the use of such hybrid terms (‘modern-postmodern’), this chapter argues that what is being described constitutes another category of analysis entirely, reflected in terms such as ‘postsecularism’ and ‘postOrientalism’. In the scope of this chapter, these latter terms would describe the work of [. . .] Pamuk. See Yıldız Ecevit, Türk Romanında Postmodernist Açılımlar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2001) and Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies. 46. See Gyan Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiograpy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:2 (1990), pp. 383–408; Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 159–220; and Hamid Dabashi, Postorientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 47. Prakash, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories’, p. 406.

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Chapter 4 Interview with Ahdaf Soueif Anna Ball

Introduction

I

n CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM, Said writes that the liberationist ‘intellectual mission’ has evolved from its nationally resistant roots to be borne today by ‘the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages’.1 As a writer, cultural commentator and political activist, Ahdaf Soueif both embodies this powerful interstitiality and enacts its liberationist potential. Born in Cairo, educated in Egypt and England, and politically active in many countries, Soueif’s work spans histories, cultures and contexts, always operating at the vital intersection between the lived and imagined, creative and political. In her fictional writing, she is admired for her nuanced and humane construction of characters and relationships that navigate the complex historical and geographical territories demarcating ‘West’ and ‘Middle East’; in her cultural commentary and her political activism, meanwhile, Soueif is renowned for her vocal and creative advocacy of Egyptian democracy, and Palestinian rights. Small wonder, then, that Soueif’s creative, critical and cultural activities have received prolific attention from scholars of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’.2 Soueif was born in 1950s Cairo, and spent portions of her childhood in both Cairo and London, where her mother, who would later go on to become professor of English Literature at Cairo University (a post she could not take up ‘until the British had left’)3 undertook a PhD on the influence of the Oriental tale in English fiction. The effects of these early cultural traversals reverberate throughout Soueif’s first collection of short stories, Aisha, which are united by the voice of a young Egyptian girl who tells of her travels between Cairo and London.4 Writing in her essay collection Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, however, she also traces this hybrid transcultural awareness back to her Cairene upbringing in the 1960s, which she describes as ‘a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions’.5 In her adulthood, she would come to traverse this terrain more literally: having undertaken BA and MA degrees in English Literature in Cairo, she moved to Lancaster, UK, to undertake a PhD in literary semantics, before moving back to Cairo to enter, relatively briefly, into academia at the university there;6 later, after marrying the writer Ian Hamilton, with whom she would have two sons, Ismail Richard Hamilton and Omar Robert Hamilton (now an author and cultural activist himself),7 she would move again to London. A sojourn of two years in Riyadh saw her start her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1992): a work that, while attentive to female consciousness and desire, is also about the act of teaching and reading across languages.8 As of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011,

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AS: I’ve always been committed to Cairo; I make that statement in my memoir of the revolution [A City Transformed]. But perhaps this is a new expression of that commitment. In the years 2011–2012, it felt as though here, in Cairo, we were creating something very big and very important – something that could change the world. Then, in 2013, with the military take-over, the defeat of the revolution and the coming to power of the counter-revolution, leaving would have been like running away. And there is still something happening at the moment. As we learn to live with defeat it’s vital to continue to encourage any bit of radical activity that still has the spirit of revolution and looks towards the new. I need to be available for that and part of it. AB: It’s interesting to hear you use the term ‘defeat’: that seems a very definitive way of characterising what might also be understood as part of an ongoing process of political development. It’s interesting to hear, too, that you believe there are aspects of revolutionary activity still taking place. I want to ask you about the role of culture, and of the writer, and also of the ‘public intellectual’ which to an extent you have come to embody. How do you feel that revolutionary drive is still being enacted within the worlds of culture, thought and creative activity, and what is your role within it? AS: Living with defeat is something we have to deal with and try to respond to in various ways: by documenting and bearing witness to what is happening, and also, encouraging and being part of continuing efforts to change things, to resist. Of course the arenas that actually have to change are the political and economic. The contribution of people in the cultural sphere is to try to keep ideas and memories alive, and to insist that something different is possible. Nothing needs to be blatant or direct; it just needs to remain outside and in counter-point to the official discourse. An exhibition of paintings, for instance, can be important; new music or performances are important. One of the very important art forms that really flourished and developed in front of our eyes during the revolution was graffiti art. So just recirculating examples of this in order for them to remain in the public memory is important and gets a huge response. Of course, writing matters. But maybe some genres matter more immediately than others? Poetry – particularly in the vernacular – is what most speaks to people and what is most immediately accessible. One of the things I did during the revolutionary period was I started writing in Arabic. Reportage, commentary, polemic: I had a weekly column in a national newspaper. It got a really wide following and as the population of young people in prison grew, my column became important to them. It was very much part of my contribution to what was going on. It was stopped about two years ago so that forum isn’t available to me anymore – but that would have been a good thing to carry on doing. AB: I would also like to know how your location in Egypt might have altered your attitude to the role of the author, and the opportunities available to you in terms of alterations in readership, publication avenues and censorship pressures. Does it feel that your location has changed what it means for you to be, or operate as, an author? AS: Of course, the difference is writing in Arabic, and writing in a newspaper. While for my English writing I had a Western readership in the West, I also had a big readership among English-reading Arabs. But writing a column rather than a book reaches a different audience. That was important in view of what was happening.

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I’d never thought of myself as a journalist. Then in September 2000, Map of Love was shortlisted for the Booker. That gave me a bigger platform than I’d had before, so when the second intifada broke out a couple of months later, The Guardian asked me if I would go and write about it, and I did. That week I was in Palestine, and every night writing down what I had seen and heard, I felt that I was putting the skills that I had to an immediate and incontrovertibly good use. Everything was aligned: my ethics, my political position and my skills as a writer. And I guess I kind of hijacked myself into that type of writing – where you use your skills as a novelist in order to communicate something that is actual in the world; to make it felt by the reader. And then in 2005, serious protests started up in Egypt and I started writing about those, also for The Guardian and a couple of Western papers. Then the natural progression was that in 2007, I and my son and some friends created the Palestine Festival of Literature, in the belief that writing and culture matter, and that they can reach people’s hearts and perceptions in a way that other things can’t – and can actually effect change on the ground. We ran PalFest for ten years (last year was the tenth anniversary) and out of that came the book This Is Not a Border, and really with all that, I didn’t find it possible to have the space and distance that you need in order to write fiction. AB: I’m going to return to asking you about PalFest a little later on – but I’d like to explore this shift that is taking place in your work back towards fiction a little further. It is inspiring to hear you talk about the ways in which your writing ‘came alive’ when located against the backdrop of fraught political contexts. These are also facets of your work that many postcolonial scholars have found energising about your work. Please can you therefore tell us more about this shift from politically located, journalistic work to fiction that is taking place for you now? Why do you think this shift is taking place? AS: In 2007 I started a new novel. We had initiated PalFest, and so it was OK to try to devote some time to fiction. But then events took over, the most important of which was that my mother died at the end of that year. I think that for me to write fiction I have to be unafraid to go into any corner of my heart, unafraid to be wide open, and I couldn’t be that after my mother died. For quite a while. So that novel was put to one side, which is a bit of a shame. The thing is that I’ve only written two novels – but with both of them, the only way I could begin was by isolating myself from the world for a couple of months, so that whatever landscape was being formed inside me had a chance to emerge; for the world of the novel to be created. After a couple of months, the world would be there and I could access it – as long as I didn’t stay away from it for longer than two or three days at a time. With 2011, of course, that isolation just wasn’t possible, and continues to be extremely difficult. Another change that has happened – with writing articles and public speaking and so on – it always feels as though this next piece you’re writing will be the one that makes a difference. And so you put fiction to one side because not only does it need this semi-isolation, but also, it takes a long time. But then, with the revolution, I found that we’d be in the protest and there’d be tear gas, and somebody would say to me, ‘and when’s the next novel?’ And I’d say ‘come on now, is this a moment for novels?’ and they’d say, ‘yes, when’s the next novel?’ We were in a sit-in once and a young woman showed me a copy of the Arabic edition of Map of Love, which was so annotated, and with bits of paper stuck to it – and she said that during a sit-in, people were reading this together and making their own comments on it. That was incredibly moving and humbling. My sons keep telling

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me that my actual job is to write fiction. And then of course, with our defeat here, and all the terrible things happening in Palestine, well a direct engagement over seventeen years has not really changed anything, has it? So maybe I’ve come to the end of direct engagement – for the moment. And maybe the really brave and different thing to do will be to try to engage with what’s happening at the level of fiction. But, you know, I was talking of a world being created inside you – but that assumes that this ‘inside you’ remains more or less the same; that your emotional terrain is consistent to a large extent. And of course what’s happening now and has been happening for a while is not that at all. In fact your emotional landscape is so volatile that you hardly have access today to the person you were yesterday. I guess what I want is to produce something that will reflect this state of volatility. But there also needs to be something of the classic novel in what I do: characters the reader cares about. Somehow that needs to be done in a way through which the reader feels the changed landscape that we are living through. AB: It’s interesting to hear that you consider there to be different literary and cultural forms suited to different purposes, and that the novel therefore has a distinctive role to play within this landscape. I am very struck by the story of the young woman activist with her annotated copy of Map of Love; the novel clearly assumed a sense of urgency during the revolution, perhaps because of the question it poses about the potential for cultural identities to be negotiated and remade. It is therefore pertinent to reflect on the way that texts assume different lives and truths depending on where and when it is read. It is also significant to note, though, that you’re now seeking to grapple with the new political environment in which you live through fiction. Whereas The Map of Love takes place across historical and geographical contexts, you seem to be turning towards a landscape much closer and more personal to you. I wonder if this will influence the way in which you’re able to construct that imagined landscape in your work. Because this is such an important topic to your literary scholars in particular, I want to ask how you go about building these political and cultural contexts within your work. AS: With Map of Love, I worked out I wanted to situate the book somewhere between 1882 and 1919. Also at that time I was interested in exploring cross-cultural relations, particularly love and friendship. And in language: when did it help people know one another better, and when was it used as a means of deceiving or dividing? I was also interested in the nineteenth century Western women who travelled in Egypt and the Middle East. Some of them were simply the product of imperialism, and some of them, like Lucy Duff Gordon, for example, achieved an open heart and open mind, and saw things for what they were. I started writing Anna’s and Sharif’s story – and then I found that I didn’t want to pretend we were in 1901; I wanted to be in the ‘now’ – looking back. So the contemporary story of Omar and Isabel was created. And then the two stories needed a device to link them – so Amal, the narrator, emerged. With the old story, I discovered how much detail, texture I didn’t know – like did people turn on electricity or gas? So I had to do research and I ended up with a month by month chart of the years I was dealing with. It listed what was going on in Egypt and England and Palestine – political and cultural, civic events; the opening of a bridge, or the publication of a book everyone was talking about. So in the end, I had a scaffolding of real

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history – and real characters within that history – and then against that background, my invented characters found their places and their lives. AB: It’s clear from what you say that an incredible amount of research goes into your writing, and this is one of the many reasons that it’s so rich and fruitful for scholars to engage with Map of Love in particular – because it has a strong ‘worldly’ connection, as Said would have it. It’s also clear that colonialism is a force that shapes the world of that text. To what extent has a consciousness of colonialism influenced your work and your consciousness? AS: Well, I have dealt with this more extensively in the introduction to Mezzaterra. I suppose the first political thing I became aware of as a child was the Suez Crisis of 1956. We were in London at the time – my mother was doing a PhD and my father a postdoctoral, and the war broke out. I knew it was a war waged by England, the country I was in, against Egypt, my home, but I was also taken to protests by my parents’ English friends against that war. My parents’ friends were all Left, many of them Communists. I guess it was a very early lesson; that the State is one thing, and the people are another. A valuable lesson. Back in Egypt growing up, the discourse was strongly anti-imperialist: this was the moment when colonialism was being ejected from Africa and the Eastern South. And at the same time, colonialism was not a burden we in Egypt had to bear: it was bad and it was gone and we were free. We could be angry about it historically and on behalf of other people, but mainly we could help. I grew up believing in Egypt’s liberationist role in the region, in justice for Palestine, and in Positive Non-Alignment. It was back in England, and with the blossoming of anti-Islamic sentiments after the Khomeini revolution, that I started to see that the divide was not over; that even if colonialism in its traditional forms was receding, it very much had the energy and the desire to reinvent itself. This, I guess, was me waking up to the fact that a great schism was still very much there – and then realising that not everyone wanted peace and friendship, and not everyone wanted to strive for a better world. And as time went by, I guess one realises that the big players in the world – power, money, arms – see their interests in continued conflict and division – until we reach neoconservatism at the start of this century, where people actually work towards Armageddon. So it’s a global thing that isn’t simply to do with the Middle East or colonialism; it is really to do with larger forces in conflict across the world, in different manifestations. AB: It is pertinent to hear you talk in these expansive terms because it strikes me that the broad and connected ethical underpinnings to your work reflect key characteristics of much postcolonial discourse; the commitment to ethical humanism also of course underpins the work of thinkers including Said. Departing for a moment, I wonder if I might ask whether this influence is direct? To what extent have you been influenced by the work of postcolonial authors or scholars in your own writing? AS: I must say that I only read Said after I got to know him as a friend. I loved his work and I loved how Orientalism pulled together and made a case for what I had already had glimpses of. My mother’s work was on the influence of the Oriental tale on British Romantics. She had worked on William Jones and Beckford, and had a great interest in

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Byron. And looking at a couple of her essays (‘Hajji Baba in Isfahan’ was one), I found some of the same ideas as Said. So what he had done was to take this thing that we knew but hadn’t articulated and put it cogently and forcefully in a book that changed the world. I mostly read fiction so I really can’t claim to know a great deal about the discourse. What influenced us all was the lived reality and our experience of living that reality in different places. AB: The question of real-world influence leads me neatly to your work on PalFest. You are of course the Founding Chair, alongside your son Omar Robert Hamilton. You’ve written extensively about this work, particularly in the introduction to This Is Not a Border, but I wanted to ask you specifically about what you consider to be the major successes of this work, and what you now view as its major challenges – perhaps particularly in light of the landscape of renewed conflict and antagonism that we now find ourselves in, following Trump’s declaration of his intention to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and ensuing conflict. AS: Well, it’s been very heartening to see the response of our Palestinian friends to the festival – and to witness people coming in and engaging and working with them and learning from them. When I first went to Palestine in 2000, and then in 2003, I saw how the Palestinians’ very strong sense of their own culture has enabled them to survive as a people with a recognisable identity. Culture is tremendously important in this situation – and so is a connection to the world. They need to continue to belong to large conversations happening in the world. PalFest helped to make that possible. The people who’ve travelled with PalFest have said it was a life-changing event. We’ve repeatedly seen people on, say, day three of PalFest saying it was like science fiction; that everything they’d learned about the situation from the media was upside down. So I guess there are some 150 cultural practitioners out there who have been enabled to have an experience and to absorb really important information that they would not have otherwise; that has an impact on their life and their work. And they are opinion-formers. So what we can hope for is that PalFest is part of altering the discourse around Palestine in the UK and in the West. And the changed discourse contributes to the wider solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians that is taking shape in, for example, the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] campaigns, and that is the best, maybe the only, hope we have – we supporters outside Palestine – of changing anything on the ground. It is a tiny, tiny contribution but it’s what’s available to us. AB: This is again a manifestation of you considering the wider lived role of the author, and of the potential for writing and culture to incite dialogue. AS: ‘Dialogue’ and ‘bridge-building’ and so on are really bad words now. In Palestine, ‘dialogue’ has been a smokescreen. They put an imam and a rabbi on stage talking to one another; meanwhile the State is demolishing Palestinian houses and turning people out of their homes. So the word we’re looking for is ‘justice’ and a decent and human life for everybody. AB: How, then, do you move towards that goal of justice through culture?

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AS: The only thing you can do is to carry on upholding ideas of justice. We’re living in a period that is becoming flagrant in its denial of these concepts themselves: history, truth, justice. As in people speaking of ‘alternative facts’, for example. So this is where you dig your heels in and insist that there are such things as truth and justice and history and context. You say this is what happened and this is what needs to happen. You need to keep saying that in as many different and effective ways as possible, because you have no instruments or tools except your words. It’s the only thing you can do – to refuse to take part in any falsification of history, in any dilution of what you know is right. If it’s a losing battle, it’s a losing battle – but you die fighting it. AB: It’s very powerful to hear how you visualise the cultural task as one of seeking justice and truth. This takes me right back to the very start of the interview, where you spoke about the different potentials held by different cultural forms – in particular, the novel as a vehicle for a particular way of engaging with the world. Here, I’m reminded of the author Azar Nafisi’s statement that ‘what we search for in fiction is not so much reality as the epiphany of truth’. Fiction may, then, have an exceptional value within the landscape that you describe. Bearing this agenda in mind – I would like to conclude by asking you to look ahead and to describe your hopes for the future of Egypt, and more broadly, for the region we might term ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. AS: The problem is that anything I say now will sound like a pipe dream – but what can one hope for except a system that actually works for the good of the people and that sees this country and region as part of the world, and a world that is really struggling to find new ways of running itself? We have obligations to the planet itself – to the environment. We need to remember that. I would want to see the people who make the decisions, demonstrating efficiency and shaking off the interests which are really bad for them and for the country. A country should be run in a way that tries to fulfil the needs of all its citizens, while taking account of the region, the planet, the future generations. But I should also say that I don’t see anything coming right for Egypt independently of what’s going on in the region and the rest of the world. I think the wars and the brutalities and the refugees of the last few years show us that new systems and new relationships and new ideas are essential if life on earth is to stand a chance.

Notes 1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 403. 2. Soueif’s work has received prolific postcolonial attention too extensive to list exhaustively here; a good indication of the postcolonial reach of her work, however, is the range of critical engagements that have been produced by contributors to this volume, which include Waïl Hassan, ‘Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love’, PMLA, 121:2 (2006), pp. 753–68; Lindsey Moore, Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 146–58; Stephen Morton, ‘Colonial Violence, Law and Justice in Egypt’, Chapter 8 of the present volume; Caroline Rooney, ‘Ahdaf Soueif in Conversation with Caroline Rooney, Cairo University, 12 April 2010’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:4 (2011), pp. 477–82; Caroline Rooney, ‘Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Unconscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 46:1 (2011), pp. 139–55; and Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Expression in Context (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 111–32.

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9. eS lA reb t Meim , Portrait du colonisØ, portrait du colonisateur P ( aris: d É itions a G llimard, 2002) and d éR a Bena ms a ï , rT‘ aduire uo lb ancih r la lang:eu amruo ib lingeu d’d bA le ibék r a hK tibi,’ in rhC istine Buic lG- a mskcu nn d e( .), Imaginaire de lautre: Khatibi et la mØmoire littØraire P ( aris: a H L’ rmattan, 1987), .p 133–60, as lew l as a N‘ tions fo rw iter,’s Studies in Twentieth Century Literature , 23:1 1 ( 999), .p 163–78. 10. Djaout was born in 1954. Having studied mathematics, he became a journalist in Algeria in 1976. He is the author of a number of poems and novels, among them Les chercheurs dos , which won the Fondation Del Duca awarded in 1984. In January 1993, he founded the journal Ruptures . He was assasinated in June that same year for his position against fanaticism. 11. I am referring here to Djaouts ’ journalistic political activism. 12. Bhabha, ‘DisemiNation’, p. 297. 13. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 1986), p. 11. 14. Bhabha, ‘DisemiNation’, p. 297; my emphasis. 15. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: aY le University Pres, 1979), p. 10. 16. While in certain pasages it is evident that Djaout is referring to the Quranic ex‘T t’, there are many pasages where it is a matter of the text that estW ern logic has superimposed on the history of the colonies. 17. Kateb aY cine, Le polygone ØtoilØ (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997), p. 10. 18. Thus the reference to Rimbaud and to the subtext to which it refers. Se Djaout, LInvention , p. 71, 103, 124, 151, 191–2. 19. ‘Narrator-treker’, but also as we will se, ‘narrator-tracker’ and son after, as I attempt to , show ‘Stalker’. Se the beautiful pasage in Djaout, LInvention : ‘I track the disintegrated tribe, I reconstitute the pulverized dynast.y I swim in the canals of the chronicles, go up the apocryphal torrents, I span time without milliaries and stretch across the frightening deserts. I must make myself a renowned trekker at all costs . I track with monstrous patience, however harsh the watchful wait’ (p. 40–1; my emphasis). While there is allegory to be found in this text with its multiple pathways, we must also inscribe in it the movemnt of the legend of Osiris. Like Isis in search of piecs of Osiriss ’ bod, y which was torn apart by Seth, one of the quests of the narrator of LInvention is to recover the dispersed fragments of a history of the Algeria shattered by colonisation – a history whose logic will never really be understod because whole sections of it are mising. Seth the colonist has decidedly and de nitively altered the integrity of the body of (the history of) Algeria. Some sections of this history are mising and will forever be mising. 20. On this notion of the writer as a ‘Stalker’ la Tarkovsky , se ‘How to becom a Stalker in Philosophy’, in Réda Bensmaïa, Gilles Deleuze, Postcolonial Theory and the Philosophy of Limit , Suspensions (London: Bloomsbur, y 2017), p. x–xiv. 21. Guy Gauthier, AndrØi Tarkovski, FILMO-19 (Paris: Éditions Edilig, 1988), u.p. 22. Ibid. u.p. 23. Ibid. u.p. 24. Se iV ctor Segalen, Essai sur lexotisme (Paris: Live de Poche, Biblio, Esais, 1986) and iV ctor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity , trans. aY ël Rachel Schlick (Durham: Duke University Pres, 2002). 25. Se Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Deleuz Outside/Outside Deleuz’, in Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 11. 26. The word to survey ( baliser) recurs constantly in Djaouts ’ writing. Se, for example, ‘This is why nothing can be surveyed and we can manage to travel, eys closed, a god thousand kilometers’ (p. 44; se also p. 104, 122).

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27. a jD tuo rw ite:s I‘ luow d a h ve likd e n bI remu To t to eb lp anted os rmly inside fo em that the n us d us denly luoc d aciuq re all the rp repo ties fo liqiu d teb n e w ym ngre .s I luow d a h ve a w nted ym a eh d to eb lled iw th lobmys s os that ve re ty ih ng that swo – a s nd and a w ter – luow d rem ,eg os that ve re ty ih ng that n uow ds rup i .se But the anctse ro is not at ym is de. eH is n o ly a distant idea that rep a h sp n o e day I iw ll turn into a kob os that ih s a w nderings a c n emoc to an n e d, os that the idea iw ll a ec es im rg ating rf mo lp ace to lp ace in ym a eh d. I iw ll n e lc eso it in a a p rep n ef ec os as not to a ef r it any lonreg ’ .p( 76; ym a hpme is .)s 28. a N ib le a F rès rec tainly n u derts d o this n ehw , almtso iohce ng a jD tuo , eh rw ites in Un Passager de lOccident : ihT‘ s is yhw ew iw ll iw tnes ew( the inhaib tants fo the n ep inslu a), the a p a s eg rf mo an allerog ical reality to an allerog y ihw hc a h s emocb reality. n eH ec ruo n u a em rus d e ;epoh to es artistic xe rp ise n o refo reality a denis ty that it a h s not tey tbo ained.’ a N ib le a F rè,s Un Passager de lOccident P ( aris: d É itions du iueS l, 1975), .p 37. roF a rom e detailed analyis s fo this astcep fo allerog y, es d éR a Bena ms a ï ,a N‘ tions fo rW iter.’s 29. Obviousl, y my analysis here does not do justice to everything that is at stake in Djaouts ’ text, particularly the gesture that little by little leads the narrator to rediscover some traces of his identity in his childhod meories. It is in fact through a return to the ‘country of childhod’, by means of writing, that the drifting of meaning and borders nally manages to be eased and appeased. But this identity is eting, aleator, y uncertain, and perhaps imposible in the end.

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Chapter 13 Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies and Millennial Palestine1 Salah D. Hassan

Introduction

D

uring the last decade, the idea of Palestine, at least for Palestinians and many of their allies in North America, has come to be associated with a new and more intolerable sense of despair. Since at least 2006, this despair has been marked by an almost absolute loss of hope in the realisation of an independent Palestinian state and a total disillusionment with Palestinian political leadership. Israel’s regular military assaults on Palestinians, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and the construction of a massive wall on Palestinian land have all but foreclosed any chance of achieving a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. If in the period between 1967 when Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories, and 2005 when the second intifada ended, Palestinian politics retained some form of hopefulness, it has since become difficult to imagine any equitable resolution to the decades-old war against Palestinians, particularly given Israel’s aggressive settlement policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and its devastating blockade and destructive military operations in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014). Always defended by the United States government, Israel has recently found one of its most ardent proponents in the administration of President Donald J. Trump, who with the cooperation of Democrats in Congress, announced in December 2017 that the US would recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the city that Palestinians also claim as their capital. The impunity granted Israel as it violates international law, such as displacing Palestinians and seizing occupied lands as has taken place in the neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, further concretises this sense of hopelessness for Palestinians who have nowhere to turn as they are subjected to one assault after another.2 Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, published in the 1984 bilingual collection Victims of a Map, already captured this sentiment, evoked most effectively in the lines: ‘Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?’3 The sense of despair was, of course, already evident in the 1990s, in the wake of the doomed Oslo Accords, whose disastrous consequences ushered in the current conditions of misery that prevail in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. If initially the 1993 signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO generated a naïve optimism for some who enthusiastically applauded the

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handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat under the patronising embrace of Bill Clinton, many others, among them major figures in Palestinian politics with close ties to Arafat – namely Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said – opposed the agreement. Darwish resigned from the PLO executive committee, distancing himself at least temporarily from Arafat, while Said broke irreconcilably with the PLO leader, critiquing ‘Arafat’s dictatorial ways, his single-minded control over the money, the circle of sycophants and courtiers that have surrounded him . . . the absence of accountability and reflection’.4 This line appeared in a London Review of Books essay titled ‘The Morning After’ (21 October 1993) that described the agreement as ‘the instrument of Palestinian surrender’ (p. 3). Darwish eventually settled in the West Bank town of Ramallah, the location of the Palestinian Authority headquarters, and re-entered Arafat’s orbit, but Said remained one of Arafat’s most vocal critics, writing in 2001: We have to say clearly that with Arafat and company in command, there is no hope. What kind of a leader is this, who has spent the last year grotesquely fetching up in the Vatican and Lagos and other miscellaneous places, pleading without dignity or even intelligence.5 Within fifteen years of the signing of the Oslo Accords, all three men, who had once shared a common purpose of establishing a secular democratic Palestinian state, and who played different key roles in shaping the idea of Palestine, were dead: Edward Said in September 2003, Yasser Arafat in November 2004 and Mahmoud Darwish in August 2008. Eulogies on behalf of Said, Arafat and Darwish were many, and most suggest that, with their deaths, the idea of Palestine was set adrift, unmoored from the once trusted positions of these men, who in many respects belonged to another age conditioned by a set of common experiences: childhoods in pre-1948 Palestine, extended exiles in the Arab world (especially Beirut) and beyond, and international reputations. It is not just that Said, Arafat and Darwish belonged to that disappearing generation of Palestinians who possessed memories of the colonial period; they also worked together to give definition to the Palestinian national movement in the postcolonial era, especially in the period between 1967 and 1991, when the PLO could justifiably claim to be ‘the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people’. This idea of Palestine tethered to the PLO found expression in a wide range of solidarity movements and in the United Nations, which granted the PLO Observer Status in 1974. In the late 1990s, the standing of Palestine in the UN was upgraded to ‘non-member entity’, a status virtually equivalent to ‘non-member state’; and in November 2012, after substantial debate, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly (138 to 9 with 41 abstentions) to upgrade the Palestine Mission to the UN to the status of a ‘non-member state’.6 Despite the presence of the State of Palestine in the UN, though, it remains unclear what kind of Palestinian entity exists or could come about in the occupied territories under the present circumstances of continued Israeli occupation and territorial expansion. While a certain idea of Palestine lives in the minds of Palestinians, both inside and outside the occupied territories, and motivates international solidarity, the future identity of Palestine is uncertain and its actualisation in the form of a coherent political state appears unlikely in the near future.7

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This chapter proposes that the passing away of the once-hegemonic idea of an independent secular democratic Palestine within the 1967 borders alongside Israel (also known as the two-state solution) has produced a politics of despair, whose most telling features are the conflict between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and their inability to mount effective challenges to Israel. Since the beginning of the new millennium there is no Palestinian consensus, except perhaps in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is non-partisan and does not propose a resolution to the conflict. Rather, the rise of BDS is a sign of the failings of the current official Palestinian parties. BDS can be seen to fill a political vacuum, taking on the role once held by the PLO to build Palestinian unity around a common goal and mobilise international solidarity.8 Numerous organisational and individual endorsements underscore the effectiveness of BDS as a contemporary expression of Palestinian resistance to the occupation and a basis for articulating international solidarity in support of Palestinian rights. Perhaps the most important indicator of the political success of BDS is the response of Israel, which has launched a global campaign that includes covert operations and lawfare aimed at delegitimising BDS.9 Despite the dire conditions of Palestinians since the partition of 1948, Palestinians have not surrendered, giving expression in the present to what John Berger has called ‘undefeated despair’, which might be contrasted with the politics of steadfastness (sumūd) of the pre-Oslo era.10 Sumūd was grounded in a national consensus in the representational function of the PLO during the 1970s and 1980s, which in the figures of Arafat, Said and Darwish embodied something similar to ‘radical hope’ as theorised by Jonathan Lear.11 In the first part of this chapter, I discuss hope and despair as the affective structure that has conditioned Palestinian responses to the devastation wrought by an unrelenting Israeli expansionism, which also is evident in public mourning of the deaths of Said, Arafat and Darwish. In the second part, I focus my argument more specifically on words for the dead. The work of Said, Arafat and Darwish – a critic, a politician and a poet – first as allies and later as adversaries, can be distinguished from other Palestinian public figures because of the way that they came to be identified with the formerly hegemonic idea of Palestine, both as a potential territorial state in the occupied territories12 and as a symbol of Arab anti-colonial politics. Their words, their personalities, their images and their physical presence operated synecdochally with Palestine at least in the period of ‘radical hopefulness’, beginning after the 1967 Arab defeat, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,13 and culminating roughly with the Oslo Accords (1993). The synecdochal quality of each of these men, in their own distinct ways, can be seen in the great authority that they assumed – whether they wanted it or not – as embodiments of the Palestinian nation. Even though they held different representational positions within the national movement, and to be sure not all Palestinians identified with Arafat, Said or Darwish, there was no other discourse between 1967 and 1993 that was as politically (Arafat), critically (Said) and poetically (Darwish) defining of Palestine; when Arafat, Said or Darwish spoke, even if one disagreed with them, one had the distinct sense they had the authority to represent Palestine. Whatever one may think of the politics of Arafat, Said or Darwish there is no denying their especially powerful impact defining the idea of Palestine over a thirtyyear period, and it is therefore no surprise that the texts commemorating the deaths

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of these three public personalities signify a painful political and intellectual insecurity. This insecurity, which amplifies the sense of despair resulting from Israel’s aggressive policies and the internal strife between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, might have more to do with the eclipsing of the secular nationalist vision of Palestine than with the deaths of the Palestinian intellectuals, politicians and poets who articulated it.14 If the anti-colonial ideal of Palestinian national self-determination, represented by the vision of a secular Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, used to inspire a certain sense of confidence in the future, neither the Palestinian Authority’s compromises at the negotiating table nor Hamas’s militant resistance offer anything upon which to build a hope. In eulogies for Said, Arafat and Darwish, one cannot only sense this loss of hope, but also the way that these men were associated with a hopeful vision, one that lives on now perhaps only in the words written on behalf of the deceased.

Radical Hope or Undefeated Despair The narratives of the lives of Said, Arafat and Darwish on the occasion of their deaths give expression to a feeling of loss that transcends the deceased individuals and comes to represent a despair embedded in the very idea of Palestine in our moment, a moment marked by political cynicism, brutal militarism and a violence against which Palestinians in the territories must struggle every day.15 In the many commemorative texts, it is evident that these three Palestinian men were sources of great hopefulness through their commitments that motivated others to express solidarity with the Palestinian struggle; this last point was especially true in the years of the first intifada (1987–93), when a new energy from inside the territories revitalised the PLO, which had been languishing in Tunis after 1982.16 The existence of both a certain despair about the actual conditions on the ground and the persistence of hopefulness against all odds has possibly always been a feature of Palestinian politics, whether articulated in UN Resolutions, political analysis, works of art or personal narratives. By approaching the Palestinian situation from this perspective, I am attending to an affective economy that informs Palestinian politics; moreover, I am proposing that the ‘history of ebbs and flows of violence through which Palestinians have lived’ can be understood in terms of the co-existence of hope and despair.17 As bad as the Palestinian situation may be, as hopeless as it may appear from the outside, Palestinians have not succumbed to defeatism, and they continue to win over more and more supporters willing to question Israel’s actions. But as criticism of Israel increases in the US mainstream,18 there has yet to emerge a viable or credible Palestinian leadership that can capitalise on openings in public opinion and inspire hope, as did Said, Arafat and Darwish. In this section of the chapter, I want to suggest, therefore, that the life works of Arafat, Said and Darwish in the pre-Oslo era might productively be associated with the concept of ‘radical hopefulness’ as it has been elaborated by Jonathan Lear, but as their lives drew to their fateful ends and conditions under occupation became increasingly bleak, coming to terms with their deaths might be read as an instance of ‘undefeated despair’, to use John Berger’s evocative phrase. In the first decade of this millennium, it was in the public mourning of the passing of Said, Arafat and Darwish in the form of eulogies, testaments and obituaries that many Palestinians and their supporters affirmed a collective commitment to a future Palestine beyond the conditions of the baleful present.

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In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Jonathan Lear develops a theory of survival in the face of historical catastrophe through an extended analysis of the oral life narrative of the Crow chief Plenty Coups as it was written down by Frank B. Lindeman. I turn to this example not because of the powerful comparisons between Zionist settlement in Palestine and white colonial conquest of Native America.19 Rather, I am interested in Lear’s articulation of the more general concept of radical hope as a response to a seemingly irrevocable territorial and cultural loss. Lear proposes that the dreams, decisions and actions of Plenty Coups gave form to a future Crow subjectivity at the very moment of the destruction of their traditional way of life. There are reasonable objections to Lear’s argument, which in the end associates radical hope for the Crow with Plenty Coups’s decisions to ally with the US government, assimilate White learning, and embrace US national values as part of an emergent Crow subjectivity in the wake of cultural annihilation. Lear concludes that one can see how Plenty Coups was able to preserve some of the traditional warrior ideals in this radically new context. . . . If one visits the Veterans’ Memorial at the Crow Agency today one will see a list of distinguished Crow veterans who have served with or in the US military from the original Sioux wars, through World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (p. 153) Lear reads Plenty Coups’s alliance with whites in the Indian Wars and the later recognition of Crow warriors in US foreign wars as visionary, indicative of a hopefulness for the survival of his people even as their cultural ways were subject to a colonial onslaught. That Plenty Coups lead the Crow into service within the colonising army, rather than ally with the resistant Sioux led by Sitting Bull, can hardly be viewed as politically radical. Whatever the merits of Plenty Coups as a Crow chief, his course of action might alternatively be understood as a fateful collaboration with the powerful in conditions of extreme constraints, not a form of hopefulness.20 Despite these reservations with regard to Lear’s interpretation of Plenty Coups’s visions and decisions, his thesis on radical hope, which addresses the question ‘[h]ow we ought to live with this possibility of collapse’ (p. 9), might usefully be applied to the Palestinian situation, particularly in the period immediately after the Arab defeat in June 1967, which led to Israeli occupation of the entire territory of historic Palestine. One could argue that after 1967, first Arafat, and then later, Darwish and Said exemplified radical hope for Palestine, producing in the years from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s a new Palestinian subjectivity oriented toward the future, one that accepted that historic Palestine had been irreversibly altered. Rather than looking backward to the traditional feudal and religious values that previously defined Palestinian existence before the 1948 creation of Israel in Palestine, in their own fields of activity, these three men worked with others to elaborate a secular democratic vision that asserted the historic presence of Palestinians on the land and aligned the PLO with revolutionary anti-colonial, antiracist and socially progressive movements around the world. Despite the catastrophe of partition (al-naqba), which was the occasion for ‘the ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine – to use the phrase that serves as the title of Ilan Pappé’s book21 – and brought about the ongoing crisis of Palestinian refugees, in the years between 1948 and 1967, the Palestinian social order remained largely intact, without

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major disruption to the established hierarchies of patriarchal authority in the towns and villages that fell under Arab rule. The Kingdom of Jordan governed the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip was subject variously to Egyptian authorities.22 This perspective is illustrated in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, perhaps one of the most widely read narratives of Palestinian dispossession in the first decade following the partition. Kanafani’s novel is built around several fictional life narratives, at the centre of which are the first-person accounts of three Palestinians making their way from the West Bank first to Iraq and then to Kuwait, where they imagine that they will begin new lives of prosperity. Kanafani’s text speaks directly to the baleful conditions of those Palestinians whose vulnerable status signals the failings of the global nationstate system that does not recognise the rights of undocumented migrants and indeed produces the conditions of their oppression. Men in the Sun offers a scathing critique not only of the disposability of migrant labour, but also of the opportunism of Arab regimes and the failure of the Palestinian (and more generally Arab) traditional leadership, which remained frozen in the face of the catastrophe of 1948. The critique of the Palestinian notables is most evident in Abu Qais’s narrative of a remembered conversation that Ustaz Selim (the village teacher from Jaffa) has with the village Headman as they socialise in a local coffee house. The conversation is set on the eve of the 1948 war and is initiated when the Headman asks Ustaz Selim if he can lead the Friday prayers. He replies: ‘No. I’m a teacher, not an imam. I can’t lead the prayers.’ After further interrogation by the Headmen, the dialogue continues as Ustaz Selim admits: ‘Well, I don’t know how to perform the prayers’. There were growls from everyone, but Ustaz Selim reaffirmed what he had said: ‘I don’t know’. The seated men exchanged looks of surprise and then fixed their eyes on the face of the headman, who felt that it was for him to say something. He burst out without thinking: ‘And what do you know, then?’ Ustaz Selim seemed to be expecting a question like that, for he answered quickly, as he was rising: ‘Many things. I’m a good shot, for instance’.23 Abu Qais then recalls that Ustaz Selim is killed in the village fighting in the first ArabIsraeli War; he is a heroic figure, a secular martyr whose body and blood become one with the soil of Palestine. His noble sacrifice stands in contrast with the Headman and also with the three hapless Palestinian migrants who leave their homeland and end up corpses on the Kuwait City municipal garbage heap. Even though Ustaz Selim’s end is tragic, his character, unlike those of the Headman and Abu Qais, represents a shift from a pre-naqba traditional Palestinian subjectivity. Just as Ustaz Selim predicts the question of the Headman (‘And what do you know, then?’), his response (‘I’m a good shot, for instance’) indicates that he also foresees the coming war. Set in 1958, Kanafani’s narrative was originally published in the early 1960s, and anticipates the emerging crisis of 1967, which would inaugurate the heroic era of Palestinian resistance coinciding with the rise of Arafat, Darwish and Said as figures of Palestinian radical hope.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, from their respective positions outside of Palestine but within the PLO, Arafat, Darwish and Said modelled a cosmopolitan, exilic and secular Palestinian national subjectivity that was third-worldist, revolutionary and avant-gardist even though it remained thoroughly patriarchal in character. Even in the current period of despair, marked by a particularly intense self-critical tendency that points to the failures of the previous generation of national leaders, the spectral figures of Arafat, Darwish and Said remain effective, casting a spell over the idea of Palestine. To be sure, the historical record and public memory – in the way that it sifts the past, elevating certain events and people above others and projecting them into the future – positions these men differently. Said and Darwish have fared much better than Arafat, who is often held responsible for the current disarray in Palestinian politics as Osamah Khalil notes in his review of Palestinian Politics After Arafat: Six years after his death, Arafat’s ghost still haunts the Palestinian national movement. From the cult of personality he constructed to the institutions he established and the agreements he signed, Arafat’s influence was not only profound, but also enduring. Indeed, the politics of divide and rule, and governance through intimidation, wasteful duplication and destructive rivalries that Ghanem describes have been adopted by Arafat’s children.24 In Khalil’s words, one can almost hear Said’s post-Oslo opposition to Arafat, illustrating how both the political and critical legacies of the two men continue to cohabit differently the present conditions of despair. In his impressionistic essay ‘Undefeated Despair’, John Berger25 eloquently captures the complex duality of the present moment in Palestine, where a sense of hopelessness is coupled with the continued existence of Palestinians on the land that is in itself a mode of resistance by refusing to surrender to the disabling effects of the Israeli violence. Berger’s essay appeared widely in European and US online publications, made its way into the Summer 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, and eventually was published in his collection Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007).26 Berger begins ‘Undefeated Despair’ with the following image: ‘Everywhere one goes in Palestine – even in rural areas – one finds oneself amongst rubble, picking a way through, around, and over it. . . . The rubble is of houses, roads, and the debris of daily lives’ (p. 602). The devastation of the material and social landscape of Palestine is here signified by the word ‘rubble’, the broken bits and pieces of stone, masonry, concrete and quotidian objects that are a reminder of what has happened in Palestine, and a testament to Israeli violence. The effects of Israeli violence are only made more painful by the distortions of language and the inaction of the international community. Berger extends this image of a landscape in ruins to language: ‘There’s also the rubble of words – the rubble of words that house nothing any more, whose sense has been destroyed. . . . There is the rubble too of sober and principled words that are being ignored. U.N. resolutions and the International Court of Justice in the Hague’ (p. 602). In the first context, language has lost its capacity to signify. Words are hollowed out of meaning or their meanings are reversed, in a classic rhetorical strategy of the powerful who aim to conceal their violence; the example that Berger gives is the so-called ‘Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)’, which he calls the ‘de facto army of conquest’. In the second context, which is equally

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despairing, the statements of international bodies condemning Israeli violations of laws of war and human rights go unheeded while ‘every rich nation is watching, and not one takes measures to discourage the illegalities’ (p. 603). For Berger, despair is produced by the destruction of the physical environment and the weakness of words that have come to define the impossible conditions of Palestinians. Yet in response to ‘the I.D.F’.s stranglehold across the territories’ and ‘small words and evasive silence’ (p. 603), Berger also identifies a specifically Palestinian stance: ‘Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat’ (p. 604). Berger’s ‘undefeated despair’ can be usefully contrasted with the concept of ‘steadfastness’, or in Arabic sumūd, the historic and resilient attachment to the land that generally characterises Palestinian resistance to the unrelenting Israeli occupation. Sumūd was an explicit strategy in the period between 1967 and 1987, when the PLO urged the residents of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and also the refugees in the camps, especially in Lebanon after 1982, to refuse to surrender to the bleakness of their situation and to retain their sense of belonging in Palestine. Sumūd is often metaphorically represented in Palestinian rhetoric, poetry and art by the olive tree or the figure of the Palestinian peasant woman.27 It is the counterpoint to the PLO strategy of armed struggle, which is portrayed mimetically in the masculinist image of the fedayeen (the military wings of the PLO). Typical of nationalist iconography, these gendered figures expose the limits of the cultural conceptualisations of Palestine in the period when the PLO still inspired radical hope, through revolutionary armed struggle and steadfastness. And even though the conditions on the ground have changed, sumūd remains an operative term for Palestinians in the post-Oslo context, but if it once produced a linkage between Palestinians under occupation, those in the camps and the PLO leadership, it has become in the present what Jeff Halper calls a default strategy ‘that takes the form of daily coping, an insistence on carrying on one’s life and a refusal to be cowed, as well as active and intentional forms of struggle’.28 Halper’s definition of sumūd is illustrated by Berger’s examples of ‘undefeated despair’: ‘It may be expressed in one way by a young man joining the Islamic jihad, in another by an old woman remembering and murmuring through the gaps between her few teeth, and in yet another by a smiling eleven-yearold girl who wraps up a promise to hide it in the despair’ (p. 604). What distinguishes undefeated despair from sumūd is, however, the evident paradox in Berger’s understanding of the Palestinian stance, which simultaneously refers to resistance and resignation, as Israel goes about ‘the careful destruction of a people and a promised nation’ (p. 603) while the nations of the world do nothing. Berger draws out this paradox through poetic and political references that emphasise the Palestinians’ lack of recourse and their reduced conditions. He cites a line from Mahmud Darwish’s narrative poem ‘The Hoopoe’: ‘There is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself’ (p. 604).29 This tangled line of verse emphasises the wilderness, a key metaphor in several of Darwish’s poems that aligns the conditions of nature and the brutalities of the poet’s political situation, subject as he and his people are to forces beyond their power. Here the poetic figure of the wilderness doubles back on itself through a repetition with a difference, creating a strange relation between the poet’s community (‘us’) and wilderness, which is in the first instance a place from which they have been banished and in the second instance takes the form of a possessive master (‘itself’). Berger cites this line without comment, allowing the poetry to do the work of evoking despair, but later

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in the essay, he counters the sense of utter desolation in the wilderness and brings into focus Palestinian resilience: ‘The inequality . . . between those who have the full arsenal of the latest military technology . . . and those who have nothing, save their names and a shared belief that justice is axiomatic. The stance of undefeated despair works like this’ (p. 607). When juxtaposed in this manner, the line from (the translation of) Darwish’s poem and Berger’s example of undefeated despair are built around the idea that something remains to the Palestinians; this idea is captured in the word ‘save’, which functions in the poetry and the essay as a conjunction denoting the exception to an absolute erasure of Palestinians. In contrast with the sense of finality in Darwish’s line of poetry,30 Berger’s sentence locates persistence in the Palestinians’ retention of their names and a belief in justice, which stand against the military superiority of Israel. Berger’s evocation of the Palestinian stance of undefeated despair also resonates with the phrase ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ often attributed to Gramsci,31 which Said used regularly to describe his own critical approach to literature and politics. Said sequences pessimism and optimism as he elaborated his critique of the Oslo Accords in ‘The Morning After’ essay: ‘first pessimism of the intellect, then optimism of the will’.32 In his tribute to Said, Michael Wood observes that Edward liked to quote Gramsci’s aphorism, and with good reason. But he wasn’t a pessimist of any kind, either of the intellect or the will. He was the deepest, most devoted, most unalterable kind of optimist, the optimist who can look despair in the face and keep on hoping.33 By portraying Said as an optimist, I do not believe that Wood wants to claim that his friend possessed a Panglossian nature; rather, in the last line quoted Wood registers a more complex idea, Said’s capacity to imagine (‘keep on hoping’) other possibilities despite his awareness of the forces militating against Palestinians. This quality in Said is also perhaps an example of undefeated despair. Gramsci’s aphorism and especially the importance of pessimism of the intellect, which Wood equates with giving into despair, is, however, a fundamental quality of critical thinking. Pessimism of the intellect does not entail surrender to the worst possible outcome; rather, it is an inclination to question authoritative statements, to query established positions and to express dissatisfaction with the status quo. If pessimism of the intellect implies recognition of the dystopian present, then optimism of the will is a utopian belief in the possibilities of a better future. In contrast with the Gramscian position that suited Said’s critical outlook and his vocation as an intellectual, Berger’s undefeated despair refers to the ordinary ways that Palestinians in the occupied territories continue to live among the physical and verbal wreckage that signifies their existence, and in doing so give expression to resistance, even though there is little hope of achieving an independent Palestine.

Words for the Dead If obituaries represent the civic responsibility of making a death public, similar to birth or marriage announcements in a newspaper, eulogies, commemorations and tributes on the occasion of the death of a public figure have multiple purposes specific to their cultural and political contexts. Whereas obituaries tend to be impersonal, guided by

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a certain kind of economy that aims at providing a concise factual record of the life, the eulogy, often a speech in the presence of the deceased, their friends and family, is subjective and strives to achieve a certain affect. Obituaries announce the end of a life and testify before the world that the individual has indeed passed away. In contrast, eulogies and written tributes more generally affirm the importance of the deceased, asserting the continuing relevance of their lives even in death. But, beyond praising the individual who is the subject of the tribute, eulogies are also about the author, whose bond with and commitment to the deceased is confirmed by the text. Public statements memorialising the deceased, especially in contexts as charged as Palestine, are occasions to restate and affirm their political positions and lay claim to their legacy, or conversely to avoid the political in the interest of elevating the individual above the messy world of polemics, as is the case with Derrida’s eulogy for Levinas, which avoids the discussion of Palestine and Zionism. Jacques Derrida’s words on the occasion of the death of Emmanuel Levinas in 1995 exemplify the tradition of eulogising on the basis of a unique intellectual bond: I would simply like to give thanks to someone whose thought, friendship, trust, and ‘goodness’ . . . will have been for me, as for so many others, a living source, so living, so constant, that I am unable to think what is happening to him or happening to me today, namely, this interruption or a certain non-response in a response that will never come to an end for me as long as I live.34 In this passage, Derrida expresses a verbal embrace of Levinas, who even in death is ‘a living source’ that will be carried forth as long as Derrida lives. Significantly, in the context of my analysis of memorialising for Said, Arafat and Darwish, even though Derrida’s words for Levinas are mostly focused on his friend’s living intellectual legacy, ‘Adieu’ also concerns Palestine, which is the unspoken subtext of the eulogy, as is evident in the following lines: the holiness of the person, who is, as Levinas said elsewhere, ‘more holy than a land, even when that land is a Holy Land. Next to a person who has been affronted, this land – holy and promised – is but nakedness and desert, a heap of wood and stone’. (p. 4) Derrida later adds that Levinas’s ‘meditation on ethics, on the transcendence of the holy with regard to the sacred’ was, ‘of course, indissociable from an incessant reflection upon the destiny and thought of Israel: yesterday, today and tomorrow’ (pp. 4–5). In the context of the eulogy, Derrida directs his words away from the ‘commentaries and questions’ raised by Levinas’s preoccupation with Israel, which was not always transcendent: Is not Israel, in its very real strength, also one of the most fragile and vulnerable things in the world, poised in the midst of unopposed nations, who are rich in natural allies, and surrounded by their lands? Land, land, land as far as the eye can see.35 Levinas’s Zionism does not allow for generosity or hospitality toward the Palestinians, who in this passage are merely an extension of the threatening Arab enemy land that

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surrounds the ‘fragile and vulnerable’ Israel. In ‘A Word of Welcome’, Derrida recognises the limits of Levinas’s politics and explicitly critiques Israeli violence,36 but in his tribute to his friend, he seeks to elevate the life and thought of Levinas above the sordid reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In this regard, the politics of eulogies is often made evident by what is not said, which then serves to reframe the life and politics of the deceased in a gesture of public commemoration. In contrast with Derrida’s eulogy for Levinas, which evades the awkward issue of Zionism, Edward Said’s obituary for Ibrahim Abu Lughod – the Middle East Studies scholar and teacher at Northwestern University (1967–91) who had a significant impact on the US academy – locates the life and death of his friend firmly within the history of Palestine. Said notes significantly: ‘In all sorts of ways, Ibrahim’s rich life and his death both reflected and clarified the turbulence and suffering that have been at the core of the Palestinian experience: this is why his life bears scrutiny.’37 Said then offers a detailed and moving retrospective on Abu Lughod’s life that is woven into the chronology of modern Palestine, leading up to his friend’s untimely death in Ramallah just as the al-Aqsa intifada was beginning. Said concludes this deeply personal and urgently political piece of writing by linking the death of Abu Lughod to that of his other close friend Eqbal Ahmad,38 and one has the impression that he is also reflecting on his own life and imminent death: Stylists of the uttered word, pluri-lingual, generous with ideas and stories, they [Ibrahim and Eqbal] sustained me during my illness in ways that embarrassment prevents me from recounting here. What dismays me is that they should have died before me – particularly now, when their voices would have been so telling and humanely informative.39 An almost palpable tremble is conveyed in the phrase ‘What dismays me is that they should have died before me’, which is followed by the expression of something like despair brought about by the absence of their ‘telling and humanely informative’ voices. The example of Derrida’s eulogy for Levinas or Said’s memorial for Abu Lughod expresses the end of formative and irreplaceable personal bonds founded on the crucial intellectual or political guidance of the deceased. It is that great sense of loss, which is not just the absence of the voice of the deceased, but something like a loss of intellectual direction and a loss of adequate words to express feelings that generates profound despair. While these two texts testify to unique personal relationships, with Edward Said’s death this sense of despair found expression in the texts of dozens of people who experienced the loss as world-altering, and were driven to make public their feelings. The outpouring of grief can hardly be overstated. In every continent, his death made the headlines of major newspapers, and many cultural and political publications in North America, Europe and the Arab World rushed to print long and detailed eulogies by family members, close friends, colleagues, comrades and students. At the time, the circulation of obituaries in print and online was ubiquitous, which testified, on the one hand, to Said’s pervasive influence well beyond that of any other North American literary scholar; on the other hand, the words for the dead appeared at times self-serving, either by asserting attachments to Said or by settling old accounts.

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The New York Times, which between 1970 and 2000 published a couple of dozen articles on Said and at least another dozen that he authored, printed an ordinary and erroneous obituary by Richard Bernstein that did little to acknowledge Said’s importance as a New York personality. Bernstein’s piece was consistent with the New York Times’s tendency to capitalise on Said’s importance while at the same time linking him to conflict and controversy because of his advocacy for Palestine – as if it were necessary to put him in his place. Toward the end of the obituary, for example, Bernstein reminds readers of the controversy when in ‘July 2000, Dr. Said became embroiled in an international contretemps over a widely published photograph that showed him at the Lebanese border about to hurl a stone at an Israeli guardhouse’.40 Although Bernstein goes on to note that the Columbia University administration supported Said’s right to throw a stone, the incident becomes yet again an opportunity to associate him with violence (i.e. terrorism), behaviour unbecoming a Columbia professor, and poor judgement. Bernstein’s obituary reads like a distant overview of Said’s life that has the façade of journalistic objectivity, but in fact stirs up trivial attacks on his person. In contrast, Christopher Hitchens’s ‘Edward Said’, published by Slate, assumes a more intimate quality, and in characteristic Hitchens’s style, pulls few punches. Once a close friend, in the years following 9/11, when Hitchens endorsed the US bombing of Afghanistan and became an ideological advocate for US wars in the Middle East, the two men grew apart, with each attacking the other’s political positions.41 In his piece for Slate, Hitchens questions Said’s political principles: ‘I knew and admired him for more than a quarter-century, and I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that his moral energy wasn’t always matched by equivalent political judgment’.42 What could one possibly misunderstand in the critical contrast between moral energy and political judgement? Despite the praise of his dynamic personality, the sentence attributes a certain kind of thoughtlessness to Said at the level of politics, and constitutes Hitchens as being better able to distinguish sound judgement from poor. The irony is that while Hitchens abandoned the political principles that had once aligned the two men – for example when they co-edited Blaming the Victims (1988)43 – he suggests that Said’s unwavering political convictions were misguided. The phrase ‘moral energy’ in short affirms that Said had principles, but the ensuing critique of his political judgement disqualifies those very principles as wrong-headed. In contrast with Hitchens’s piece, most of the published eulogies, such as those by Richard Falk44 and Michael Wood are reverential, paying tribute to Said’s influential intellectual work and political statements. One of the dominating themes in these tributes is the sense that Said’s words guided so many people in their political understanding of the Middle East, and that with his death there was no longer a beacon in the messy world of Arab politics and culture. Rasha Salti captured this sentiment in ‘A Letter to a Friend’, written following the New York memorial service at Riverside Church on 22 September 2003: The idea of New York City and of the United States without his voice, his stamina and his whirlwind was horrifying to us all. We murmured variations of that realisation to one another, almost worried that its utterance louder and clearer would grant it more power, more reality.45

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Mustapha Marrouchi’s more theoretical but no less personal tribute to Said also gestures toward the collective loss of direction occasioned by his death: So much to say about what has happened to us, with the death of Edward; so much to say about what happens after a death we all knew was coming. However prepared we might have been, we knew no act of mourning would console us or diminish the pain of our loss. Some griefs are curable, but not this one, which is likely to incline us to a long sadness.46 A close personal connection to Said is also evoked in Joseph Massad’s words, which assert Said’s enduring influence and the great sorrow caused by his death: Edward Said left many heirs to his legacy. We are everywhere, inhabiting the place that he created for us, and which will always be inspired by his spirit. . . . Now, at the time of his death, many of us are overcome with sadness and grief over our loss.47 What stands out in these texts and so many others is the way that the authors make public not only their personal feelings of profound grief, but also a collective experience of mourning. For Salti, Said’s absence is ‘horrifying to us’; for Marouchi, Said’s death is something that ‘has happened to us’. It is possible to hear in these words – in this ‘us’ – the evocation of what Laurent Berlant has termed an ‘intimate public’,48 which in Massad’s eulogy assumes the specific identity of Said’s ‘many heirs’. Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading’ also makes intimacies public, but it stands apart from the eulogies. The poem is not formally elegiac. Possessing neither the structure nor tone of an elegy, rather it is a tribute to Said’s vision, which was in large part shared by the poet, as becomes apparent in the poem. Also apparent is the poem’s inadequacy to the moment. Darwish posits the limits of poetry in the face of death and the despair that Said’s death engenders: It is neither me nor him who asks; it is a reader asking: What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?49 The catastrophe is of course al-naqba, the partition of Palestine in 1948; it is also the increasing despair associated with the Palestinian situation in the new millennium. Through reference to the reader, Darwish raises the question of the usefulness of poetry in the face of the Israeli occupation and the fragmentation of Palestinian politics. In the context of the poem, however, catastrophe and poetry are multivalent; ‘poetry’ refers also to this very poem – ‘Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading’ – and the ‘catastrophe’ is Said’s death. These lines step out of the dialogue between the poet and his friend, an aside that opens onto the reader and ventriloquises the reader’s doubts that the poem can do justice to the event of Said’s death, another catastrophe, not equal in historical significance to 1948, but perhaps a more immediate source of despair. Darwish does not, however, allow the poem to give into the reader’s scepticism about the power of poetic language; rather, the poet returns to the dialogue with his friend, an exchange of vows of friendship in death, which voice Edward Said’s final testament:

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He also said: If I die before you, my will is the impossible. I asked: Is the impossible far off? He said: A generation away. I asked: And if I die before you? He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee, and write, ‘The aesthetic is to reach poise’. And now, don’t forget: If I die before you, my will is the impossible. (p. 182) ‘My will is the impossible’ looks to the future even as Palestine is ‘baptised in blood / and blood / and blood’, foreclosing the impossible for at least a generation. In the face of an impossible and baleful present, this gesture to the future, to the next generation, after Said and Darwish – and also after Arafat – have passed away, provides another poetic figure for Berger’s undefeated despair. One of the central images of Palestinian undefeated despair Berger’s discusses is the tomb of Yasser Arafat, located on the grounds where the Headquarters of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah once stood before it became ‘a gigantic heap of rubble [in 2002] when [Arafat] was held hostage there by the I.D.F’.s tanks and artillery’ (p. 606). The rubble cleared, ‘On its western side at ground level an austere plinth marks Arafat’s grave’. Berger effectively relates Arafat’s last stand against Israeli military force to the memorial for the deceased President of the Palestinian non-state whose remains now belong to the site. Anybody can find their way there, passing by scarred walls and under garlands of barbed wire. Two sentinels stand guard over the plinth. Apart from them, there is no more reticent last resting place for a head of a (promised) state; it simply declares itself to be there against all odds! (p. 606) In what ways is the tomb reticent? Is it silent, non-communicative? It says nothing about the past or the future of Palestine. It is merely there to be viewed from a certain angle. Berger continues his description of the tomb, which provides the occasion to reflect on the paradox of leadership: If you happen to be standing by his feet when the sun sets, its radiance is that of a silence. He was nicknamed the Walking Catastrophe. Are loved leaders ever pure? Aren’t they always full of faults – not weaknesses, flagrant faults? Is this maybe a condition for being a loved leader? Under his leadership the Palestinian Liberation Organization also contributed, on occasion, to the rubble of words. Yet into Arafat’s faults were stuffed, like notes into a pocket, the daily wrongs his country suffered. Like this he assumed and carried those wrongs, and their pain found a home, a painful home, in his faults. It’s neither purity nor strength that wins such undying loyalty, but something flawed – as each one of us is flawed. The stance of undefeated despair works like this. (p. 606) The flaws, perhaps the same flaws that Said critiqued as symptomatic of Arafat’s ineptness, here become the very qualities of the beloved leader, whose pockets are

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the repository of the oppression of Palestinians, as if it is only in his faults that the people’s pain can find an adequate home. No other eulogy in English comes close to Berger’s words here. Jimmy Carter’s praise of Arafat as ‘the undisputed leader of the fragmented and widely dispersed Palestinian community and the symbol of its cause’50 was unique among statements by US politicians, and he was viciously attacked by pro-Israeli pundits for his public tribute. In the US, many statements about Arafat at the time of his death returned to the pre-Oslo view that he was nothing but a pathological terrorist. Consider this commentary by Jeff Jacoby, a journalist for the Boston Globe: God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich?51 In contrast, Carter sees in Arafat a careful and sensitive leader of the Palestinian people, who was the ‘the only common denominator around which the disparate factions could find a rallying point’.52 He also notes that while Arafat had largely been embraced as a partner in the peace process during the Clinton era, in the years right before his death, the Bush administration and the Israeli leadership shunned him: Peace efforts of a long line of previous administrations have been abandoned by President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. For the last three years of his life, Mr. Arafat was incapacitated and held as a prisoner, humiliated by his physical incarceration and excluded by the other two leaders from any recognition as the legitimate head of the Palestinian community. (n.p.) By 2002, Arafat’s political career was over, and when he passed away in 2004 his body caught up with his career. Mahmoud Darwish’s remains rest in Ramallah not far from Arafat’s grave, but are sadly misplaced. His death in Houston was also out of place, but it was of the moment, as it could not be otherwise. In 1994, Said published an essay in Grand Street ‘On Mahmoud Darwish’ that begins with the following sentence, which sounds oddly now like the beginning of a eulogy before the fact of his death: Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in the Palestinian village of Birweh, which the Israelis destroyed six years later. While working as an editor and translator for the Rakah (Communist) Party newspaper, he was imprisoned several times and frequently harassed by Israeli authorities. By the early 1970s, when he arrived in Beirut, his reputation as a brilliant poet – certainly the most gifted of his generation in the Arab world – was already established. He quickly became affiliated with the P.L.O. and soon became Palestine’s unofficial national poet.53 Said was introducing Darwish to an anglophone audience that was largely unfamiliar with his poetry. It was only in the bleak era of the post-Oslo Accords that Darwish’s name and his work entered a wider circulation in North America, in part thanks to

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the efforts of Said, Jean-Luc Godard, Berger and his recent translators, such as Sinan Antoon, Munir Akash, Faddy Joudah and Rema Hamami. Distinct from Said, whose death was mourned perhaps as much in the US as in the Arab world, and Arafat, whose death was received with great ambivalence in North America, news of Darwish’s death was reported in the most cursory manner in the New York Times;54 but for Palestinians and Arabs more generally, and for poets and those concerned with Arabic literature, the passing away of Darwish was monumental. The Guardian reported that ‘Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning and announced that he will receive the equivalent of a state funeral on Tuesday, an honour only previously accorded to PLO leader Yasser Arafat’.55 In some respects, Darwish’s death in 2008, unlike Said’s or Arafat’s earlier in the decade, accentuates and intensifies the sense of despair associated with Palestine in the present. Writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Rashid Khalidi suggests that the passing of Mahmud Darwish, however, may mark the end of an era during which Palestinian aspirations evolved from the narrow focus on survival and steadfastness in the bitter new post-Nakba world after 1948, and from nostalgia for a return to an imagined idyllic existence before that traumatic rupture, and toward an increasingly broad-minded and tolerant humanistic approach to a resolution of the conflict.56 For Khalidi, Darwish’s life is made to correspond with transformations in the Palestinian national movement from the catastrophe of 1948 to mutual recognition in 1988 to a period of despair during the ensuing decades. Implicit in this eulogy is the idea that over the last twenty years, ‘the broad-minded and tolerant humanistic approach’ gave way to an era of increasing desperation produced not only by Israeli oppression, but also by the loss of that poetic voice, which despite its melancholia, did not surrender. In a brilliant short essay titled ‘A Place of Weeping’, Berger evokes the fact of Darwish’s death by describing a visit to his grave on a hill in Ramallah: He wanted to be buried in Galilee, where he was born and where his mother still lives, but the Israelis forbade it. . . . In the now deserted hill I tried to recall Darwish’s voice. He had the calm voice of a beekeeper.57 Later, after narrating the story of a dying bird cradled in his hands that suddenly feels lighter when it expires, Berger reconciles himself with the death of Darwish: ‘After I sat on the grass on the hill of Al Rabweh, something comparable happened. Mahmoud’s death had lost its weight. What had remained were his words’ (n.p.).

Epilogue My original point of departure for this chapter was to illustrate how the deaths of Said, Arafat and Darwish coincide with a growing public despair among many Palestinians and those who advocate their rights. This sense of despair stems from the unhappy view that the realisation of an independent state in the occupied Palestinian territories appears to be more remote today than at any other time since the June War of 1967. This pessimistic outlook finds expression in many different forms of writing, but what I have proposed here is that despair is especially evident in the public statements on the

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occasions of the deaths of Said, Arafat and Darwish, where the deteriorating situation on the ground heightens the anguish associated with the loss of key figures who served as political, intellectual and cultural leaders for the national movement; or perhaps inversely the deaths of these men has accentuated the building sense of political hopelessness about the future of Palestine. If the present condition of Palestinian politics can be fairly represented in terms of despair, then in the three preceding decades, when Arafat, Darwish and Said assumed increasing importance, Palestinian politics articulated a remarkable hopefulness, a radical hope in the PLO and the justice of its cause: Palestinian national self-determination. Before Oslo, Arafat, Darwish and Said had worked closely within the structure of the PLO. Most importantly they collaborated in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Palestinian National Council in Algiers in November 1988. Darwish is credited with writing the original text in Arabic, and Said is said to have translated it into English. Arafat, the newly appointed President of Palestine, read it. Inspired by the first intifada, the Declaration of Independence buoyed international support for the PLO and further affirmed its legitimacy as the representative of the Palestinian people. The Declaration of Independence was met with jubilation by Palestinians and confusion by others, who were uncertain of its meaning, especially since Israel was in direct control of all Palestinian territory. Nevertheless, at that time around one hundred countries officially recognised the State of Palestine. In 1988, the idea of Palestine was alive with potentialities, a highpoint in Palestinian politics comparable perhaps only to 1974, when Arafat gave his famous speech to the United Nations General Assembly – also partially written by Darwish. The idealism, hopefulness and revolutionary energy that informed the 1988 Declaration of Independence now belongs to another time, a time before the Oslo Accords and the al Aqsa intifada, before the separation wall and the civil strife between Hamas and Fatah, before the many Israeli assaults on Gaza and the massive expansion of settlements throughout the West Bank. And when this dark era of despair passes away, perhaps at the moment of the impossible, a new idea of Palestine will enter the world.

Notes 1. This chapter was originally published in Biography, 36:1 (2013), pp. 27–50. Minor edits have been applied here. 2. For recent settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, see ‘Israel seized 2,500 acres of Palestinian land in 2017: Jewish settlements in West Bank and East Jerusalem increase by three times’, Middle East Monitor, 1 January 2018, https://www. middleeastmonitor.com/20180101-israel-seized-2500-acres-of-palestinian-land-in-2017/ (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p. 3. Mahmoud Darwish, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, in Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, trans. Abdullah al-Udhari (London: Saqi Books, 1984), pp. 12–13; p. 13. 4. Edward W. Said, ‘The Morning After’, London Review of Books, 15:20 (21 October 1993), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after (last accessed 21 February 2018), pp. 3–5; p. 4. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 5. Edward W. Said, ‘The Desertion of Arafat’, New Left Review, 11 (September–October 2001), https://newleftreview.org/II/11/edward-said-the-desertions-of-arafat (last accessed 21 February 2018), pp. 27–33; p. 31.

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6. See for example the UN General Assembly Resolution 250, 52 Session (13 July 1998). On 29 November 2012, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of Palestine becoming a non-member observer State. See UN News Centre, ‘General Assembly grants Palestine non-member observer State status at UN’, 29 November 2012, http://www.un.org/apps/ news/story.asp?NewsID=43640#.WmfCvah5XtU (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p. 7. Ali Abunimah was among the first of an increasing number of commentators on Israel/ Palestine to propose a return to the one-state solution (a bi-national secular state), which for some Palestinians, who see no future in the post-Oslo context, constitutes the only real hope to resolve the crisis and bring about an end to the ongoing conflict. See Ali Abunimah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). Other titles that make similar arguments include Raja Halwani and Tomis Kapitan, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism and the One-State Solution (New York: Palgrave, 2008); Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the IsraeliPalestinian Deadlock (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); and Hani Faris (ed.), The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the IsraelPalestine Conflict (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). 8. In ‘Boycott Politics’, a paper I presented at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference, I argued that BDS is in part the antidote to despair, as it provides a mechanism for the expression of opposition to Israel; in doing so, BDS has the potential to shore up the position of those living under occupation. See also Omar Barghouti, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). 9. See Ali Abunimah, ‘Israel using “black ops” against BDS, says veteran analyst’, Electronic Intifada, 5 September 2016, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-usingblack-ops-against-bds-says-veteran-analyst (last accessed 20 February 2018), n.p. 10. See John Berger, ‘Undefeated Despair’, Critical Inquiry, 32:4 (2006), pp. 602–9. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 11. See Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 12. In 1988 at Algiers, the Palestine National Council endorsed a Palestinian Declaration of Independence that unequivocally embraced the two-state solution, and implied recognition of Israel. For almost a decade, Palestinian negotiators sought to achieve a resolution to the conflict based on the two-state solution, while Israel continued to build settlements in the West Bank, making the two-state solution increasingly impossible. Now, many Palestinian activists and intellectuals claim that in effect there is only one state, divided into distinct territories (Israel, Gaza, the West Bank Palestinian zones and West Bank Israeli settlements). In these territories, there are multiple categories of residents (Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians in Occupied Territories, Palestinians with Jordanian citizenship, Palestinian refugees), but only one category of full citizenship – Israeli Jews. Abunimah calls for a return to the secular bi-national state, which he views as the only feasible solution to the conflict: ‘As the prospect of two states that will bring normality becomes increasingly faint, we are left with hopelessness, hatred, extremist policies and the prospect of endless, escalating violence as Israel tries to defend an unworkable dream against relentless reality’ (Abunimah, One Country, pp. 15–16). In the face of growing support for the one-state solution, Israel and its supporters insist that the two-state solution must serve as the basis for negotiations, but paradoxically Israeli leaders are unwilling to surrender the territories occupied since 1967 and continue to build and expand settlements, making the establishment of a Palestinian state there increasingly unimaginable. 13. Israel also occupied the Egyptian Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights in the 1967 June War. Israel withdrew in 1982 from the Egyptian territory as part of the terms of the 1979 Camp

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David Peace Accords, but annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. The United Nations does not recognise Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights, which is considered occupied territory according to international law. For accounts of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, see Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) and Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (New York: Picador, 2008). The latter provides a more detailed narrative of the war as it relates to Israel. There are of course many other names that one could add to the list of noteworthy Palestinians of this generation who died in the first decade of the new millennium. A short list would include Faisal Husseini (2001), Ibrahim Abu Lughod (2001), Fadwa Touqan (2003), Haidar Abdul Shafi (2007), George Habash (2008) and Shafiq al-Hout (2009). For a related, but perhaps more optimistic analysis of the situation, see Lori Allen, ‘Getting by the Occupation: How Violence Became Normal during the Second Palestinian Intifada’, Cultural Anthropology, 23:3 (2008), pp. 453–87. There, she discusses the ways that Palestinians ‘get by’ in the face of a violence that disrupts every aspect of quotidian existence. The PLO was based in Beirut in the 1970s, but in 1982, as a result of the Israeli invasion, it was forced to move to Tunis. The withdrawal of the PLO forces from Lebanon was soon followed by the Sabra and Shatilla massacres. These last events are vividly depicted by Jean Genet in ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ and in Prisoner of Love, a poignant chronicle of his solidarity with the Palestinians, which began in Jordan in the final months of 1970. See Jean Genet, ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, Revue d’études Palestiniennes, 2:1 (1983), pp. 3–20 and Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New York Books, 2003). Allen, ‘Getting by the Occupation’, p. 455. See for example Joseph Levine, ‘On Questioning the Jewish State’, New York Times, 9 March 2013, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/on-questioning-the-jewishstate/?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=7350D6F3BC5472F9F47C01F06D72089C&gwt= pay&assetType=opinion (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p. More recently, K. C. Johnson argues in The Washington Post that ‘a backlash against President George W. Bush’s adventurism in the Middle East, the fraught relationship between President Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, and ideological conflict among liberals shattered uniform Democratic support for Israel at precisely the moment when conservative support for Israel spiked thanks to changing attitudes among evangelical Christians’. K. C. Johnson, ‘Why Democrats are Abandoning Israel’, The Washington Post, 18 August 2017, https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/18/why-democrats-have-souredon-israel/?utm_term=.0d835a469e11 (last accessed 20 February 2018), n.p. See for example Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Ben Norton, ‘Palestinians Support Indigenous Dakota Pipeline Protests: “We stand with Standing Rock”’, Salon, 18 November 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/11/18/palestinians-support-indigenous-nodapl-protestswe-stand-with-standing-rock (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p.; Phoebe Ferris, ‘The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths of Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish’, Cultural Survival, 31 January 2014, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/map-not-territory-parallel -paths-palestinians-native-americans-irish (last accessed 21 February 2018) n.p.; Ben White, ‘Dispossession, Soil, and Identity in Palestinian and Native American Literature’, PalestineIsrael Journal, 12:2–3 (2005), http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=364 (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p. To be fair, Lear addresses these critiques earlier in the text: ‘There may be various forms of ethical criticism one might be tempted to level at this form of hopefulness: that it was too complacent; that it didn’t face up to the evil that had been inflicted on the Crow tribe. But it is beyond question that the hope was a remarkable human accomplishment – in no small part because it avoided despair’ (p. 100).

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21. See Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World Publishing, 2007). 22. For the political regimes that governed Gaza between 1917 and 1967, see Ilana Feldman, Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority and the Work of Rule, 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 23. Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 23. 24. Osamah Khalil, ‘Book review: Arafat’s ghost and the Palestinian national movement’, Electronic Intifada, 13 January 2011, https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-reviewarafats-ghost-and-palestinian-national-movement/3608 (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. 25. An artist and author, whose writings on Palestine over the last decade are uniquely sensitive to the plight of the Palestinian people, Berger occupies an important place in this essay. In a 2010 interview with Victoria Brittain for the New Statesmen, Berger explains his coming to awareness of the Palestinian situation: ‘But the crisis, the injustice, the suffering of the Palestinians, have coexisted alongside my whole life as a writer. The length of this injustice, the lack of recognition of it by the rest of the world, while Israel pursues its own logic, totally regardless of the views of the external world – all this I was not conscious of then, but I am now’ (Victoria Brittain, ‘The Books Interview: John Berger’, New Statesmen, 55 (19 January 2010), https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/01/palestine-rema-israelengland (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p.). Berger’s writing on Palestine has taken a number of forms, but always is characterised by an intimacy that records the contemporary Palestinian situation in words that move beyond slogans and received ideas. 26. See John Berger, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 2007). 27. See for example Sliman Mansour’s 1987 painting The Village Awakens, which depicts Palestinians productively at work on the land around the perimeter of the canvas, notably picking olives in the lower foreground. But at the centre of the painting is an oversized peasant woman who is symbolically giving birth to a parade of village workers and fighters dressed in traditional clothing. 28. Jeff Halper, ‘A Strategy within a Non-Strategy: Sumud, Resistance, Attrition, and Advocacy’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 35:3 (2006), http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/41711 (last accessed 21 February 2018), n.p. 29. The line has been translated by Fady Joudah in the following manner: ‘What remains of the wilderness is only what the wilderness finds of us’ (Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, trans. Fady Joudah (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), p. 43). 30. This is similar to the Darwish poem cited previously, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, which includes the famous lines: ‘Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ Darwish, ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’, p. 13. Part of the second line was used by Edward Said as the title for the semi-autobiographical book After the Last Sky, which included the photos of Jean Mohr: Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 31. Gramsci wrote in a ‘Letter from Prison’ dated 19 December 1929, ‘I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will’. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, Volume 1, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 299. An editor’s annotation attributes the origins of this famous Gramscian motto to the French writer Romain Rolland, who coined the formulation in a 1920 review for L’Humanité. He writes: ‘cette alliance intime . . . du pessimism de l’intelligence . . . et de l’optimisme de la volonté’ [this intimate alliance of pessimism of the intelligence and optimism of the will]. Romain Rolland, ‘Une Livre de Raymond Lefebvre. Le Sacrifice d’Abraham’, L’Humanité, 19 March 1920, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k299613c/f1.item (last accessed 21 February 2018), pp. 1–2; p. 2. Said acknowledges Rolland as a source for Gramsci in his 1997 Tanner Lecture ‘On Lost Causes’. See Edward

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32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

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39. 40.

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43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

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Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 527–53. Said, ‘The Morning After’, p. 5. Michael Wood, ‘On Edward Said’, London Review of Books, 25:20 (23 October 2003), https://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n20/michael-wood/on-edward-said (last accessed 21 February 2018), pp. 3–6; p. 6. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 5. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Zionisms’, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 267–88; p. 282. See also Jason Caro, ‘Levinas and the Palestinians’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35 (2009), pp. 671–85. For instance, in ‘A Word of Welcome’, a second longer text in commemoration of Levinas, Derrida notes: ‘the despair that recent events, to mention only them, have not attenuated (for example, though these are just examples from yesterday to today, the renewed support of colonial “settlements” or the decision by the supreme Court authorizing torture, and, more generally, all the initiatives that suspend, derail or interrupt what continues to be called . . . the “peace process”)’ (Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 81). Edward W. Said, ‘My Guru’, London Review of Books, 23:24 (13 December 2001), https:// www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n24/edward-said/my-guru (last accessed 13 May 2013), pp. 19–20; p. 19. See also his obituary for Eqbal Ahmed. Edward W. Said, ‘Eqbal Ahmad’, The Guardian, 13 May 1999, https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/may/14/guardianobituaries1 (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Said, ‘My Guru’, p. 20. Richard Bernstein, ‘Edward Said, Polymath Scholar, Dies at 67’, New York Times, 26 September 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/26/arts/edward-w-said-literary-criticadvocate-for-palestinian-independence-dies-67.html (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. See for example, Clare Brandabur, ‘Hitchens Smears Said’, Counterpunch, 19–21 September 2003, https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/19/hitchens-smears-edward-said (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. or Richard Seymour, Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 47–52. The latter contains a detailed account of their public disagreements. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Edward Said’, Slate, 26 September 2003, http://www.slate.com/ articles/news_and_politics/obit/2003/09/edward_said.html (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. See Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988). See Richard Falk, ‘When Words Fail: In Memory of Edward Said’, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 24 October 2003, https://www.wagingpeace.org/edward-w-said-in-memoriam (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Rasha Salti, ‘A Letter to a Friend’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 5:1 (2004), pp. 44–7; p. 46. Moustapha Marrouchi, ‘Stirrings Still: The Impossibility of Mourning the Deaths of Edward Said’, College Literature, 31:10 (2003), pp. 201–14; p. 201. Joseph Massad, ‘Edward Said’s journey to Ithaka’, Electronic Intifada, 10 October 2003, https://electronicintifada.net/content/edward-saids-journey-ithaka/4818 (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Lauren Berlant’s insightful articulation of intimacy and publicness, with its focus on expressions love and desire, equally applies to death and grief: ‘intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating

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49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

states of post/coloniality kinds of love. Yet the inwardness of the intimate is met by a corresponding public.’ Lauren Berlant, ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, Critical Inquiry, 24:2 (1998), pp. 281–8; p. 281. Mahmoud Darwish, ‘A Contrapuntal Reading’, Cultural Critique, 67 (2007), pp. 175–82; p. 180. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Jimmy Carter, ‘Casting a Vote for Peace’, New York Times, 12 November 2004, http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5DE163FF931A25752C1A9629C8B63 (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Jeff Jacoby, ‘Arafat the Monster’, Boston Globe, 11 November 2004, http://archive. boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/11/arafat_the_monster (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Carter, ‘Casting a Vote for Peace’, n.p. Edward W. Said, ‘On Mahmoud Darwish’, Grand Street, 48 (1994), pp. 112–15; p. 112. See Ethan Bronner, ‘Mahmoud Darwish, Leading Palestinian Poet, is Dead at 67’, New York Times, 10 August 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/world/middleeast/11darwish. html (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. ‘National Grief Follows Death of Poet’, The Guardian, 11 August 2008, https://www. theguardian.com/books/2008/aug/11/mahmoud.darwish (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p. Rashid Khalidi, ‘Remembering Mahmud Darwish’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 38:1 (2008), pp. 74–7; p. 74. John Berger, ‘A Place of Weeping’, Threepenny Review, 118 (Summer 2009), https://www. threepennyreview.com/samples/berger_su09.html (last accessed 13 May 2013), n.p.

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Chapter 14 ‘They are in the right because I love them’: Literature and Palestine Solidarity in the 1980s Anna Bernard

I

n his introduction to After the Last Sky (1986), his collaboration with Edward Said, the photographer Jean Mohr recalls an encounter with a fellow photographer in New York in 1984. When Mohr told his acquaintance that he was working on a book about the Palestinians, the man replied, ‘Sure, why not! But don’t you think the subject’s a bit dated?’1 Mohr derides this comment as ‘foolishness’, and uses it as an opportunity to reflect on his growing sense of moral responsibility towards the Palestinians since he first went to the refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank in 1949, in relation to his own background as the child of Germans who applied for Swiss citizenship in the 1930s. Mohr sees the deteriorating conditions of life in the camps as an indictment of everyone who stands by while the situation continues: ‘The Israelis are not solely to blame, we are all guilty’.2 As I write, nearly as much time has passed since this exchange took place as had then passed since Mohr first visited the camps. While the subject of Palestinian statelessness remains disgracefully current, the man’s provocation now itself seems dated, signalling the transformation of the metropolitan Left’s relationship to Palestinians in the intervening decades.3 In 1984, Mohr’s colleague could blithely say, ‘these days, who’s interested in people who eat off the ground with their hands? And then there’s all that terrorism.’4 He thus exhibits the liberal disregard for Palestinians that Said, in 1979, wrote ‘dehumanized us, reduced us to the barely tolerated status of a nuisance’.5 Today, although the vilification of Palestinians certainly persists, since the 1980s the global ‘“NGOization” of political activism’6 has fuelled the representation of Palestinians as victims in need of international aid, diplomacy, and increasingly, solidaristic civil disobedience, which since 2005 has been channelled through the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Mohr’s emphasis on the plight of Palestinian refugees and his implicit comparison of Palestinians to German Jews is an early example of this return7 to the language of human rights by Palestinian leaders and activists as well as their international supporters. The increasing influence of the humanitarian revival would supplant the third-worldist anti-colonial liberationism that had characterised the Palestine Liberation Organization’s ‘global offensive’8 in the 1960s and 1970s. The rhetorical shift from Palestinian resistance to Palestinian suffering was prompted in part by the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut

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in September 1982, perpetrated by Lebanese Phalangists (Kataeb) with the support of the Israeli army shortly after the PLO’s withdrawal from the city. At this point, as Said wrote a decade later, it seemed to many international observers that ‘Israel had lost virtually all the political high ground it had once occupied; now it was Palestine and its people that had gained the moral upper hand’.9 Widely circulated images of the atrocity spurred the formation of metropolitan solidarity organisations that sought to represent the Palestinian struggle in humanitarian terms, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Britain and the November 29th Coalition (later the Palestine Solidarity Committee) in the United States.10 The emergence of such organisations was partly a response to ‘the political destruction of the Palestinian resistance movement’ in Beirut, itself a symptom of the increasing power of the reactionary oil-producing regimes in the region since 1967.11 However, this change in tactics was also part of the broader turn to human rights that Samuel Moyn argues took place in the metropolitan countries from the 1970s onwards, when ‘Westerners left the dream of revolution behind . . . envisioning an international law of human rights as the steward of utopian norms, and as the mechanism of their fulfillment’.12 Palestinian revolutionary nationalism ‘straddled this divide – rather than produced it’:13 it rose to prominence as the metropolitan Left’s support for armed liberation struggles waned. The turn to humanitarian argumentation in the 1980s was thus not only a strategic response to the PLO’s defeat, but also an adoption of what had become the Palestinians’ only ‘legitimate’ option in the eyes of many potential supporters.14 Palestine’s importance in the history of humanitarianism’s displacement of liberationism, coupled with its status as ‘the most visible focus of global solidarity’15 since the end of South African apartheid, would seem to make it an ideal subject for postcolonial literary studies. Yet postcolonial scholarship has only recently begun to address it. 16 Its omission resulted partly from the field’s Anglophone emphasis, which traditionally excluded the Middle East and North Africa, but also from its general political cautiousness, which has tended to privilege empire’s aftermath over on-going anti-colonial struggles. However, in the last decade Palestine’s status in the field has changed, as the considerable momentum of the international solidarity movement has made it more practically and politically feasible for postcolonial and world literature scholars (including myself) to work on Palestine, to the point that Palestine now has more of a presence in the field than any other country in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.17 Early debates over whether Palestine should be included under the rubric of the postcolonial18 have given way to a broad recognition of the region as the quintessential site of contemporary colonialism.19 There is also now far more Palestinian literature available in translation for students and scholars who do not read Arabic, as increased general interest in Palestine has generated a market for new translations of Arabic texts and Palestinian diaspora writing in English and other European languages.20 Arguably, recent acts of repression and censorship of Palestinerelated teaching, research and student activism in the US, UK, Canada and Australia21 seek to contain not only specific solidarity movement victories, but also this shift in the visibility and perceived importance of Palestine across the Anglophone academy. However, the mere fact of Palestine’s greater incorporation into postcolonial literary studies does not tell us how it is being represented. Is the national movement seen as a response to a human rights crisis, the political expression of an ethnonational ‘narrative’, or the potential site of a wider social liberation? Are Palestinians

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represented as a suffering mass, or as agents of individual or collective resistance? What response are they presumed to elicit from non-Palestinians? I have argued previously that attention to the literature of Palestine and Israel could enrich postcolonial studies’ reductive account of what it means to narrate the nation.22 Here, I would like to make a related but distinct claim, that the literary history of Palestine solidarity, which includes Palestine’s contemporary representation in postcolonial studies, reveals a tension between two modes of solidarity that the field has tended to conflate: the first based on common ideological commitments, the second on a defence of rights regardless of the victim’s politics.23 North-south solidarity is the implicit – and sometimes explicit – raison d’être of postcolonial criticism in the metropolitan academy, insofar as it seeks to challenge past and present forms of imperial exploitation from within the metropolitan centre. Yet scholars in the field have rarely directly addressed either the important differences between ideological and humanitarian solidarity, or the politically and stylistically diverse ways in which texts solicit and theorise each kind of solidarity.24 This essay takes up these questions by returning to examples of Palestine solidarity literature written in the 1980s, when the future of the national movement appeared uncertain and the humanitarian turn had not yet been consolidated. I focus on narratives in English and French by Raja Shehadeh (1951–present) and Jean Genet (1910–86), two writers with distinct biographies and affiliations who have profoundly shaped the metropolitan reception of the Palestinian cause. Shehadeh is a Palestinian who has spent most of his life in the West Bank, working for part of that time as a lawyer arguing human rights cases in the Israeli military courts. Genet was French, but unlike Shehadeh he lived with a camp of fedayeen in Jordan in the early 1970s, and he supported other armed liberationist movements, including the independence struggle in Algeria and the Black Panther Party in the United States. By reading Shehadeh’s neglected early diary The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (1982) alongside Genet’s landmark works ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ (‘Four Hours in Shatila’, 1983) and Un captif amoureux (‘A prisoner in love’, translated as Prisoner of Love, 1986), I bring two kinds of appeal for solidarity with the Palestinians into conversation. Shehadeh acts as a witness and advocate for his fellow West Bankers, making the case that their (and his) everyday existence under occupation represents a ‘third way’ of struggle that is neither violent nor compliant, and thus deserves external support. Genet, meanwhile, declares his solidarity with the revolutionary period of Palestinian resistance that ended fifteen years earlier, with the PLO’s defeat in Jordan. His work elegises that phase of the struggle, grounding his support in his admiration and love for the fedayeen, without resolving the question of how his readers should respond to the revolution’s aftermath. Shehadeh’s work can reasonably be seen as an expression of the humanitarian turn and Genet’s as a refusal of it. Yet Shehadeh and Genet’s appeals are not as antithetical as they might seem, for they share the effort to articulate a deliberate, self-critical and open-ended account of a solidarity based on common political commitments. Both writers are sober about the structural and tactical limitations of their approaches and their own constraints as actors, but these concerns do not lessen their principled endorsement of Palestinians’ right to resist. Strikingly, both also draw on the notion of solidarity as a form of love, encouraging their readers to apprehend ‘the embodied and emotional constitution of solidarity’ as a relation forged through struggle,25 rather

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than an act of charity. Shehadeh and Genet’s self-conscious explorations of how to define and engage in solidarity are thus not simply historical documents of imagined relationships between Palestinian activists and their supporters in the 1980s, but also contribute to our understanding and practice of international solidarity with Palestine in the present, within the academy and beyond it.

‘A lawyer is a useless Sāmid’: Solidarity and Self-criticism Since Said’s death in 2003, Raja Shehadeh has arguably become the best-known spokesperson for the Palestinians in Anglophone literature. Shehadeh’s prominence is due in part to his prolific output, his decision to write in English and his reputation as a political moderate,26 but it also indicates the accessibility of his work, which makes intimate, confessional use of the diary and personal essay forms. The Third Way was his first book in this mode, published a few years after he co-founded the first Palestinian human rights organisation, Law in the Service of Man (later renamed Al-Haq, meaning ‘truth’), in 1979.27 The Third Way did not achieve the same degree of recognition when it was published as his later books, particularly Strangers in the House (2002) and Palestinian Walks (2007), and it is not often cited now (for instance, as of this writing it does not appear on the list of works on Shehadeh’s English-language Wikipedia page).28 However, it was noticed by a few high-profile contemporaries, including Said, in After the Last Sky; the Israeli novelist David Grossman; and the US scholars Barbara Harlow and Noam Chomsky.29 Chomsky correctly predicted that The Third Way would remain unknown in the United States, and called this neglect ‘a shame – indeed, a scandal’.30 The book was also reviewed in major area studies journals, including MERIP, Middle East Journal and Journal of Palestine Studies.31 Most of Shehadeh’s interlocutors focused on the book’s framing notion of sumūd, the ‘third way’ of the title, which Shehadeh describes as a response to the Israeli occupation that refuses the choice between ‘mute submission’ and ‘blind hate’ (epigraph). For Shehadeh, sumūd denotes the experience of ‘watching your home turned into a prison’ and deciding to ‘stay in that prison, because it is your home’ (p. viii).32 The book collects Shehadeh’s journal entries from 1980, the year that his ‘groundbreaking’33 legal work The West Bank and the Rule of Law34 was published, alongside stories of violence, imprisonment and dispossession related to him by neighbours, clients and acquaintances. It began life as an anonymous column by ‘Samed’ (the personal noun for someone who practises sumūd, transliterated in The Third Way as sāmid) in the London magazine The Middle East,35 and was published in book form by the London press Quartet Books, which had come under the directorship of the British-Palestinian publisher Naim Attallah several years previously. In the same year, it was also published in Hebrew by Adam Press in Jerusalem, followed by French and German translations in 1983, an American edition in 1984 and an Arabic translation in 1985. The Third Way is historically distinctive for having introduced the idea of sumūd, which Shehadeh translates as the state of being ‘steadfast’ or ‘persevering’ (p. vii), to an Anglophone readership. He did not, however, invent the term, as Said erroneously suggests in After the Last Sky.36 According to Alexandra Rijke and Toine van Teeffelen, the notion of sumūd had begun to gain currency among Palestinians in the 1960s, with the rise of the PLO and the consolidation of the national movement. While the term was originally used to describe a range of forms of ‘steadfastness’,

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including the survival of residents of the refugee camps and the continuation of the armed struggle, in the 1970s it became primarily associated first with Palestinians who had remained ‘inside’ the Israeli state (al-dākhil) after 1948, and then with Palestinians living in the occupied territories, which had come to be seen as the most promising site for popular resistance.37 When The Third Way appeared, the idea of sumūd as Shehadeh defines it was beginning to spread: for instance, in a 1982 interview with Gilles Deleuze in Libération, the Palestinian-French writer and intellectual Elias Sanbar expressed a similar desire to portray Palestinians as combatants in every area of their lives, not as refugees or ‘militiamen in the strict sense’.38 Although Shehadeh has recently claimed that the book’s main aim was to identify sumūd as the most important Palestinian strategy at that time,39 The Third Way represents it more broadly than this statement implies, as a general attitude of refusal to Israeli domination rather than a prescribed set of tactics. Rijke and van Teeffelen contend that because Shehadeh’s account of sumūd appeared in English, it was less a contribution to intra-national debates about the meaning of sumūd than ‘a conceptual window to communicate Palestinian humanity to non-Palestinians’, including Shehadeh’s Hebrewlanguage readers, such as Grossman.40 Shehadeh’s definition of sumūd seemed to resonate with liberal metropolitan readers’ preference for non-violent methods of civil disobedience associated with Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Nabeel Audeh, writing in the Journal of Palestine Studies, criticised it for this reason, complaining that ‘for Shehadeh the humanist, the agent of social change is not “Class-conscious man” but simply “Universal Man” with his reason and his innate good-will intact’.41 Yet although The Third Way, like Shehadeh’s later work, mostly eschews materialist analysis and party affiliation, it is not a pacifist or accommodationist text. Rather than avoiding a confrontational politics, it presents sumūd as a contestatory practice, of which the recourse to international humanitarian law is a necessary but partial component. The book thus promotes a solidarity with Palestinians that conceives of them as political actors and strategists rather than as victims, at a time when, as Lori Allen has written, ‘human rights and international humanitarian law were sources of creativity and even courage for some people living under occupation’.42 It must be emphasised that Shehadeh’s notion of sumūd does not provide a model for international solidarity activism, since it refers to Palestinian practice while living under occupation. However, sumūd and solidarity share a metaphorical connotation, as Emily Riddle has argued: ‘in both abstract nouns, a sense of fixity becomes moral as well as physical, that which is grounded in the land and in the cause’.43 This notion of political commitment as physically and morally located – that is, based on consistent principles that are brought to bear on a particular struggle – can also be found in Shehadeh’s effort to persuade a non-Palestinian audience that sumūd constitutes a politics of defiance. He contends that sumūd is not simply an instinctive, ‘human’ response to the occupation, but a conscious and sustained activity that is ‘developing from an all-encompassing form of life into a form of resistance that unites the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation’ (p. viii). To support this claim, Shehadeh often examines his own effort to forge a political practice from his location as an educationally and economically privileged Palestinian who has chosen to remain in the West Bank. His account is suffused with doubt and self-recrimination, dwelling as much on his fear that his legal work is futile as on his fear of the occupation authorities. While another contemporary reviewer described this approach as ‘an over-intellectualizing

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with which only a few Palestinians would feel comfortable’,44 Shehadeh’s self-criticism can alternatively be read as a dramatisation of his on-going position-taking, which requires him to test each decision he makes against his belief in the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and socio-economic equality. His approach invites the non-Palestinian reader to examine her own relationship to the Palestinian national movement in a similarly rigorous fashion, while also validating the sense of anxiety or ambivalence that this reader might feel in the process of formulating a position of solidarity. Like Sanbar, Shehadeh depicts sumūd as a form of combat, which he refuses to elevate over the armed resistance that was then going on in Lebanon, insisting that ‘[the fedayeen] and I are fighting for the same thing’ (p. 57). He is not arguing that sumūd is morally ‘good’ while armed struggle is morally ‘bad’; and conversely, he does not concede that sumūd is less effective or strategically important than armed struggle.45 Both methods are driven by a necessary and empowering anger, which he contrasts with self-defeating despair: ‘Anger fuels memory, keeps it alive . . . We samidīn [the plural form of samed/sāmid] cannot fight the Israelis’ brute physical force but we must keep the anger burning – steel our wills to fight the lies’ (p. 68). This is not the language of someone who is trying to make the Palestinian cause palatable to liberal western European, North American or Israeli readers. He further rejects the opposition between sumūd and armed resistance by suggesting, apocalyptically, that sumūd is an interim strategy, to be maintained under the ‘long-drawnout occupation, with no end in sight but war’ (p. 32); ‘I sometimes long for the day I most dread – the day we samidīn will have to spill blood for this loved and hated land’ (p. 125). Shehadeh thus deprives the reader of ‘obvious grounds for optimism’, as Robert Spencer has written of Palestinian Walks:46 sumūd is not an alternative to violent struggle, and it is unlikely to achieve Palestinian liberation by itself. The nightmares that punctuate Shehadeh’s narrative also discourage the romanticisation or premature celebration of sumūd, especially when it comes to Shehadeh’s practice of it in the Israeli courts. Shehadeh dreams (presciently) of the spread of settlements across the West Bank, but he also has more gruesome and surreal visions of Israeli soldiers in concentration camp uniforms who stamp his arm with a number and of spinning death masks with an Israeli and a Palestinian face on each side (see pp. 48, 63, 137–8). The waking counterpart to this visceral apprehension of his vulnerability as a Palestinian are the passages in which Shehadeh expresses doubt about the value of his work as a lawyer, armed only with his clients’ testimony: I am beginning to be wearied by the constant attrition of not being believed. . . . I know very well the psychological mechanism that makes people believe the concise, documented account as opposed to the confused, incoherent, verbal one. I know all this so well that I sometimes believe it is ludicrous, irrational, to expect anyone to believe the story of the weak. (p. 69) At first glance, this pronouncement seems to echo Didier Fassin’s observation of the paradox of contemporary human rights campaigns, which designate the ‘testimony’ of professional advocates as more credible than that of victims: The survivors, because they need the facts to be established and because they are aware of the risk of not being believed, distance themselves from affects. The humanitarian agents, because they seek primarily to move their audience and because they know that they have a capital of credibility, exploit these affects.47

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Yet the important difference between the two statements is that in Fassin’s account, the possibility of ‘believable’ emotive argumentation arises within a relation of humanitarian solidarity and in an international setting: the lawyer or advocate speaks for the ‘survivors’ but is not one of them, and the audience for the victims’ claims is presumed to be a neutral party who might be swayed by an appeal for empathy. By contrast, many of the lawyers who practised in the Israeli military courts were Palestinian, and as Shehadeh has said more recently, he and his Palestinian colleagues at Al-Haq knew that ‘a lot of emotion was not going to work’ in that venue.48 Instead, Shehadeh and his colleagues saw their work in the courts as an ‘expression of Palestinian collective empowerment through law’,49 and thus as another arena of combat. However, in The Third Way Shehadeh appears more sceptical about this claim. When he suffers no repercussions for having published The West Bank and the Rule of Law, and his Canadian-Israeli friend ‘Enoch’ (whom Shehadeh has recently named as Henry Abramovitch)50 tells him that it is because the Israeli public does not care about the legality of the occupation, he despairs of the inherent weakness of his chosen form of sumūd: ‘the law, reason, words – everything I deal with – mean nothing . . . I have refused fully to acknowledge this for fear of having to confront my own impotence’ (p. 105). Subsequently, when Shehadeh and his father are defeated in their legal challenge to the deportation of the mayors of Hebron and Halhūl in December 1980, he reflects that ‘everybody[’s] . . . hopes will be smothered. And it is all for the good. We will be freed of hope, and of dependence. . . . A lawyer is a useless Sāmid’ (pp. 128–9).51 The narrative’s trajectory toward despondence undercuts Shehadeh’s previous insistence on the necessity of anger: his early defiance comes to look like an empty threat. Shehadeh’s disheartenment mirrors the decline of adversarial politics in the Palestinian national movement and across the Arab region at that time, as the revolutionary optimism of the 1960s and early 1970s gave way to a ‘condition of all-round crisis and collapse’.52 Yet his move from confrontation to lament can also be read as a mobilisation of affect, which seeks, as Fassin puts it, ‘primarily to move’ Shehadeh’s non-Palestinian readers.53 Crucially, instead of soliciting empathy for his suffering as a victim of the occupation, Shehadeh asks the reader to recognise the immense effort (and perhaps the impossibility) of resisting the occupation through legal channels. The affect he ‘exploits’ is his political and personal demoralisation as a humanitarian agent who is also a stateless person. This is a different use of testimony from that described by Fassin: it presents Shehadeh’s participation in the struggle as the basis for his readers’ connection with him, ‘provoking their imagination’ by making his sense of frustration and failure ‘part of their own’ experience.54 The reader’s solidarity becomes the necessary adjunct to Shehadeh’s sumūd; his diary seeks to succeed where his legal work has failed by turning a wider non-Palestinian public against a regime that disregards and punishes even legal and non-violent forms of protest.55 This attempt to reach a larger audience recalls Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s account of the rise of international advocacy networks, which holds that when individuals and organisations ‘have no recourse within domestic political or judicial arenas . . . [they may] directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their states from outside’.56 Shehadeh’s turn to literature broadens his appeal beyond the local and international legal arena to readers who might be willing to support an informal and largely unarmed popular struggle for national liberation, an imagined formation that prefigures the impending mass civil uprising of the first intifada.

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The idea that the Palestinian practice of sumūd requires engagement and support from non-Palestinians, and that it is part of a wider struggle for human emancipation, emerges more vividly in Shehadeh’s use of love as a figure for solidarity. Shehadeh first invokes love when he introduces the idea that sumūd represents a ‘third way’ of resistance, in an account of a conversation with his friend Enoch/Henry about the legacy of the Holocaust. From Enoch/Henry, Shehadeh learns that ‘really honouring the memory of people who have suffered creates courage and a capacity for love’ (p. 38). This invocation of the Holocaust counters its subsequent appearance in the nightmare of the monstrous soldier-survivors. Here, it signals a basis for connection between histories of oppression by representing both Palestinians and European Jews as ‘people who have suffered’. However, Shehadeh makes it clear that suffering is not morally or politically valuable in itself;57 instead, he extols the ‘courage’ and ‘capacity for love’ that are produced by the struggle to end suffering. Such a struggle is defined by its refusal of ‘the psychology of a victim’ and by its consciousness that oppositional praxis is always a work in progress: it is ‘something that is created as I go along, forged step by step while I live here as Sāmid’ (p. 38). In the epilogue, Shehadeh observes that sumūd does require hope after all, but this hope cannot be tied to the outcome of a particular act of resistance or a specific political vision: ‘not hope for this or that to happen, nor hope for the far-off future. It is the kind of general hope you draw from the people around you whom you love’ (p. 143). By naming his community as the engine of his sumūd, Shehadeh grounds his activism in his ‘passionate’ connections58 to others, including Israelis who are in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, as he affirms: ‘It is the faces, on the West Bank and in Israel, that I love, admire, am proud to know, that have pushed aside my nightmare visions’. Shehadeh links his appreciation for his comrades’ ‘humanity’ to an anecdote about a young Israeli soldier whom he saw playing football with young Palestinians in Ramallah, and insists that it ‘is not mere sentimentality to linger for a moment over’ this scene. This fleeting vision of reconciliation does not provide narrative closure: Shehadeh concludes merely that ‘our struggle is not senseless: it is not yet proven that good never wins the day’ (p. 143). From this sequence of observations, we might conclude that for Shehadeh, the possibility of the triumph of ‘good’ designates a broad commitment to the establishment of relations of equality and community between all the region’s inhabitants. He invites the reader to build her own connections of solidarity with a movement whose next steps are uncertain, but whose principles remain constant: that Palestinians have a right to live under a government of their choosing and to resist the denial of their rights.

‘Because I had known them’: Solidarity as Passionate Commitment Apart from its authors’ different political attitudes, the most obvious contrast between Genet’s writing on Palestine and Shehadeh’s is that Genet, as a non-Palestinian, spends more time exploring his reasons for supporting the cause. While this attribute might seem to give his work functional value as a model of solidarity theory and practice for other non-Palestinians, his articulation of how he understands and experiences his solidarity with the movement is so idiosyncratic that it is not clear whether he sees

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it as generalisable. Said, in his review of Prisoner of Love, suggests that it is not: he says that like Adorno, Genet is ‘to be neither emulated nor routinized, no matter how much the reader might appreciate (or appropriate) some of what they say’.59 Yet Genet is a crucial figure for thinking about the contest between different idioms of solidarity in the 1980s. Rather than seeing the humanitarian turn as inevitable or strategically advantageous, Genet openly resists it by grounding his solidarity with the Palestinians in the period of armed struggle, which he continues to memorialise after its defeat. His use of the idea of love as a way of thinking about solidarity is not derived from a universal love for one’s fellow human beings, as some of Genet’s readers have suggested.60 Instead, it is based in a specific attraction to the Palestinian revolution that Genet metaphorises as desire, but that might also be understood as a literalisation of the notion of solidarity as passionate connection and commitment, in contrast to Shehadeh’s sincere but comparatively cursory associations of solidarity with love for fellow participants in the struggle. Genet’s work on Palestine was produced and circulated originally in French; his expression of solidarity with the Palestinians should therefore be understood in relation to the specific legacies of Algerian independence (the first liberation struggle that Genet declared himself in solidarity with), French Maoism and the student uprisings of May 1968.61 However, he had also been well-known in English as a playwright since the late 1950s, and his work on Palestine appeared in major English-language venues. His first essay on this subject, ‘The Palestinians’ (1973), came out in the Journal of Palestine Studies before it was published in French, and ‘Four Hours in Shatila’ (1983) appeared in the same journal shortly after its initial publication in Revue d’études palestiniennes.62 His final work Un captif amoureux, published posthumously by Gallimard in 1986, was published in English translation in the same year by the New York Review of Books and reissued in 1989 by Picador. It was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and Grand Street (by Said),63 and it received another round of press reviews when the New York Review of Books re-released it in 2003, this time with an introduction by the Egyptian Anglophone novelist Ahdaf Soueif.64 Early readers like Clifford Geertz and Edmund White refused to see the book as an endorsement of the Palestinian struggle, insisting instead on Genet’s position as an outsider in the movement and his non-partisanship.65 While Genet’s lament for what became of the Palestinian revolution after his time with the fedayeen might seem to support this claim, these critics overlook the text’s main source of narrative energy, which comes from Genet’s commitment to the Palestinian cause, even as he traces the movement’s ‘brutalization’ by a self-serving PLO leadership.66 I would argue instead, with Bashir Abu-Manneh and Said, that the ‘artistic greatness’ of Genet’s writing on Palestine ‘results from its author’s political allegiance’67 and ‘unquestioned solidarity’ with the ‘very same oppressed identified and so passionately analyzed by Fanon’.68 Revolution, Genet insisted, meant being ‘on the side of the weakest’; acting in solidarity meant going ‘immediately to the people who asked me to intervene’ (he is referring to the Black Panthers and the Palestinians) and ‘help[ing] to the extent that I can’.69 As I have already suggested, solidarity is a central theme of all of Genet’s writing on Palestine, but he first makes this preoccupation overt in ‘Four Hours in Shatila’. Genet was famously the first European observer to enter the Shatila camp after the killings, and the essay moves between his account of what he saw and his memory of

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living with the fedayeen a decade earlier. Genet describes the experience of stepping over mutilated bodies that have blackened in the sun in unadorned but precise detail (Geertz derisively calls this emphasis ‘inflammatory’).70 He describes their wounds, their stench, their swelling; he speculates about how they died, focusing more on what the Lebanese soldiers might have done than on how the victims might have felt. Here, Genet is ostensibly fulfilling a role that we know from contemporary human rights advocacy: he is a ‘reliable’ observer (an outsider, a European) giving a factual account of what he sees and what he believes happened. But the essay’s vocabulary and form refuse this structural position. Genet foregrounds his relationship to the victims, which is not so much an empathic relation as it is a physical and spatial one: he steps and almost trips over their bodies; he feels that he is ‘at the center of a compass whose quadrants contained hundreds of dead’.71 This description does not come from a recognisable vocabulary of humanitarian empathy with suffering; this is horror on a mass scale, and what matters is not how Genet feels about it, but his proximity to it. It implicates him not only as a witness, but as a participant in a struggle that has been virtually annihilated, the evidence of its destruction all around him. The structure of the essay more openly identifies Genet as a partisan by juxtaposing his present observations of the aftermath of the massacre with his memories of the PLO camps. The horror of the massacre is punctuated by the joy and beauty (Genet’s own terms (see pp. 4, 11, 20)) of the Palestinian revolution. It is in this context, as he describes the bombed buildings of Beirut, that Genet first names his solidarity with the Palestinians as a relationship of love, an idea that he would go on to develop in Prisoner of Love: You can select a particular community other than that of your birth, whereas you are born into a people; this selection is based on an irrational affinity [une adhésion non raisonée], which is not to say that justice has no role, but that this justice and the entire defense of this community take place because of an emotional – perhaps intuitive, sensual – attraction; I am French, but I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically [entièrement, sans jugement]. They are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people [un peuple vagabond]? (p. 13)72 This definition of solidarity recalls Said’s famous distinction between filiation and affiliation in The World, the Text, and the Critic (published the same year as this essay), in which filiation is a given relation and affiliation is a chosen one.73 However, Genet’s understanding of affiliation as attraction and love departs from Said’s notion of deliberate alliance. For Genet, ‘adhésion’ – which can also be translated as ‘joining’ or ‘membership’, emphasising the idea of belonging to an organised movement – supersedes the process of evaluation and judgement that might normally be associated with ideological commitment (‘sans jugement’). Genet embraces this feeling of passionate and spontaneous connection to the Palestinians as proof of the integrity of their cause, even as he admits that his position might be tautological: ‘they are in the right because I love them’ (emphasis added). Although Genet’s reference in this passage to Palestinian ‘wandering’ (or vagabondism) invokes a history of suffering, his feelings are not limited to or even particularly aimed at women and children, the archetypal victims of humanitarian solidarity and the focus of

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many metropolitan condemnations of the massacre.74 Instead, Genet emphasises his love for the dead Palestinian fighters: ‘Many died in Shatila, and my friendship, my affection for their rotting corpses was also immense, because I had known them. Blackened, swollen, decayed by the sun and by death, they were still fedayeen’ (p. 21). He mourns these men not simply as human beings, but for the loss of their exceptional radiance, which he attributes to their quest for liberation: The statement that there is a beauty particular to revolutionaries raises many problems. . . . Perhaps this may be explained in the following way: breaking with the ancient ways [les ordres archaïques], a new freedom pushes through the dead skin, and fathers and grandfathers will have a hard time extinguishing the gleam in the eyes, the throbbing in the temples, the joy of blood flowing through the veins. (p. 11)75 The eroticism of this passage appears elsewhere in his descriptions of the fedayeen,76 but in Prisoner of Love, Genet insists that ‘I never desired any particular person, I was all desire for the group as a whole’.77 He reasserts his passion for the collective in the book’s conclusion: ‘From late 1970 to late 1972, more than anything else I loved the fedayeen’.78 Both statements distinguish sexual or romantic love for an individual from solidaristic love. These forms of relation might share the same vocabulary and even the same sensations, but because solidaristic love is forged through participation in the revolutionary struggle of a group, the struggle’s supporters enter into relation with all its members. Elsewhere in the book, Genet suggests that passionate connection to a movement’s protagonists is necessary to solidarity because solidarity is itself a form of human connection: ‘how can you make a comrade of an ideology?’79 Genet also uses love as a figure for solidarity in the broader sense of post-revolutionary social solidarity: love metonymically and metaphorically names the ‘new kinds of relations’80 that he claims the Palestinian revolution has established. He observes in 1973 that ‘revolutionary activity is not restricted to the use of an emotive vocabulary, nor even to the use of the rifle; it also lies in the challenge to live a happy life to the full’, a life that would include the space and time for people to make love.81 In Prisoner of Love, Genet claims that the songs the fedayeen sang among the Jordanian hilltops were a ‘call to love’, issued from ‘the configuration of nature in the darkness’.82 The primal character of this call demonstrates the bonds among the fedayeen, but it also conveys the freedom and creativity that the revolution has initiated. The singing, like the revolution itself, is ‘a great improvisation performed among the mountains, in the midst of danger’. When Genet asks one of the men what the songs are about, he confirms the connection Genet has intuited: ‘Love, of course! And occasionally the revolution.’83 Genet’s linking of revolutionary violence and revolutionary desire with life force (‘a new freedom pushes through the dead skin’) also appears in his controversial 1977 essay praising the Red Army Faction, and it recalls the use of this kind of imagery in New Left thought of the 1960s and 1970s.84 Genet’s language echoes not only Frantz Fanon’s classic essay ‘Concerning Violence’ (1963), but also Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969), which has been far less influential in postcolonial studies.85 Marcuse writes of the European and North American youth movements of the 1960s: ‘There is a strong element of spontaneity, even anarchism, in this rebellion, expression of the new sensibility, sensitivity against domination: the feeling, the awareness, that the joy of freedom and the need to be free must precede liberation.’86 Marcuse sees

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this spontaneous demand for freedom in the metropolitan centres as a response to the anti-colonial independence movements. However, he goes further than Fanon or Genet in asserting the importance of metropolitan solidarity to the process of decolonisation: ‘the preconditions for the liberation and development of the Third World must emerge in the advanced capitalist countries. Only the internal weakening of the superpower can finally stop the financing and equipping of suppression in the backward countries.’87 Marcuse thus describes a reciprocal north-south solidarity, or what Abu-Manneh, in his discussion of Genet, calls a ‘mutually beneficial revolutionary encounter’.88 The citizens of the formerly colonised countries demonstrate the possibility of establishing the ‘new kinds of relations’ that Genet saw among the fedayeen, while the citizens of the colonising countries oppose the counter-revolutionary activities of their own governments, seeking to generate world-systemic conditions in which those new relations might be realised. Yet while Genet shares Marcuse’s attraction to spontaneity, in Prisoner of Love he appears less persuaded of the revolutionary potential of north-south encounters (although he does compare the atmosphere of the camps to the mood of ‘freedom’ in Paris in May 1968).89 He is suspicious of a pair of French activists that he met in Jordan, whom he says ‘were like two children of May 1968 – liberated but full of antiquated platitudes’ (p. 133). He worries about ‘watching revolutions from plush and gilt stage boxes’, although he wonders if there is any way around it: ‘What other place are we to watch from if the revolutions are first and foremost wars of liberation? From whom are they trying to free themselves?’ (p. 304). Unlike other metropolitan supporters of the Palestinians, Genet suggests, he is aware that his love for the fedayeen may not have been reciprocated: ‘It’s only now that I feel I’d like to have been a tree myself, so as to see how they really felt about me’ (p. 347). Genet’s insistence here on the limits of his access to the fedayeen and their revolution is characteristic of the self-criticism and uncertainty that come to dominate Prisoner of Love as the narrative continues. Such statements undermine the more celebratory portrayal of solidaristic love that appears in Genet’s earlier works and elsewhere in the book. Instead, he ponders whether his acts of solidarity with the Palestinians made any difference, and whether his writing about them will be read: ‘What if this book were only a mirror-memoir for me alone . . .?’ (p. 381). This shift towards a negative representation of metropolitan solidarity as self-congratulatory or solipsistic recalls the melancholic shift that takes place in Shehadeh’s text, but Genet goes further than Shehadeh by doubting the worth of his own book, even though Palestinians had asked him to write it (see p. 282). Prisoner of Love also takes a dark view of what Genet’s love has become after the Palestinians’ defeat, a turn of events that he sees as the consequence of not simply the PLO’s military losses in Jordan and Lebanon, but the betrayals of the Arab regimes and the PLO leadership. After 1973, he says: I was still charmed, but I wasn’t convinced; I was attracted but not blinded [Encore charmé, pas convaincu, séduit pas aveuglé]. I behaved like a prisoner of love [un captif amoureux]. . . . So much love to start was bound to grow less. . . . [It a]ll went to show that every revolution would deteriorate, would capitulate before the invasion of stultifying comfort. (p. 217)90

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Genet expresses a certain (and to my mind, frustrating) fatalism here, in his suggestion that capitulation is the fate of all revolutions. Yet this charge is directed at specific individuals for specific acts of betrayal. He speaks scathingly of PLO leaders who have personally profited from the revolution, blames Arafat for its defeat, and asserts that if the PLO accept territory for a Palestinian state, they will betray their own fighters (see pp. 139–40, 208, 306). He notes wryly: ‘I found the manners of almost all the ordinary Palestinians, men and women, delightful. But their leaders were a pain in the neck [emmerdants, lit. ‘annoying as shit’]’ (p. 280).91 The leadership have left Genet without a movement with which to be in solidarity; they have left him with a love that has no object. Genet ends on a bleaker note than Shehadeh in part because he refuses to seek a compromise between liberationist and humanitarian ideas of solidarity. In fact, in the 1973 essay, he explicitly distinguishes between them: ‘the pro-Palestinian movement itself is very weak and always runs the risk of being accused of anti-Semitism. Thus the attitudes taken are more humanitarian than really political.’92 Yet he shares with Shehadeh a commitment to showing his work. Genet endlessly examines his reasons for being in solidarity, returning on multiple occasions to the idea of the revolution as a spectacle from which he derives an unearned pleasure (see pp. 105, 144, 314). At the same time, he continues to emphasise the need for solidarity, even and especially in the absence of a revolutionary movement. Immediately after he describes himself as a ‘prisoner of love’, he cites Arafat’s prediction that the rest of the world will lose interest in the Palestinians, ‘and for the West and all the rest of the world the Palestinian problem will be solved simply because no one sees its picture any more’ (p. 217). His self-criticism and his criticism of what the struggle has become do not disable his solidarity; the trajectory of his enquiry is toward the possibility of its realisation.

Palestine Solidarity, Then and Now Genet and Shehadeh’s work contributed to the international Palestine solidarity movement by making a case for the legitimacy and integrity of the Palestinian cause at a time when its future looked bleak, and its metropolitan reputation was in dispute. Yet the French fellow traveller and the Palestinian human rights lawyer resisted the growing emphasis on suffering and testimony, and the privileging of ethics as an alternative to politics, that have characterised the humanitarian turn.93 Instead, they urged the reader to recognise and respond to Palestinians’ organisational actions, beliefs and goals, and above all to comprehend their united opposition to Israeli domination. In place of a ‘politics of compassion’, they promoted a ‘politics of justice’.94 This emphasis thwarts past and present attempts to recuperate Shehadeh and Genet’s work as non-partisan. The idea of solidarity as love that they articulate seeks – paradoxically – to avoid romanticising either Palestinian suffering or Palestinian heroism. As Genet remarks, ‘To be a fedayee for a moment when you haven’t had to endure a fedayee’s woes is like wearing a forged medal [c’est faire sur soi, de cette malédiction, un faux-semblant]’ (p. 314),95 something which might also be said of the desire to imaginatively substitute oneself for the occupied subject or refugee, as appeals for empathy with the oppressed in humanitarian activism and postcolonial literary scholarship have sometimes encouraged. Instead, these writers invoke the notion of

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love as a way of imagining a non-hierarchical and anti-identitarian96 relation between participants in a struggle and their supporters. My hope in returning to these works is that by recovering the historical trajectory through which liberationist solidarity came to be seen as naive, and humanitarian solidarity the only pragmatic option, we can undo that automatic response. These writers’ insistence on both the difficulty and the possibility of shared struggle continues to offer more radical ‘resources of hope’97 to activists and intellectuals who seek to build connections across distance. At a time when cynicism about the effectiveness of human rights-based activism is mounting, and new ideas of revolution and liberation, through civil disobedience but also through armed resistance, are on the rise, it is imperative that postcolonial scholars engage the archive of decolonisation, liberation and political solidarity. This task has a particular salience in the context of the contemporary Palestinian struggle. We are a long way from where we were in the 1980s, when metropolitan support for the Palestinian cause was confined to members of the Arab diaspora and a small group of non-Arab activists. This change in public opinion presents a real opportunity for those of us whose governments continue to enable the occupation of the West Bank, the siege of Gaza and a refugee crisis in its fifth generation to follow Shehadeh and Genet’s example and speak out against it. ‘We are all guilty’, as Jean Mohr put it, of allowing the catastrophe to continue.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 7. 2. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, p. 8. 3. I use the term ‘metropolitan Left’ to designate citizens of the core countries of the capitalist world-system who identify with the political Left. This shorthand term (which includes a wide range of positions) allows me to focus on the modes of appeal for solidarity with struggles in the global peripheries that are directed at this demographic. 4. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, p. 7. 5. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. xl. 6. Lori Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 12. 7. The founding of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA) in 1949 identified Palestinians as a population in need of humanitarian aid (United Nations Relief and Works Agency, ‘Who We Are’, https://www.unrwa.org/who-we-are (last accessed 19 January 2018), n.p.). This representation of Palestinians as humanitarian victims was challenged by the rise of the PLO in the 1960s. 8. Paul Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. Said, The Question of Palestine, p. xi. 10. On the UK context, see Tony Greenstein, ‘The Origins of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC)’, Tony Greenstein’s Blog, 10 November 2014, http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/ the-origins-of-palestine-solidarity.html (last accessed 19 January 2018), n.p. On the US, see Hilton Obenzinger, ‘Palestine Solidarity, Political Discourse, and the Peace Movement, 1982–1988’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 8:2 (2008), pp. 233–52; p. 238. 11. Bashir Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 2016), p. 142.

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12. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 4. 13. Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, p. 6. 14. Didier Fassin, ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification Through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, Cultural Anthropology, 23:3 (2008), pp. 531–58; p. 537. See also Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, pp. 2–4, 14–17. 15. John Collins, Global Palestine (London: Hurst, 2011), p. 4. 16. For a discussion of Palestine’s relationship to postcolonial studies, see Anna Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel / Palestine (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 19–22 and Anna Ball and Patrick Williams, ‘Where is Palestine?’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:2 (2014), pp. 127–33. 17. Examples of Palestine scholarship linked to postcolonial literary studies include AbuManneh, The Palestinian Novel; Anna Ball, Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (London: Routledge, 2012); Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging; Norbert Bugeja, Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing (London: Routledge, 2012); Isabelle Hesse, The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Lindsey Moore, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations (London: Routledge, 2017); Bart Moore-Gilbert, ‘Palestine, Postcolonialism and Pessoptimism’, Interventions, 10 March 2016, pp. 1–34; Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘The International Palestinian Resistance: Documentary and Revolt’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:2 (2014), pp. 148–62; and Patrick Williams, ‘Gaps, Silences, and Absences: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies’, in Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray (eds), What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 87–104. It is worth noting that all these scholars were or are based in the UK, where support for the Palestinian cause is controversial but carries less professional risk than in the US. 18. See for example Salah D. Hassan, ‘Undertaking Partition: Palestine and Postcolonial Studies’, Journal X, 6:1 (2001), pp. 19–45, and Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 13–40. 19. See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2004) and Elia Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (London: Routledge, 2016). 20. See Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging, pp. 3–4. 21. Examples include York University’s (Canada) denial of club status to Students Against Israeli Apartheid in 2013; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s revoking of Steven Salaita’s contract in 2014; the investigation of Jake Lynch at the University of Sydney in 2015; the University of California at Berkeley’s temporary suspension of the module ‘Palestine: A Settler-Colonial Analysis’ in 2016; and the cancellations of Israeli Apartheid Week events at the universities of Exeter and Central Lancashire in 2017. 22. See Bernard, Rhetorics of Belonging, pp. 7–12, 25–8. 23. This distinction is taken from Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 15. 24. This is not to say that north-south affiliations have not been explored: see, for instance, Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). However, postcolonial scholarship has rarely engaged with the literature of organised solidarity movements, apart from some key exceptions, such as Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (London: Routledge, 1987) and Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Redressing Anti-Imperial Amnesia’, Race & Class, 57:3 (2016), pp. 18–30.

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25. David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed, 2012), pp. 36, 4. 26. See for example David Shariatmadari, ‘Raja Shehadeh: ‘International law is being violated – but you have to try to make it prevail’, The Guardian, 4 April 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/04/raja-shehadeh-international-law-mustprevail (last accessed 19 January 2018), n.p. 27. See Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (London: Quartet, 1982). Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 28. See Raja Shehadeh, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2002) and Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (London: Profile, 2007). 29. See Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, p. 100; David Grossman, The Yellow Wind, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1988), pp. 9–11; Harlow, Resistance Literature, p. 83; and Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Cambridge: South End Press, 1983), pp. 143–6. 30. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 143. 31. See Nabeel Audeh, ‘Steadfastness’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 12:2 (1983), pp. 76–9; Bishara Bahbah, ‘The Third Way’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 14:4 (1985), pp. 151–3; Irene Gendzier, ‘The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank by Raja Shehadeh’, Middle East Journal, 38:3 (1984), pp. 557–8; and Anita Vitullo, ‘West Bank Journal’, MERIP, 112 (1983), p. 31. 32. See also Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 144 and Bahbah, ‘The Third Way’, p. 151. 33. Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, p. 38. 34. See Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (Geneva: International Commission of Jurists; Ramallah: Law in the Service of Man, 1980). 35. See Raja Shehadeh, Where the Line is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine (London: Profile, 2017), loc. 651. 36. Said and Mohr, After the Last Sky, p. 100. 37. See Alexandra Rijke and Toine van Teeffelen, ‘To Exist is to Resist: Sumud, Heroism, and the Everyday’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 59 (2014), pp. 86–99. 38. Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar, ‘The Indians of Palestine’, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse, 20:3 (1998), pp. 25–6. 39. Raja Shehadeh, ‘Without Vision We Can Never Get Anywhere’, Wasafiri, 29:4 (2014), pp. 4–7; p. 5. 40. Rijke and van Teeffelen, ‘To Exist is to Resist’, p. 89. 41. Audeh, ‘Steadfastness’, pp. 78–9. 42. Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, p. 34. 43. Emily Riddle, ‘Museums in Exile: Mobilizing Solidarity through Contemporary Palestinian Exhibition Practice’, MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2016, p. 7. 44. Vitullo, ‘West Bank Journal’, p. 31. 45. As Jonathan Kuttab, a co-founder of Al-Haq, has pointed out, armed struggle is sanctioned under international law: ‘We always stated that human rights are only part of what Palestinians are entitled to, and that our political rights go beyond respect by the occupiers of our human rights and of the Geneva Convention’ (Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, p. 42). 46. Robert Spencer, ‘Ecocriticism in the Colonial Present: The Politics of Dwelling in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape’, Postcolonial Studies, 13:1 (2010), pp. 33–54; p. 49. 47. Fassin, ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony’, p. 538. 48. Allen, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, p. 39.

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49. Ibid. p. 58. 50. Shehadeh, Where the Line is Drawn, loc. 83. 51. The mayors Fahd Qawasmeh and Muhammad Milhim were deported in May 1980, in retaliation for a PLO attack in Hebron that killed six Israeli settlers. Their deportation followed an unsuccessful attempt to deport the Nablus mayor Bassam Shakaa, whose Israeli lawyer, Felicia Langer, succeeded in getting his expulsion order overturned in the Israeli Supreme Court. However, in June 1980 Shakaa lost both legs in a car bomb attack claimed by the Jewish Underground organisation, and in 1982 the occupation administration replaced all remaining ‘nationalist’ Palestinian mayors in the West Bank with Israeli army officers. See Shehadeh, The Third Way, pp. 47–8, 56, 101, 109–11, 128; Bassam Shak’a, Muhammad Milhem and Fahd Qawasmeh, ‘The Mood of the West Bank: Interviews with Three West Bank Mayors’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 9:1 (1979), pp. 112–20; and Moshe Ma’oz, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank: The Changing Role of the Arab Mayors Under Jordan and Israel (London: Routledge, 2015), chapters 7–9. 52. Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 157. 53. Fassin, ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony’, p. 538. 54. This is Shehadeh’s own recent account of his practice as a writer. See Cynthia Franklin, ‘Towards a New Language of Liberation: An Interview with Raja Shehadeh’, Biography, 37:2 (2014), pp. 516–23; p. 518. 55. As he puts it in a recent interview: ‘I saw writing as a way of serving the cause of justice and human rights. Human rights reports reach a limited sector of the population and so have limited impact, but if you write something that touches more people and is mass-distributed, the impact is that much stronger.’ Vincent Bernard, ‘Interview with Raja Shehadeh’, International Review of the Red Cross, 94.885 (2012), pp. 13–28; p. 15. 56. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, p. 13. 57. Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 162. 58. Featherstone, Solidarity, p. 37. 59. Edward W. Said, ‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’, Grand Street, 36 (1990), pp. 37–42; p. 39. 60. Zahra A. Hussein Ali, ‘Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan’, Criticism, 51:4 (2010), pp. 589–621; p. 610. 61. See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 62. See Jean Genet, ‘The Palestinians’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 3:1 (1973), pp. 3–34; Jean Genet, ‘Four Hours in Shatila’, trans. Daniel R. Dupêcher and Martha Perrigaud, Journal of Palestine Studies, 12:3 (1983), pp. 3–22; and Jean Genet, ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, Revue d’études palestiniennes, 6 (1983), pp. 3–19. 63. See Clifford Geertz, ‘Genet’s Last Stand’, The New York Review of Books, 19 November 1992, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1992/11/19/genets-last-stand/ (last accessed 19 January 2018), n.p.; Nigel Williams, ‘Upstaged in Palestine’, London Review of Books, 11:10 (1989), p. 18; and Said, ‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’. 64. See Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003) and Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). 65. See Geertz, ‘Genet’s Last Stand’, n.p. and Edmund White, Genet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 719. 66. Howard Caygill, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 134. 67. Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 95. 68. Said, ‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’, p. 40.

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69. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, ed. Albert Dichy and trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 133, 235. 70. Geertz, ‘Genet’s Last Stand’, n.p. 71. Genet, ‘Four Hours in Shatila’, p. 6. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 72. For the original French, see Genet, ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, p. 11. 73. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 20–2. 74. See for example Seth Anziska, ‘A Preventable Massacre’, New York Times, 16 September 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/a-preventable-massacre.html (last accessed 19 January 2018), n.p. 75. See Genet, ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’, p. 10; see also Genet, ‘The Palestinians’, p. 19. 76. See for example Genet, Prisoner of Love, pp. 307–8. 77. Ibid. p. 300. This statement is in reference to the Black Panthers, but the comparison to the Palestinians is implied. See also Genet, The Declared Enemy, p. 149. 78. Genet, Prisoner of Love, p. 428. 79. Ibid. p. 307. 80. Genet, ‘The Palestinians’, p. 8. 81. Ibid. p. 22. 82. Genet, Prisoner of Love, p. 45. 83. Ibid. p. 46. 84. Genet, The Declared Enemy, p. 172. See also Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 93. 85. Marcuse, like the rest of the members of the Frankfurt School apart from Theodor Adorno, has not often been engaged by postcolonial critics. Benita Parry is a notable exception: see Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 132, 221–3, and Benita Parry, ‘Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms’, ARIEL, 40:1 (2009), pp. 27–55; pp. 38, 49, 52. 86. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 91. 87. Ibid. p. 84. 88. Abu-Manneh, The Palestinian Novel, p. 93. 89. Genet, Prisoner of Love, p. 285. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 90. See Genet, Un captif amoureux, p. 258. 91. See Genet, Un captif amoureux, p. 328. 92. Genet, ‘The Palestinians’, p. 31. 93. See Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination, pp. 1–16. 94. Fassin, ‘The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony’, p. 543. 95. See Genet, Un captif amoureux, p. 369. 96. See Said, ‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’, p. 36 and Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 285. 97. Said, ‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works’, p. 40.

Acknowledgement The work for this essay was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

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Chapter 15 Nikes in Nineveh: Daesh, the Ruin and the Global Logic of Eradication Sadia Abbas

Citizens, keep a watch. The chickens of Jihads once sponsored by imperialism and the state are likely to come home to roost. Afghanistan then may prove to be a metaphor for the future. Eqbal Ahmed, ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’1 Problems of jurisdiction always mirror greater crises of authority. John Keene, Counternarratives2

I

C

arefully staged, thoroughly mediatised, meticulously disseminated, Daesh’s attacks on Nineveh, Palmyra, Hatra manifest and reveal the convergence, implosion and extension of capitalist late modernity’s most exacerbated fixations: the spectacle, ruination, the desire for the real, the inescapability of simulation, irony and parody without laughter, death without redemption, eschatology without history.3 These highly publicised acts of destruction inhabit the tension between capitalist obsolescence and the exalted conservation of the ruin. Capitalism plans the obsolescence of everything and the very modern discourse of ruination uses ruin gazing as the bedrock of monumentalisation. Seeking safeguards against modernity within the very terms of modern historicism, we preserve, conserve, monumentalise and curate that which we have left behind. World Heritage sites are in many cases all that stand between developers and the physical remnants of history – emblems of its existence, reminders of its end. In our current moment, the twinning of development and destruction has been much accelerated. We might think here of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, which began as resistance to the mallification of Istanbul, in this case to the actual erection of a mall on a park, the culmination of years of the AKP’s (Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party) investment in ‘developmental’ projects. In the first seven months of 2003 alone, 1,775 hectares of land were set alight and scorched, qualifying them as ‘fit for privatization’ in Turkey.4 Hurricane Sandy has been used as an opportunity by developers in New York to accelerate the erection of unaffordable high rises in their ongoing attempt to turn Manhattan into Dubai, which wanted to rise higher than Manhattan all along.5 Homogenisation in the name of innovation continues apace.

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The Saudis have found a particularly efficient way to implement the erasure of the inconveniently physical presence of history by deploying Wahhabi ideology to destroy shrines, holy graves, old houses; we might recognise, for instance, the destruction of the al-Baqi cemetery by King Ibn Saud in 1925 as an inaugural moment (see Figure 15.1). They are even considering moving the Prophet’s grave from the Mosque in Medina to this cemetery, where his daughter and grandson are buried in graves which are now unmarked.6 Meanwhile Mecca has been turned into a modern tourist complex for the Muslim wealthy, as exemplified by the Makkah (Mecca) Clock Royal Tower hotel, which looms over the Kaaba, making clear to the pilgrims that Allah is represented on earth by the Kingdom’s capacity to pierce the skies with the highrise, declaring that if you are wealthy enough you can get a God’s eye view of the Haram Sharif (see Figure 15.2). The Kaaba itself is put in perspective by these buildings constructed by the Saudi Binladin Group which continues, as Zaheer Kazmi remarks drily, to ‘make towers the prodigal Osama would dream of razing and the Caliph Ibrahim [Daesh’s al-Baghdadi] might dream of possessing’.7 Bulgari sightings are likelier in the Muslim Holy Land than finding Fatima’s grave. The Saudi deployment of iconoclasm has helped create a global environment in which all shrines, graves and holy places – Muslim, Buddhist (think of the Bamiyan statues), Christian – can be destroyed. Daesh are the steroidal inheritors of this tendency, which they deploy and which they have perfected as a highly mediatised propaganda tool, manifesting an aesthetics of power that is fully cognisant of the centrality of the management of the image to the dependency on spectacle that has come to shape so much of modern consciousness – using the visual world of Hollywood disaster movies, video games and advertising heavy glossies, to participate in and, the fantasy appears to be, seize control of the spectacular in the society of the spectacle.8 In a remarkable essay, Faisal Devji has argued that Daesh is obsessed with transparency and the will to live entirely on the surface.9 This passion to live on the surface is accompanied by a politics in which the unmasking of hypocrisy and the manifestation of sincerity are all, culminating in an insistence that all action must be rendered visible as law, conceived in an unideological and entirely unsystematic way. Daesh wishes to reduce the subject to ‘its mask or legal persona’.10 Elements of this insistence on

Figure 15.1 Al-Baqi cemetery before demolition. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)

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Figure 15.2 The Makkah Clock Royal Tower Hotel and the Haram Sharif. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons) surface and on unmasking are to be found in the way it ranges through Islamic texts for precedents while being, as Devji puts it, ‘curiously devoid of narrative content’ and the fact that ‘the militant self has been reduced to the virtual self in video games like the “Assassin’s Creed”’ (n.p.). Moreover, in a fine recent essay, Ömür Harmanşah has discussed Daesh’s ‘relentless production of images’ of the destruction of world heritage sites as appealing to structures of reality TV consumerism, even as it seeks to erase local memory and attack collective belonging in an extension of its scorched earth policy.11 I am most interested, then, in how the life and politics of the surface mobilises an aesthetics of the image, its relation to the spectacle, the structure of desire revealed in this mobilisation, and what it tells us about the global state of mass violence in our times. For the purposes of this volume, it is important to note that to some extent such a focus invites an engagement with what ‘Islam’ and ‘the Middle East’ designate in our current moment. Both have come to emblematise unreason, the impossibility of modernity and inescapable and almost predestinarian violence in a certain international imagination. Yet Daesh is very much a product of modernity, and its violence is both an effect of globalisation and fully partakes of it. Moreover, the ostensible path to Muslimness it offers – allegiance can be sworn across global lines, be an effect of Internet chat-rooms and long distance ‘grooming’, jihadist groups can change names and

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join wherever they might be located (West Africa, South Asia) – calls into question the epistemic use of ‘region’ in discussions of modern Islam, even as we are reminded, yet again, that the emergence of regions as areas of study is itself an effect of the colonial and postcolonial (Cold War) and resurgent imperial (post the first Iraq war or post9/11 depending on one’s conceptualisation) politics which have led to the creation of groups like Daesh and precursors such as Al-Qaeda. Numerous commentators have remarked on the careful staging of Daesh’s videos and the slick production of their online magazine, Dabiq. Even with this in mind, however, the glossiness of their recruiting videos and of Dabiq are striking. Daesh’s aesthetics seem comprised of formal tools from a postmodern grab-bag, manifested in pastiche, a desire for spectacle, even in the production of a language that passes itself off as theological and grave, but that incorporates quotations from the Quran and Hadith in a manner that makes them function as a sort of authorising code in what I can only call ‘gangster pidgin’: a private language rendered portentous by generous quotations from the Quran and Hadith where there is a tenuous relation between what is presented as interpretive claim and text quoted. Indeed, interpretation is replaced by juxtaposition and the ostensible self-evidence of the text is performed again and again. The article on the attack on the ruins of Nineveh, ‘Erasing the Legacy of a Ruined Nation’, in Dabiq’s eighth issue, whose cover bears the legend ‘Shariah Will Rule Africa’, is an exemplary instance of Daesh’s management of the image. The piece quite carefully images the destruction of the image even as text itself becomes image as the numerous quotations from the Quran and Hadith are inserted as authorising patches without narrative or exegetical coherence.12 The title ‘Erasing the Legacy of a Ruined Nation’, is more revealing in the totality of destructive ambition, than anything else. All traces of that which is already ruined must be erased. Despite the knowing tone of the title, the pun on ruined nation, which suggests both the Assyrians and the Iraqis, and the connotation of moral ruination, the essay that follows makes no theological sense. I say this not to deny or confirm Daesh’s authenticity as Muslim but rather to make a different formal and interpretive point.13 At the same time, the essay suggests a desire to goad others by smashing the things they might hold dear. This theatre of destruction is based on an entirely banal structure of gloating and goading, which one sees in the less glossy video of the destruction of Nimrud, in which the camera pans around the site, lovingly tracing the ruins, so that one can see what is about to be destroyed before one witnesses the destruction. In ‘Erasing the Legacy of a Ruined Nation’, this structure is visible in the very first paragraph: Last month, the soldiers of the Khilafah, with sledgehammers in hand, revived the Sunnah of their father Ibrahim (alayhis salam) when they laid waste to the shirki legacy of a nation that had long passed from the face of the Earth. They entered the ruins of the ancient Assyrians in Wilayat Ninawa and demolished their statues, sculptures, and engravings of idols and kings. This caused an outcry from the enemies of the Islamic State, who were furious at losing a ‘treasured heritage’. The essay follows with quotes from the Quran and Hadith, which seem to have no relation with the event being justified as they speak to Allah’s capacity to ruin civilisations and Ibrahim’s smashing of idols, neither of which are analogous to the

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event even on the article’s own terms. The piece is, however, replete with references to disbelievers and death and destruction. Despite the absurdity of the rhetoric and the incoherence of the essay, it seems clear that the writer(s) of the piece identify with Abraham, Muhammad and Allah, arrogating the power to destroy to themselves. If, despite its illogic, one takes the essay seriously, one could say that as it flings around the accusation of shirk (idolatry), which allows it to declare everyone deserving of slaughter, while serving the agenda of attacking Iraqi national identity and nationalism to enable it to assert its own power and transnational reach, Daesh performs the very shirk to which it appears so opposed by identifying itself with Allah. The kuffar had unearthed these statues and ruins in recent generations and attempted to portray them as part of a cultural heritage and identity the Muslims of Iraq should embrace and be proud of. Yet this opposes the guidance of Allah and His Messenger and only serves a nationalist agenda that severely dilutes the wala required of the Muslims towards their Lord. The essay is heavy with images of the destruction – eight in three pages – making the text seem supernumerary, even as the Quranic and Hadith quotations function as emblems that give the illusion of theological gravity while revealing an inability to read that is not merely a result of the group’s refusal to take traditions of exegesis or Islamic history seriously by declaring them all part of the customs of Jahilyya; it seems instead to display a basic problem with comprehension. But what is left in this absence of interpretation and in the nature of the deployment of both text and photograph is the ascendancy of the image, where even text functions only as image, almost like a badge or a tattoo which authorises entry into the group, in this case granting permission to destroy with impunity, to exercise the law, indeed be the law. We are in the presence of the purest fantasy of power. A power that legitimates the desire to destroy, which seems a manifestation of what Slavoj Žižek, following Alain Badiou, has called the passion for the real, for an authenticity of experience that in its extreme violence peels off the deceptive layers of reality.14 The desire to own the spectacle is also a desire to control death and destruction, not only by inflicting it, but by owning its imagery – an imagery of horror and at the same time of utter banality. In the Daesh visual world, presented in high gloss photographs and slick videos with CGI enhancements, even the numerous dead bodies are normalised and then banalised, their sheer humanity an odd eruption of the ordinary as the bodily into this shiny real-fake world. The photographs of demolition at Nineveh show the militant as an unindividualised character in sneakers, cargo pants and South Asian kameez, and the carefully cultivated deshabille of the untrimmed beard, an oddly banal insertion of a uniformed and thus non-individuated agency, reducing the sheen of the photographs and deflating the triumphant declaration of the title (see Figure 15.3). This destruction is clearly staged in mimicry of – or aspirational fantasy to – the aesthetic of the Hollywood disaster movie, in which one is invited to tremble and shudder with fascination and prurient fear as one contemplates the destruction of all one holds dear or considers too large, too powerful, too permanent, too beautiful to be destroyed (see Figure 15.4).15 And, already destroyed, what could be more permanent than the ruin? Into this fantasy is inserted the heroic but nonindividualised agent: the hero here not one who saves but instead one who destroys ostensibly in the service of some higher rescue.

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Figure 15.3 Still of destruction of Nineveh, Dabiq, Issue 8. © Dabiq

Figure 15.4 ‘The Flood’, Dabiq, Issue 2. © Dabiq The recruiting ad, ‘Abandon the Lands of Shirk, Come to the Land of Islam’ looks like an American Express pitch, a kind of glossy business class invitation to extreme tourism (see Figure 15.5). The imagery is not subtle: in the first picture a sweatshirted young man turns his back upon the ‘Land of Shirk’ as he walks toward the gate. The numerous seats under the sign pointing to the gate are empty, selling the idea that the consumer of the advertisement can be a lone adventurer setting out to a great new land. In the second picture, bearing the legend, ‘Come to the Land of Islam’, the man’s face is not entirely visible and presumably one can (if male) insert one’s own. Daesh’s flag flutters high above. The advertisement appears to be designed to appeal to an imagination shaped by the advertising world and reality TV: but instead of shooting bison, wrestling snakes or eating things that slither and wriggle as one swallows them

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Figure 15.5 ‘Abandon the Lands of Shirk, Come to the Land of Islam’, Dabiq, Issue 8. © Dabiq the tourist gets to rape and kill.16 In this vision, which is a strange inversion of the rise of the mercenary and the increasing privatisation of warfare, the soldier does not sell his services but instead buys the right to engage in the most criminal aspects of war: rape, the right to enslave and the licence to kill indiscriminately are all commodities. Accompanying this privatisation is a bureaucratisation of destruction as suggested by reports that licences were issued to people so they could smash the ruins with the State’s permission. Regardless of the actual make up of its ranks, we do not, for instance, know how many are conscripts, the consciousness to which Dabiq and the recruitment video sets out to appeal is a product of what Žižek identifies as the fundamental paradox of the ‘passion for the Real’: It culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle – from the Stalinist show trials to spectacular terrorist acts. If, then, the passion for the Real ends up in pure semblance of the spectacular effect of the Real, then, in an exact inversion, the ‘postmodern’ passion for the semblance ends up in a violent return to the passion for the Real.17 Indeed a manipulation of the desire for real experience and for the sublimity of the Real stoked by a global environment permeated by a promise of infinite availability on billboards and television, in films, magazines and Internet ads, that create the illusion of infinitely fulfillable desire seems to permeate Daesh’s media presence. The oscillation

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between banality, spectacle and violence is then an inevitable consequence of its relation to authenticity and to the spectacle. Also in Dabiq issue 8 is an essay that explicitly uses and celebrates the term ‘terror’ about attacks in Tunisia and Yemen, called ‘Soldiers of Terror’: This month, the soldiers of the Khilafa sent a forceful message to the camps of kufr and riddah, striking and terrorizing them in multiple lands, and with no visas, and passports to stand in the way. Strikes were carried out in Yemen and Tunisia by men whose allegiance lies, not with false citizenship, but with Allah, his messenger, and the believers. They readily sacrificed themselves for the cause of Allah in their own lands, bringing massacre to the disbelievers and murtaddin [apostates], not differentiating between them on grounds of nationalism. This emphasis on the obsolescence of the nation and the wrongness of nationalism pervades the text of the short piece on the destruction at Nineveh as well. At the same time both essays seem to stand in a somewhat contradictory relation to Daesh’s insistence on the amount of territory it holds and on the fact that it is indeed a state. This is very evident in a recruiting video, ‘No Respite’, apparently released on 24 November 2015, designed it seems to recruit Black Americans. A black man stands with classical ruins behind him; in the middle of the video the narrator quotes a hadith popular among Black Americans as we see a picture of soldiers from different races standing together.18 At the conclusion of the video, the same man presented in front of the ruins now stands with a flag behind him, the video’s last man. As the shot zooms out, the voiceover says, ‘Bring it On’ for the second and final time, before the screen changes to one of the top of the planet with a few lines from Surah Yunus, from which the title of the video is taken, placed above, as a voiceover recites the Surah in Arabic – ostensibly presenting an eschatology that will result in the conquest of the world. However, since this verse accompanies no other formal transformation within the video and has no aesthetic or historical trace of Islamicate tradition or customs, the Surah seems merely pasted on to the American imagery, a pro forma appeal to theological ‘cred’, providing an eschatology without history, reduced merely to caption. Daesh’s postmodern aesthetic tendencies are dramatically on display in this fourminute video that looks and sounds like a video game. Perhaps consonant with this is the circulation of this video and other ISIS material on tabloid-like right wing and conspiracy websites in the US, raising the question of the peculiar complicity of that subculture of the Internet world in Daesh’s machinery of dissemination. The rapidly morphing video begins with a logo bearing the caption ‘Al-Hayat Media Center’, followed by ‘bismillah ar rahman ar rahim’ in Arabic and then an aerial shot of a city with a black flag fluttering above. The voiceover says, ‘This is our Khilafah in all its glory. It was established in 1435 Hijri’. The narrator goes on to talk about Al Baghdadi, a picture of whom at a microphone is inset on the screen, but then follow images that mark the magnitude of the State. Presented with a series of maps, we are told that it is greater than Britain, eight times the size of Belgium, and thirty times the size of Qatar, with Britain, eight Belgiums, and thirty Qatars placed alongside each other on the screen. In this video, as in the Dabiq article, the attack on Palmyra and Nineveh is figured as an attack on nationalism and its ‘idols’. As the man stands with ruins behind, holding a

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gun, a Daesh flag fluttering next to him, his foot is on a concrete slab carved into letters that spell ‘nationalism’. The voiceover says, Yes, we are the soldiers who stopped the idols of nationalism, demolish the shirki symbols of Palmyra and Ninawah and destroyed the Sykes-Picot borders for there is no honor to be found in the remnants of shirk and nationalism and the difference between an Arab and a non-Arab or a black man and a white man except in piety. The latter half of this utterance contains the translation from the hadith popular amongst Black Americans I mentioned earlier, suggesting an attempt to manipulate a tradition of internationalism. Daesh’s simultaneously territorial and deterritorialised character are intelligible through its imperial ambition, which has led to assertions of its medieval and fundamentally non-modern character (largely because all debates in which the word Islam figures seem to become increasingly tired referendums on the reconcilability of Islam and modernity), but which is better understood as a face of what has been called neomedievalism, suggesting a scrambled, overlapping and competing cluster of national sovereignty, globalisation and fragmentation, which is a result of the transformation (or collapse) of the post-Westphalian structure of nation states.19 It remains a more than merely parenthetical fact that the rules that governed this order were never observed in the colonial context.20 In any case, neomedievalism is of the order of modernity we call postmodern. This, indeed, is what I take Harmanşah to designate with his term ‘supermodern’.21 In a recent essay for The Atlantic Monthly, ‘What ISIS Really Wants’ (an essay which circulated widely and apparently thrilled Daesh), Graeme Wood asserts the irrefutable Islamic essence of the group.22 This assertion seems not only bound to a vision of Muslim stasis, but perhaps more interestingly (simply because, despite their Islamophobic nastiness, visions of Islam’s unchangingness have become so utterly boring) reveals a lack of understanding of the shifts that have taken place in the post-Westphalian political order. In other words, what is invisible to Wood, when he asserts that ‘we are misled . . . by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature’, is the nature of the present global order. The blindness to this world order is a recurrent component in Islamophobic discourse, which takes Islam’s permanent premodernity as a culpably constitutive feature of the religion. So committed is even the liberal media establishment to this Islamophobia that it can end up cheerleading for Daesh because it needs to believe in the bleakest vision of Islam.23 So it is that Wood, with an enviable disregard for interpretation and historical knowledge and all the assurance of the journalist used to parachuting in for polaroid visions of complex issues, asserts: ‘The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic’ and ‘They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win.’24 Well, that is that then. The issue here is not of the efficacy of the declaration – trading proclamations of who gets to be called a Muslim is a ubiquitous contemporary practice which seems to resolve nothing. Indeed, what makes Daesh’s claim of jurisdiction over all Muslims so preposterous is precisely that it cannot be resolved between Muslims – only death will tell. The issue with Wood’s assertion is in fact one of journalistic adjudication. The

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media’s feeding frenzy on issues relating to Islam and its circulation of decontextualised readings of Islamic history and theology is part of the increasing and damaging mediatisation and reductionism of the discourse on Islam, in which the entire media spectrum from far right to far left is implicated.

II Despite Alberto Toscano’s valiant attempt to de-provincialise Badiou’s The Century in a commentary at the conclusion of the book that draws on Kamau Brathwaite, W. E. B. Dubois and Franz Fanon, the theorists of the spectacle and of the passion for the Real I draw upon here engage inadequately with the history of colonialism and thus provide accounts of globalisation, terror and the spectacle that are rather less than global and planetary.25 This might have something to do with the Cold War backdrop of much of this work, a backdrop that prompted the (mis)recognition of many of the players in the structures of global violence as mere proxies for the United States and the Soviet Union. The proxy need not be void of interest and ideology, and may, indeed, aspire to play the player. But its properly constituent role in the global order has yet to be fully addressed, a limitation that has led to significant oversights in our understanding of global politics since 1989. In one sense, then, ‘blowback’ is the proxy’s revenge against such voiding. Or, more banally, this inadequate engagement with the global might be just another aspect of the conceptual limitations of Eurocentrism. This is evinced in the following passage from Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, which comprises a fully fledged fantasy of Europe: The Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream; in the present constellation, it is only Europe which can do it. The true opposition is not today between the First World and the Third World, but between the whole of the First and Third World (the American global Empire and its colonies) and the remaining second world (Europe).26 In the light of the violence revealed to be at the heart of managerial, neoliberal, unified Europe in the assault on Greece, of which Žižek has written with care and insight, these lines appear all the more fictional.27 It is not merely a matter of thinking nationally in the era of market post-nationalism to list with their national affiliations alongside one another figures including F. A. Hayak (Austria), Margaret Thatcher (UK), Ronald Reagan (USA) and Angela Merkel (GDR). In the economic structures and theorisings of neoliberalism and globalisation, the Europeans are fundamental constituents and not reluctant conscripts. That the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are implicated in this global structure does not somehow rescue or redeem Europe. This aspirational fantasyland Europe is revealed clearly by the Greek crisis. My point is not that Greece should be kicked out of the European Union or seek Grexit, or otherwise – that situation will unfold as the EU unravels or forcibly stabilises itself. Grexit will not resolve the issue of Europe, and in this conceptual context it is both beside the point and thoroughly illuminating. Greece is after all part of Europe as land mass, and also, as I have suggested elsewhere, a fundamental node in the Anglo-Germanic fiction of Europe.28

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However, the assertion which comes out of recognition of the bind in which the European Union has put its constituent nations, a bind which may indeed issue from all the contradictions inherent in the idea of Europe, cannot be used to redeem a Europe that refuses to confront its full constitution by colonialism and racial slavery. So when Žižek claims that there is ‘a weird pact between the postmodern global capitalism and the premodern societies at the expense of modernity proper’, well, one might one ask, ‘when was modernity proper’? And (I can only aspire here to Žižekian puns), ‘but are not such proprietary assertions of its propriety precisely the problem’? ‘Is the moment not such that we need urgently, desperately to rescue notions of justice, equality, and freedom from their instrumentalisation and management in modernity, from the very history of modernity itself’? Work by scholars such as Achille Mbembe and R. A. Judy has reminded us of the necessity of remembering racial slavery and colonialism as fundamental historical elements in the formation of the role of mass violence in modernity. The question of the contemporary ways in which ‘the political . . . makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective’ (Mbembe) and in which globalisation and modernity are connected to mass violence and the ‘emergence of disposable populations’ (Judy) is, of course, very much at play in Daesh’s own political being.29 And to get at this I will turn very briefly to a scene which seems to concentrate some of these tendencies from Abderrahmane Sissako’s exquisite film Timbuktu, about the takeover by jihadists of the eponymous city, so important to Muslim history, one of the ultimate ‘heritage’ sites for Muslim tradition.30 The film should, in my view, be watched alongside Bamako, Sissako’s film about neoliberalism and the ‘institutions’ (World Bank, IMF), as the Greeks have taught us to call them, in Africa – of course, structural adjustment in Africa, as in so much of the Global South, anticipates the Greek situation, and indeed reminds us that in the neoliberal world order that situation is planetary.31 The Ansar Dine jihadists that initially took over Timbuktu appear to have had ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and were not Daesh, which began as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but as we now know, transformed into a distinct group battling other jihadists for supremacy. However, as we also know, Boko Haram has recently pledged allegiance to Daesh.32 Such shifting allegiances, expansions and transformations suggest the broader significance of Sissako’s representation and again ask us to interrogate the epistemic value of observing the borders of what we call ‘the Middle East’ in an analysis such as mine; for those borders work mostly to exceptionalise a situation that is increasingly ubiquitous. Despite offering a profoundly bleak vision of the jihadist rule of Timbuktu that presents it as an attack on an entire lifeworld and social fabric, the film nonetheless drew the ire of a French mayor who banned its screening in a suburb of Paris, after the Charlie Hebdo murders.33 Although it turns out the mayor had not seen the film even as he banned it for being pro-terrorist, one wonders whether he decided to do so because he had heard the film shows the jihadists as humans. If this were indeed the case, its opponents would of course have missed the film’s subtle and important point that the jihadists are culpable and responsible because they are human – as human as the neighbours they persecute. Indeed, humanity – as modernity has taught us – is hardly a redemptive category. Timbuktu’s aesthetics are crafted as a counter to the spectacle, and suggest a commitment to decreasing the speed of the spectacle and to recuperating a ruptured sociality by

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lingering on the intimacies of interaction – among people, between humans and animals, and between humans and the land.34 Quiet, and unfolding slowly – people take their time in conversation, and the camera lingers on faces, follows gazelles and cattle, and patiently pans across the landscape – the film is beautifully shot, its artifice obviously linked to its attachment to custom and ways of life under threat, not only from war but also from environmental change. Drought and desertification are presented as causes of conflict, and as exacerbating the plight of those at the mercy of the jihadists and, although the film does not show this, of those who will become jihadists as well.35 At the heart of the film is a parable against war: an account of a conflict between a herder and a fisherman. The fisherman kills a cow that comes too far into water he considers his own. When Kidane, one of the protagonists, finds out, he goes to confront the fisherman and, despite his wife’s objection, takes a gun with him. The gun accidentally discharges, killing the fisherman. Kidane is then sentenced to death by the jihadists in control of the city. In the film’s denouement, both Kidane and his wife are killed, and the last scene portrays their daughter attempting to escape the jihadists in a doubling of the opening scene that shows a gazelle being hunted. Kidane’s transformation, from griot to the warrior his daughter proudly says he is not, allows the film to offer a characteristically subtle reflection on the weaponisation that has so exacerbated the conflicts in the region. The very pastoral beauty of the murder scene pits the weapon, and those armed with it, against the earth itself, and resonates with an earlier scene where a jihadist relieves his frustration by shooting off the top of a bush. One of the subsidiary plots involves a group of musicians – three men and a woman – practicing together in a home. Arrested for singing and being in each other’s company, the woman is sentenced to forty lashes for singing and forty more for being in the company of men. Though not longer than a minute, the scene of the flogging is quietly remarkable. The woman sits on the ground, her legs folded under her. The whip lands with mechanical inevitability. Tears run down her face and then she begins to sing. She stops, yet the punishment continues. One of the jihadists who are watching, gets into his truck and drives away. The scene is a reminder of Timbuktu’s place in the Trans-Saharan slave trade (a reminder that there is no pre-colonial past to which to turn for redemption), and evokes the flogging of slaves in America. At the same time, the character’s singing summons the history of song and music on the slave plantations. That in turn expands the range of significations that accumulates around the jihadists, who speak French, English and a non-local version of Arabic and are thus rendered as occupiers shattering a series of customary and traditional relations. The identification of the jihadists with American slavemasters is not only an ironic indictment of their self-positioning against America as ‘the Great Satan’ (though it should be noted that the greatest victims of their violence have been their Muslim and non-Muslim neighbours). It is also a reminder of the connection between jihadist and American violence. This connection is not merely one of mimicry, although it is also that. Without the social upheavals and energies unleashed by globalisation, neoliberalism and neoconservative wars, the jihadists would never have been able to gain the kind of power that they currently possess. I want to be clear here: I am not making a point about resistance, but about death thriving in the absence of society, which has been gutted by a global structure that dismantles lifeworlds and is maintained by perpetual war and violence. The group partakes in the necropolitical tendency to designate the enemy inhuman by deploying an all-too-familiar logic of supremacy and

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raciology – a logic by which the enemy is voided of any possibility of redemption yet remains infinitely criminalisable, merely replacing the racial distinctions of colonial history with religious ones. The scene in the film makes clear, then, that the jihadists are extensions of and intimate competitors with the American structure of violence, and not – as they want to claim – its opposite, reminding us of the continued pertinence of Judy’s question: what is the historical as well as formal relationship between disparate, highly localized forms of ‘domestic’ violence and the American system, viewed not so much in terms of a unique form of military and economic dominance but rather as a particular constellation of tendencies in capitalism’s development called globalization – bearing in mind that recognition of the historical manifestation of these tendencies is not tantamount to presuming their necessity or inevitability?36 Although I think Daesh’s is more aptly called a ‘globalised form of domestic violence’, understanding the particular constellation of tendencies of violence, and indeed of necropolitics, is of ever greater urgency in our times of accelerated destruction. The destruction of the ruin is significant then, because of what it reveals about the reach of the destructive ambition in which even the memory of destruction must be controlled and erased. Daesh, it must also be noted, does not engage in the Muslim discourse of ruination, in which the ruin is to be gazed upon as an emblem of divine power and human vanity. Superficially, Daesh’s is an attack on the world heritage site. As I hope to have demonstrated, however, the attack seeks to accomplish much more than that – it seeks to erase everything including its own erasure, until all that is visible is Daesh and its power and, to extend Devji’s terms, meaning is replaced by law.37

III I have explored how the spectacle, the management of the image, the reduction of meaning, the desperation to be seen (applying to men only, of course, although the removal of women from the public sphere is clearly meant to be seen as well) and the erasure of that which is already destroyed are all aspects of this face/phase of mass violence, and of the proliferation of what Mbembe calls ‘war machines’.38 It is worth pointing out that if the State’s monopoly on violence is disrupted by these fighters (self-)fashioned as insurgents, it is so only in the service of setting up a state (Daesh) in which that monopoly is ubiquitously, endlessly performed. The illusion that it embodies opposition and resistance is thus lost and we can now comprehend it as not only an extension of the globalised structure of violence, but also as one of its horrific, logical ends. I would like to conclude with a speculative question that takes Daesh’s claim to being a state seriously. I take it as true that Daesh is/was a state. It holds territory, has a bureaucracy, has indeed bureaucratised destruction, monopolises both violence and the Law, and seeks as Devji has suggested the purest instantiation of Law. Denying that it is a state might perhaps be useful as a consolation, but this seems not to address the precise nature of its monstrous brutality and of its danger. Nonetheless, what would be the nature of this state in peace? The question is ontological. What Daesh displays, enacts, instantiates is destruction, and to the extent that this instantiation has a discursive structure it issues from one performative utterance (with a formally

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indistinct variant or two): ‘X is not a believer’. A variant, ‘X is a shirki (idolater)’, quickly turns into ‘X is not a believer’. Increasingly flung at Muslims of all kinds and sects, the volatility of this declaration, the accelerating speed by which it is scattered, means that Muslims are always already ex-Muslims. It must be emphasised that this is not only a question of sectarianism; Sunni Muslims are also likely to be accused. The only question, then, is whether apostasy is chosen or thrust upon one, although the distinction between choice and conscription might itself have little meaning soon. In this discursive structure, ridda (apostasy), shirk and so forth are thrown in merely for rhetorical variation, as all roads lead to kufr (disbelief). The word clears all paths to slaughter; it is a kind of magical word that might in a fantasy film open a door, cause a transformation, cast or break a spell. The declaration means that the object is thus available for rape, enslavement and slaughter. Rape, enslavement and then slaughter. This applies to the subjects of Daesh, who are revealed to be the ultimate consumable. The proclamation ‘X is a kaffir and must be destroyed’ that is the fundamental strut of the State’s ideology means that in a state of peace – that is, where it is not at war with others – it would quickly consume its own population, and having disposed of that would need to spread outwards yet again simply for more to consume.

Notes 1. Eqbal Ahmed, ‘Red in Tooth and Claw’, Dawn, 251 (1998), n.p. 2. John Keene, Counternarratives (New York: New Directions, 2016). 3. On the world heritage site and ISIS’s careful management and dissemination of its image, see Ömür Harmans ah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacle of Destruction in the Global Media’, Near Eastern Archaeology, 78:3 (2015), pp. 170–7. 4. Cihan Tugal, ‘Nato’s Islamists: Hegemony and Americanization in Turkey’, New Left Review, 44 (2007), pp. 5–34; p. 21. In this essay, published ten years ago, Tugal wrote: ‘The AKP is undertaking an extensive privatization of public forests justified by the claim that it will only sell off tracts that have “lost their qualities” as forests. Real estate speculators have known how to interpret the message: there were 829 fires set in the first seven months of 2003, which scorched 1,775 hectares of forest, qualifying them as fit for privatization.’ 5. On the development of NYC, see, for instance, Jackason Lears, ‘Capitalism’s Capital’, London Review of Books, 38:6 (2016), pp. 25–8. 6. See Amtul Q. Farhat, ‘Saudi considers “moving” Prophet Muhammad’s grave’, The Muslim Times, 2 September 2014, http://themuslimtimes.info/2014/09/02/saudi-considers-movingprophet-muhammads-grave (last accessed 22 January 2016), n.p. 7. Zaheer Kazmi, ‘Chicago, Babylon’, Brooklyn Rail, 6 May 2015, http://www.brooklynrail. org/2015/05/field-notes/chicago-babylon (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. See also Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘Idol-Breaking as Image-Making in the “Islamic State”’, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, 7 (2016), pp. 116–38; p. 124. 8. On the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, see Flood, ‘Idol-Breaking as Image-Making’, p. 120. 9. See Faisal Devji, ‘A Life on the Surface’, Tank Magazine, 8:5 (2015), http://tankmagazine. com/issue-64/features/faisal-devji (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. In my view, Devji’s essay belongs alongside Achille Mbembe’s ‘Necropolitics’, and a series of essays, that should be read together, in which R. A. Judy explores the relation between Islam, globalisation, the different orders of violence in modernity, the imbricated histories of liberal and Islamic thought in the post-reformation era, and the threat to complex thinking about Islam in the post 9/11 era. See Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture,

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

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15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40; R. A. Judy, ‘Provisional Note on Formations of Planetary Violence’, boundary 2, 33:3 (2006), pp. 141–50; R. A. Judy, ‘Dreaming about the Singularity of the New Middle Ages: Three Provisional Notes on the Question of Imagination’, Critical Zone, 3 (2009), pp. 115–44; R. A. Judy, ‘Reflections on Straussism, Antimodernity, and Transition in the Age of American Force’, boundary 2, 33:1 (2006), pp. 37–59; and R. A. Judy, ‘The threat to Islamic Humanity after 11 September, 2001’, Critical Quarterly, 45:1–2 (2003), pp. 101–12. Devji, ‘A Life on the Surface’, n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Harmanşah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacle of Destruction’, p. 172. On the imaging of this iconoclasm, see Flood, ‘Idol-Breaking as Image-Making’ and Harmanşah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacle of Destruction’. For a discussion of the complexities of the history of Islamic jurisprudence on the question of iconoclasm and monuments, see Flood, ‘Idol-Breaking as Image-Making’. See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 5. Daesh is, of course, openly interested in that aesthetic. One of the issues presents a still taken from the Hollywood film Noah and places it under the title, ‘The Da‘wah of Nuh’. See Harmanşah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacle of Destruction’, p. 175. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 10. See ‘ISIS Releases New “No Respite” Propaganda Video in English’, Heavy, 24 November 2015, http://heavy.com/news/2015/11/new-isis-islamic-state-news-pictures-videos-no-respite -english-language-propaganda-full-uncensored-youtube-daesh (last accessed 20 January 2016), n.p. See Stephen Kobrin, ‘Back to the Future: NeoMedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy’, The Journal of International Affairs, 51:2 (1998), pp. 361–86 and Judy, ‘Dreaming about the Singularity’. See Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’. Harmanşah, ‘ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacle of Destruction’, p. 176. For Daesh’s response, see Graeme Wood, ‘What ISIS Really Wants: The Response’, The Atlantic Monthly, 24 February 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/ archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants-reader-response-atlantic/385710 (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. Bill Maher is perhaps one of the most vociferous and striking representatives of this tendency. Wood, ‘What ISIS Really Wants’, n.p. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Verso, 2005); Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2002); and Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 186. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Courage of Hopelessness’, New Statesman, 20 July 2015, https:// www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/slavoj-i-ek-greece-courage-hopelessness (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. and Slavoj Žižek, ‘This is a chance for Europe to Awaken’, New Statesman, 6 July 2015, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/ Slavoj-Zizek-greece-chance-europe-awaken (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. See Sadia Abbas, ‘Neoliberal Moralism and the Fiction of Europe: A Postcolonial Perspective’, Open Democracy, 16 July 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/sadiaabbas/neoliberal-moralism-and-fiction-of-europe-postcolonial-perspective (last accessed 2 February 2016), n.p. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 12; Judy, ‘Planetary Violence’, p. 143. See Abderrahmane Sissako (dir.), Timbuktu (France/Mauritania: Cohen Media Group, 2014). On some of the complexities and contradictions of heritage in a variety of Muslim

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31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

states of post/coloniality contexts, see Trinidad Rico (ed.), The Making of Islamic Heritage: Muslim Pasts and Heritage Presents (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017). See Abderrahmane Sissako (dir.), Bamako (Mali/France/US: Artificial Eye/New Yorker Films, 2006). See Adam Nossiter, ‘In Timbuktu, Harsh Change Under Islamists’, New York Times, 2 June 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/world/africa/in-timbuktu-mali-rebels-andislamists-impose-harsh-rule.html (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. See J. Hoberman, ‘French Mayor Bans Anti-Jihadist Muslim Film’, Tablet, 17 January 2015, http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/188412/french-mayor-bans-oscar-nominated-muslim-film (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. On the aesthetics of the film, see Manthia Diawara, ‘Frames of Resistance’, Artforum International, 53:5 (2015), n.p. On the role of climate change in the Syrian conflict, see Juan Cole, ‘Did ISIL Arise Partly Because of Climate Change?’, The Nation, 24 July 2015, http://www.thenation.com/ article/did-isil-arise-partly-because-of-climate-change (last accessed 31 January 2016), n.p. On the effect of climate change on conflict across the planet, see Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2012). Judy, ‘Planetary Violence’, pp. 143–4. This is of course, very much in line with Flood’s claim that the ‘systematic destruction and erasure of Christian, Islamic, and Yazidi monuments across Iraq and Syria is intended to create a tabula rasa over which the reductive certainties of singular truths can finally be inscribed’, although one wonders what the relation between law as performance and ‘truths’ is in this context. In other words, what is the discursive status and nature of ‘truth’ in this context of spectacle and image-making? Flood, ‘Idol-Breaking as Image-Making’, p. 117. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 32.

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Chapter 16 There Was No ‘Humble Task’ in the Revolution: Anti-colonial Activity and Arab Women Anastasia Valassopoulos

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his chapter examines Arab women’s engagements with anti-colonial practice and discourse. Specifically, it seeks to locate the means through which we can understand and recognise certain activities around decolonisation anew and subsequently, to track how and why some of these practices appear to dissipate in favour of a cohesive postcolonial trajectory that is characterised by a forward-looking, progressive and often nationalist agenda. Seeking out untheorised forms of resistance requires us to delineate a working definition of resistance. By revisiting Arab women’s work within the context of anti-colonial activity, it becomes possible to begin to grasp the ways in which certain issues came to matter in the postcolonial process. Past and present studies have elegantly articulated Arab women writers’ and activists’ awareness of the complexities of living under colonialism. Others have urgently argued for how Arab women’s literary and cultural work has engaged with the postcolonial context in particular ways. It has not, however, been as straightforward to tease out a record of sustained engagement either through literature, culture or politics, with the broad remit of anti-colonial resistance that is necessarily looking both outwards towards a postcolonial future, but also inwards towards a potentially radically transformed social structure. To do this, we need to look at how Arab women were beginning to identify and locate themselves as women participating in political contexts and how this was enacted and articulated. Specifically, we can remain curious and open to ways in which women experienced their roles as participants and the extent to which they engaged with anti-colonial discourses and ideologies, regardless of whether this participation was concretised in the postcolonial moment. Moreover, unpicking the process that leads to our recognition of these articulations can contribute to an alternative cultural history of Arab women’s participation in the anti-colonial or revolutionary struggle. In other words, as well as locating and describing what anti-colonial resistance activities purportedly offered women in the longer term, we need to consider whether we can do this with the discursive tools that we currently have at our disposal. I here examine several instances where we can begin to think through how to become curious about certain contexts that we may feel have already delivered feminist or postcolonial contributions. Specifically, I look at the work of the Palestinian author Hamida Na’na, the Algerian activist Marie-Aimée Helie-Lucas and the Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli in order to assess our ability to read their work as revisionist. Alongside these I touch on the words of Leila Khaled spoken in a PFLP (Popular Front

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for the Liberation of Palestine) documentary to test some of my claims. What I found in some of the critical works was also illuminating. Works that place Arab women’s writings at the forefront do so within a formal classification. This is not a critique, but it is an important observation. The ways in which we take to ordering and defining contribution is the way in which the record is set. Whilst not wishing to wholly disrupt this, I do wish us to query it.

Establishing the Arab Feminist Narrative In their pioneering anthology Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Thinking (1990), Margot Badran and miriam cooke worried about what they called ‘distortions’ around the very concept of Arab feminism. Their concern, understandably, was on setting the record straight and on dismissing the status of the mythical founders of women’s liberation, from the reformer Qasim Amin to the radical feminist Nawal El Saadawi.1 Rather than remain attached to what they considered to be these ‘shrill’ inducing figures (in that they incited extreme reactions), Badran and cooke gave space to multiple voices in their anthology. Placing the contributions under the three main categories of Awareness, Rejection and Activism, the collection honoured a wide variety of writing from women across the Arab region working within the framework of multiple stringent local nationalisms and variants of patriarchal structures: Arab women’s feminist discourse has addressed universal issues such as education and work, rights concerning marriage, and suffrage, and at the same time has confronted less universal issues such as breaking out of gender segregation. . . . [These] Arab and other third world societies have typically experienced European colonial rule and/or western imperial hegemony while Arab women’s feminisms were beginning to be articulated. Arab women’s feminist voices have always run the risk of being discredited as anti-nationalist or anti-religious.2 What this early anthology was alert to was the complexity involved in locating and legitimising agency in the midst of existing discriminatory practices. The difficulty here was in articulating a multiplicity of positions (an intersectional position as outlined in the quotation) in the context of colonial rule and postcolonial nation building. This suggests that the discrediting of certain positions would always be a risk. Not all positions could be accommodated in the post-struggle national narrative. Those positions that suffered in particular were the ones deemed marginal to wider nationalist and traditionalist discourses, in alliance with certain interpretations of modernity. At the outset, however, it is important to state that for the purposes of this work, I argue that a handle on anti-colonial thought and a grasp of colonial discourse are crucial to an understanding of postcolonial politics. In their landmark Feminist Postcolonial Theory (2003) Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, in organising the collection around feminist interests, also tell an intriguing story about colonialism.3 Sections on race, whiteness, sexuality, the veil as material reality and metaphor, and the politics of gender and space, all remind us of the centrality of some of these positions and practices for imperialism’s longevity. The anti-colonial moment itself, however, does not play out in such organised ways and the arguments championed around decolonisation are often contradictory and in flux. For example, the articles under ‘Harem and the Veil’ cover

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a wide range of responses, both material and metaphorical, around the thorny issue of the uses of the veil in the Middle East and North Africa. Where Fatima Mernissi’s article refers to the veil as repository of gender segregation at the crossroads of religion and sexuality, other entries by Sarah Graham-Brown and Winifred Woodhull point to how, in some cases, the motif or suggested metaphorical potency of the veil served to permit certain judgements and in turn justify colonial actions against a suspected secretive and by implication hostile native environment. Seeking to firm up the usefulness of the veil as a symbol against which Arab women may have been expected to rally around does not yield such stable results. In other words, contexts that may seem pertinent to debates around freedom and equality in the present may not always have seemed so. Another useful example here is Fanon in White Skin, Black Masks where he presents a troubling yet lucid account of racial difference. Bhabha’s praise of Fanon, however, concedes that in his treatment of sexual and racial difference, white women as objects of desire are flattened by Fanon as it complicates his racial schema.4 Thus, in order to highlight the complications that arise in the construction of racial difference, the white woman is stripped of her complexity. I am speaking here of particular rhetorical and material sacrifices and how they are made. Principles generated within anti-colonial movements are often contradictory: not all participants can agree, though what they can agree on is that much is at stake. The process of decolonisation is fraught with competitive possibilities, in particular around the imagining of the emerging new nation state and the place of individuals within that state: this is specifically where factionalism often appears, in the cracks. Looking deeply into these disordered moments we find that very difficult political questions are being asked, whether in discourse or through action, around the shape of the postcolonial future. These decisions, for nations emerging from under colonial rule in one form or another, both shaped and were debated from within the anti-colonial struggles themselves and continued throughout the processes of decolonisation. In the specific context of the Arab-speaking world, the most generally accepted scholarly position is that Arab postcolonial states overwhelmingly prioritised the nationalist cause over and above feminist concerns and demands. Shereen Abouelnaga goes as far as to claim that in the case of Egypt for example, it is because ‘women’s rights have always been linked to the project of building the modern state [that] they have never achieved legitimacy on the ground’.5 In certain contexts, this position has become concretised and has led to certain celebratory moments in the history of Arab feminism to be cited repeatedly as expressions of the potential and ability of women to act politically from within an otherwise unreceptive environment. These range from the establishment of women’s presses to the development of unions to protect women’s rights, as well as a variety of formal and informal women’s movements across the Arab region.6 More recently, the focus has shifted to documenting campaigns for women’s rights and we now see the introduction of transnational debates that would seek to place Arab women’s social and political activities within an international feminist framework.7 These trajectories all engage with the vision of egalitarian societies, understood differently across regions and across historical periods. But what of the very debates rehearsed within the spaces of liberation movements? Rather than return to the stalemate of the above position, we would do well to consider the views of Patricia McFadden and Muriel Tillinghast in their article ‘Women and National Liberation Movements’ who, arguing from their roles within the civil rights movement and the

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African National Congress respectively, tell us that they ‘do not think that liberation struggles guarantee the reconstruction of egalitarian societies’.8 This understanding is profoundly illuminating as it releases liberation movements from the responsibility of producing a new society with impeccable egalitarian structures. It is also a startling proposition as it frees liberation movements, broadly understood, from the responsibility to do so. In other words, we come up against a very different problem when we suggest that nationalist/liberationist movements were/are not capable of undertaking the task of conceiving egalitarian structures in the post-revolutionary phase. It is one thing to argue for their failure to do so and quite another to suggest that it is idealistic to desire their willingness to do so. To contemplate this in context, we can look again at the activities of women during liberation struggles as in some cases acting against the overwhelming requirements of the anti-colonial fight in order precisely to envision this egalitarian society. This can lead us to recover the attempts at reconstruction that may have, nevertheless, for institutional and structural reasons (and perceived urgent priorities around reform and ‘stability’), failed to move across and be taken up in the postcolonial moment. We can study women’s actions in a different context, thus articulating their contribution alternately. That is, we can look to women’s offerings to anti-colonial movements and to liberation struggles to see what vision of egalitarianism was being formulated, and how and why it may have been abandoned. Ironically, the legacy of coloniality, then, may contain within it the lost potential of the anti-colonial moment. McFadden states that ‘there is no guarantee, particularly for women, that liberation wars are the stepping stone, the transition mechanism, to egalitarian societies which are non-sexist and which are not gender biased’ (p. 5). Effectively, during the phase of anti-colonial resistance, it is not possible to mobilise women separately from men . . . It is not possible to effectively resist colonialism and be separate. This is the major problem faced by women in the liberation movements (p. 6). This is reminiscent of what Amal Amireh strikingly refers to as the ‘prioritisation paradigm’ where women’s or feminist movements often find themselves subordinate to nationalist politics. Her example, that of the lack of ‘feminist or womanist’ responses to violent and unjust actions against women in the aftermath of the 2008–9 Israeli attacks on Gaza, shows up the extent to which, ‘women’s issues’ are always deferred to a later, more suitable moment either because other more pressing issues, like national liberation, have priority or because high political risks of legitimacy and influence are involved in bringing them up when ‘society’ is not ready.9 Marnia Lazreg, in an extension to this argument argues, in ‘Post-structuralist Theory and Women in the Middle East: Going in Circles’10 that post-structuralism (and by implication postcolonialism) must to some extent claim accountability for allowing too many unexplored and un-theorised expressions of resistance that now appear to struggle to surface when they are most needed. This is a challenging proposition as we are asked to consider a particular politics of postcolonialism as somehow stalling or re-directing certain actions. Her challenge is to locate ‘concrete action [that] brings about change’

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(p. 348). However, to locate action that might go against the overall trajectory of liberation movements is perhaps to admit to losses. It also reignites the question and the possibility of what Lazreg has called the need for urgent ideational change in the Middle East.11 Where she claims that ‘there has not been a feminisation of the larger society’ (my emphasis),12 Lazreg is arguing that the feminisation of the larger society in the MENA region has not fully developed and an ideational change has not occurred (despite the on-going cultural and political activities that might point to this). Where Lazreg may be speaking quite broadly and risks homogenising the Arab-speaking world, she is aware that a retreat from grand theories of the purpose of liberation and an escape into the local addresses what she recognises as a return to the specific and the familiar – even if this specificity contains within it traces of injustice. One conclusion we can draw from this is that the retreat into the local and redirection of energy into the ‘future’ has meant that many painful disappointments of the past and opportunities not taken up or discarded, no longer need to be considered (unless they are absorbed as ‘traumatic’ losses). Future orientated debates are often quite frustrating, not because they require patience but because they often assume that choices will be made differently and in line with the grievances of the present. Against this, Lazreg points to the fact that the very discourses of liberation need to be revisited and the place to do this would be at the juncture of the needs of anti-colonial agitators alongside the very different needs of nationalist politics. Can a return to anti-colonial moments and to the process of decolonisation give us the clues and the language with which we can approach these questions? What then, might these moments look like, and how might we make routine an approach towards them that is both ethical and generous? In practice, revisiting key moments, contexts and texts where women involved in the decolonisation process and in anti-colonial struggle attempt to broker some recognition for themselves as women may mean looking again at material that has already been mined for its opposite – namely, for instance, where women are articulating or agitating for an acknowledged role in the broader nationalist project. In this case, we may be seeking different forms of recognition, as yet unrecognisable. In other words, the challenge is to look for instances where anti-colonial struggles were articulated alongside different demands and in some cases, concurrently, for different groups of women. In this process we might then see how alternative contributions to the decolonisation process were also seen as opening up advantageous possibilities for women to challenge their erstwhile static roles. Having located such moments, we may go on to ask why these have not fed into a broader liberation discourse that could cut across religious, ethnic, gendered and class lines. We need here, in other words, to force a reconsideration of certain themes such as the right to intellectualism and abstract thinking as well as a right to valorise and politicise clear practical labour. There also needs to be a more complex history of women’s work in the context of Middle Eastern/ Arab feminism. In the edited collection Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East, Jean Said Makdisi, Noha Bayoumi and Rafif Rida Sidawa are very clear on what they call the ‘founding myths of Arab feminism’:13 ‘men’s role in the liberation of Arab women’ and the relationship between ‘modernity and discipline’ (p. 10). These are myths in the sense that they are repeated often as truths that set in motion a certain history of Arab feminism. In essence, this story presents the need for transformation as so conspicuous and urgent that even educated men could not help but pick up on the public appetite for change (thus validating its necessity). The other myth pertains

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to the notion that certain systems of modernity brought to the Arab world facilitated a re-doubling of conservative efforts to reimpose patriarchal structures onto women’s lives in the event that ideas around emancipation should somehow ‘pass’ through. Tackling these two myths allows a rehearsal and at the same time a reinterpretation of the extent to which they have eclipsed other significant manoeuvres that could contribute to different sets of founding principles. Fighting these two myths has taken up much energy, and rightfully so. What research under the umbrella term of ‘feminism’ has brought to light is the lost history of pioneering movements and pioneering women, identified as radical, that have taken to task both the ‘founding fathers myth’ as well as the myth of obligation to Western feminism. This second myth, that ‘credits the West and modernity with expanding women’s rights’ (p. 10), overlooks the fact that the modern definition of women’s education, motherhood and domesticity occurred in a colonial context, and was part of the goal of controlling the subject populations through their acceptance of the universality of the modernising project and its definitions of gender roles. (p. 11) Thus, the argument in both Opening the Gates and, almost twenty-five years later, Arab Feminisms, is that resistance to colonialism was largely a home-grown phenomenon that was aided to some extent by particular forms of internationalisms (such as we see in the example of French feminists lending visible support to Arab women activists).14 Overcoming these two myths has formed a large part of the project of postcolonial Arab feminism. A more encompassing and questioning perspective would also seek to recognise practices and actions that do not clearly fall within these two camps of either reacting to men’s supposed centrality in championing the woman question or arguing for the origins of Arab feminism (be they colonial or not). What follows is an attempt to graft an alternative space for the subtle set of practices that could be seen to be forging a workable solution. I seek to foreground certain themes that require further investigation and that, taken individually or together, could yield some very productive discussions that might orient us differently towards the past as a place where more demanding possibilities were being imagined outside of specifically nationalist or feminist frameworks. These are: the realm of intellectualism and abstract thought, the role of veterans (or the left behind) and an alternative understanding of different forms of labour. Individually and together these trajectories can engender a new appreciation of actions taken without the foreknowledge of success but enacted within a context of hope and possibility. Rather than examine these actions retrospectively in order to foreclose their success and to reinstate their subordination to the nationalist cause, we might want to declare the arguments, validate them and observe their enactment without judgement. In the best tradition of postcolonial inquiry, we need to attempt a temporal displacement: looking to the past whilst suspending the need to articulate a vision for the future.

Intellectualism In considering a history of Arab women intellectuals, many of the names that make up the pantheon of Arab feminism would take their place: Huda Shaarawi, Nawal El Saadawi, Fatima Mernissi, Jean Said Makdisi, Haifa Zangana and Assia Djebar among others. Locating writing about intellectualism though, for women and by woman as a valid pursuit in whatever capacity, has been somewhat more obscure. Many writers

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have tackled the issue of education or lack thereof and strongly suggested its role as a prerequisite for any sustained engagement with feminist thought. Though this is to a large extent beyond dispute, I am interested in the idea of intellectualism for its own sake, as a sign of ideational freedom – the freedom to conceive of thought as strategy and also a worthy pursuit in and of itself. Palestinian novelist Hamida Na’na attempts one such imagining in her novel The Homeland (1979) which tells the story of Nadia, a figure based on the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled.15 Nadia is both a combatant and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine now exiled in Paris. Set in 1977, the novel narrates Nadia’s past and present as she recalls her involvement in the Palestinian liberation struggle. This is a difficult arena in the sense that, as Anna Ball argues, ‘in the Palestinian context . . . it becomes clear that any theorisation of a Palestinian postcolonial feminism must be attentive to the careful inflections, alliances and distances that are constructed between nationalist and gender-consciousness’.16 This is a very apt observation – the very notion of consciousness and the context of its manifestation is a thorny issue and although not outwardly feminist, Nadia does travel along the spectrum of alliances and distances in the consideration of her role within the liberation movement. For example, in the very illuminating discussions that Nadia has with her fellow male fedayi, she often prioritises knowledge and abstract political thinking over action. Looking again at the content of these discussions, it is interesting to observe how, and by whom, knowledge is produced. What emerges is a very clear and direct understanding of the role of men in the production of that knowledge and the extent to which it expects to move in the world unchallenged. Nadia seeks answers to the Palestinian context in world history: I look again at the history of revolutions and the men who made that history. Vietnam. Cuba. Bolivia. In their footsteps we look for guidance in our own struggle. (p. 33; my emphasis) Here, the struggle is plural: ‘we’; ‘our struggle’. There is the strong sense that a partnership is not only expected, but also internalised. It is not wholly clear the extent to which Nadia is thinking of the women’s struggle or the national struggle but the potential to participate in the search for guidance across national boundaries and to seek political solutions is imagined as an act that can be undertaken by her. It may be the men, in the first instance, who construct the ideas and pin down the historical record but their legacy can and should be shared. There is no specifically articulated interest here in overt feminist or women’s rights though there is a feminine consciousness that, importantly, does not perceive limitation. Rather, more attention is given to acquiring and absorbing knowledge that can be consumed by all. The radical anticolonial context that Nadia reads about is one that suggests strategy and moves the Palestinian cause forward. Her participation in these discussions situates her squarely within ideological and nationalist activism. This, however, is not a legacy commonly associated with Arab women in the anti-colonial struggle. In her recent work, Women in Revolutionary Egypt, Shereen Abouelnaga argues that we cannot ignore the premise of women’s rights, even if it is not self-evident: The long historical entanglement of women’s rights issues in ideological, national, and political struggles is the foundation of all the ensuing politics that supported or discredited the citizenship of women.17

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This position frames women’s rights as central to any political struggle and points to what is actually often a very long and tortuous process in the ‘ensuing’ time that comes after. In the example above, Nadia’s right to read, discuss, compare and strategise points towards the moment where such activity is naturalised as part of the broader rights of women. The ‘entanglement’ that Abouelnaga speaks of is interesting as it suggests spaciousness as we revisit and repopulate the historical and literary record. This entanglement can, and should, be examined for what it purported to promise, rather than seen as a structural and adversarial construct doomed to failure. In other words, it is not that the character Nadia cannot see the invisible chains that surround her, but rather, she challenges the structure that would deny her shared access to knowledge in the first place. It is possible to examine the spaces that some of these entanglements reveal on an array of concerns, be they social, political or intellectual. What is often surprising, however, upon closer inspection, is the overall limitation of revolutionary frameworks as conceived of within a masculinist world view. The novel itself is an exercise in the prioritisation of the revolutionary fighter (understood in overtly male terms) over her perceived limitations as a woman. As it happens, Nadia leads risky operations and represents her comrades at military councils – necessary work in the context at hand. In one scene, she herself bemoans the pride that the men take in their physical training. She thinks: I no longer have the patience required for this seemingly endless training. What’s more, they seem not to have confidence in me. I am a woman and I do not really speak the same language as them. I talk about ideology and their preferred topic of conversation is the towns in the Arab world where they have lived. Their grasp of ideological discourse is almost non-existent. I see it as my job to do something about their political naivety. What I need to do is find a way of closing the linguistic gap which is keeping us apart. That is the hardest thing as far as I am concerned. Che Guevara comes to mind during the moments that I am alone and unoccupied. It is he who makes me remember that I must find the bridges that link them and me. I stare at the face of Che Guevara which accompanies me wherever I go. (p. 35; my emphasis) This is a particularly incisive moment in the text. Reading closely, the movement between the ‘I’ that is female in one moment and the female ‘I’ that nevertheless closes the gender gap by alluding to Che Guevara, prioritises the ideas and the possibilities, speaking of bridges and linking rather than separation and ideological breaks. It seems that connections brought about by reading, thinking and contemplation hold within them surprising possibilities: One evening, Abu Mashour comes to me with a copy of Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution. We spend the whole night reading it together, stopping at places where Debray defines the duty of revolutionary focus. I disagree with his making Cuba the basis for his observations. It is hard to extrapolate generalisations from what was a unique event. (p. 41; my emphasis) Moments like these can illuminate the intellectual reach of women agitators – here, intellectual curiosity as well as an awareness of difference is prioritised. Disagreement and nuance are presented as part of the structure of inclusive debate. In the quotation

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above, Nadia critiques Debray for speculation – or rather, for sloppy generalisations. The question is, however, what power does Nadia have to move these ideas forward? There is an opportunity here: for reading, study, intellectual debate and immersive intellectual strength, educating others; engaging equally or in a superior position to men; also, making comparisons with other movements: understanding and qualifying differences and similarities – all of this to some degree constitutes a ‘strategy’. Although planning and carrying out resistance activity carries its own risk, Na’na prioritises (or at least equalises) the intellectual labour that gives it shape and that seeks to legitimise it. This engagement with other decolonisation movements by the female protagonist here is a call to action in a very particular way that does not find strict correlation with many postcolonial Arab feminist debates. It calls instead for recognition of intellectual ability in the abstract. It also reminds us of the intellectuals bound up in the history of anti-colonial thought – names such as Albert Memmi, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, to name a few. This type of expansive and comparative work is only gestured towards in the character of Nadia – but in her words we find echoes of thwarted intellectual engagement. Towards the middle of the novel, we are told that Nadia is reprimanded for disobeying military orders and is sentenced to ten days in prison and a temporary desk job. Writing of this period, Nadia recalls that, I went into detention the following day. I was put in a small room filled with books in one of the camps in Wadi Musa. I had been received by a guerrilla fighter who put me in the cell. He laughed as he closed the door behind me, saying: ‘Comrade Nadia, you just need to be patient, and you can pass the time reading up on your Marxist theories’. (p. 100) The fighter may laugh but Nadia does read the books made available to her. This is reminiscent of some of the words spoken by Leila Khaled in the documentary Declaration of World War, made by the PFLP and the Japanese guerrilla group JRA (Japanese Red Army) in 1971. In what sounds like a long monologue that overlays and guides the scenes of every day Palestinian struggle, Khaled’s words are haunting: A revolutionary must dedicate his or her personal life in actual struggle and practice it. Therefore, there is no such thing as personal life or life in struggle, because struggle is, for all the people involved in a revolution, an individual and total life . . . The separate lives should be unified and expanded.18 To hear this speech as propaganda would be to strip it of its potential as a blueprint for equality. The plural ‘lives’ are ones over which there is a choice. Perhaps Khaled is alluding to individuality as a subjective state that highlights the extent to which gender as difference has become the norm. To unite for the purposes of struggle offers the potential to realise and mobilise something altogether different. This may be idealistic but there is something powerful and convincing in Nadia’s description in The Homeland of her reading practices whilst in detention: During my imprisonment, I read a lot and slept a little. I read Che Guevara’s memoirs of the war in Cuba. I was particularly interested in passages which dealt with the revolutionaries’ relationship with the inhabitants of Sierra Maestra. It was that

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relationship which helped them to see their struggle through to its conclusion. It made me think how weak our links were with the ordinary Palestinians up until now . . . (p. 101; my emphasis) This scene of close reading and reflection is an opportunity for a broader commentary on the place of an expansive intellectualism with regards to the history of Arab women’s contribution to the ways in which revolutionary struggle is remembered and put to use. What is the revolution for, asks Nadia in many ways. To see these acts of reflection and recollection as contribution are significant as they encourage thinking and debating as legitimate sources of struggle and as legitimate activities undertaken within and in relation to the construct of ‘the people’, without gendered differentiation (though therefore significant for them, as women). In this particular case, the content of the forms of engagement may not be ones that have ever had a long-standing futurity, but the ability of the heroine here to explore the parameters of that commitment is fruitful. In the postcolonial utilitarian sense, it is difficult to ascribe a purpose that can be measured – for example, by looking at the text we can see that women were involved in the struggle and therefore we can honour these women and their activism. This is worthwhile and crucial, though different forms of engagement that do not fit well or easily within a feminist agenda may fall short of this special treatment. This is wholly understandable as visibility and solidarity is central to a feminist politics. My concern here, however, is with alternative actions that become lost because they do not appear immediately useful. Struggles taken up such as equality in marriage, legal rights, addressing violence and sexuality, among others, are seen as requiring almost immediate attention and resolving these is clearly where the emphases and where our sympathies should lie. The above text, however, does not fall into these contexts. In one sense, we could take the lesson about the legitimacy of representing active women in struggle and move on. It is not enough, however, to commend Nadia for having a place within the revolutionary struggle. What we need to do is find ways to negotiate the fact that what she desires is to have equal intellectual input without recourse to her perceived rights as a woman but instead as a thinking subject – this would point to something different: this would present an alternative trajectory. To entertain this possibility in earnest would be to accept that what women may have desired was radical equality with men, not simply nationalist success and postcolonial victory. In another example, in Nawar Al-Hassan Golley’s Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies,19 we see a very interesting but also deliberate move to prioritise colonial views of Arab women as a context to write against rather than engage with what might have constituted women’s anti-colonial involvement, and the feminist gains and losses that followed the decolonisation process. This invariably places any Arab women’s post-Orientalist articulation in a positive and restorative light as the premise of postcolonial critique, but whilst it can admit and welcome the terms of the colonial encounter as a legitimate site of relational formation, it does not easily admit to the concurrent losses. In other words, pointing to a critique of colonial presence in the postcolonial context is a different action to considering the outcomes of anti-colonial demands formed during the liberation struggle. Lazreg argues that poststructuralism (and by implication postcolonialism)

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must to some extent claim accountability for allowing too many unexplored and untheorised expressions of resistance.20 I think that this is correct. Poststructuralism and postcolonialism as discourses that seek to observe and overturn structures of power in the many forms that these manifest would seem to wish to identify overt expressions against an oppressive state or other hierarchical institutions such as the family (Na’na’s text and Ttalti’s film, discussed below, would serve as good examples). Our understanding, through postcolonial critique, of the colonial condition, its political and social consequences and the ensuing postcolonial politics, often make it difficult to consider more supple forms of resistance. For example, Lazreg, influenced by the Foucauldian ‘historico-critical’ principle, by which events may be made to appear inevitable or compelling, warns us against seeing any losses for women in the nationalist movement as an inevitable part of the process. Thus, in Na’na’s text, the quest for intellectual equality can be made to seem a waste of time or, at least, is being requested at the wrong time. Nevertheless, the querying of this attempt at intellectual participation at what appears to be the wrong time must, to my mind, be incorporated into a history of feminism. In other words, rather than fortify the discourse that holds national movements responsible for the silencing of women’s rights, we might want to consider the possibility that these movements were never equipped to deal with the demands of equal gender rights. With this in mind, we may wish to continue looking for the demands and visions for radical equality in any case.

Veterans The category of the ‘veteran’ has come to my attention only recently and in relation to the response of women’s activism during the period of anti-colonial resistance in the MENA region. In her article ‘Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle’, Marie-Aimée Helie-Lucas takes a quasi-anti-Fanonian stance and points to the unequal distribution of gains after anti-colonial resistance in the Algerian context.21 She argues for how nationalist discourse obliterates the real work undertaken by women and re-inscribes women as the bearers of value, metonymically carrying the weight of an idealised tradition, untouched by colonisation, and most importantly, seemingly unscathed by the decolonisation process. Lucas points out that it is ‘more difficult to criticise the nation’ when that nation is decolonised (p. 108). This seems to me to be crucial. Why should this be so? It is not only that perhaps newly formed nations are vulnerable, but also, that the time between their birth and the anti-colonial moment is still remembered. To criticise the decolonised nation in this sensitive moment can be seen as criticising the strategic processes for decolonisation. To do this is to implicitly point the finger and reopen the wound of conceded ground in the anti-colonial struggle. Lucas’ critique of the very bureaucratic system that did not allow women, in, for example, Algeria, to register as veterans of the Algerian liberation struggle, reveals an ‘in-house’ system of ensuring that certain beneficial moves that could have been taken up by women based on their experience of the struggle were closed off to them. Lucas’ statistic is striking in relation to the aftermath of the Algerian struggle for independence: ‘only 3.5 per cent of the total number of veterans’ were actually registered. Reasons for this ranged from

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the high levels of illiteracy of participants from agrarian communities, a ‘cumbersome bureaucratic system’ and the lack of encouragement from ‘official agencies’ (p. 105). These processes, argues Lucas, undermined the very methods through which involvement could be recorded, accessed and historicised – in other words, made useful. Pointing to the very gendered terms within which active participation was itself framed, (‘if a man carried food to the armed fighters at great personal risk, he was called a “fighter”. A woman doing the same was called a “helper”’ (p. 106)) she nevertheless rehabilitates activities performed by women and makes them visible as acts that enabled the struggle. Citing (official) veteran Djamila Armane’s research into the archive, Lucas performs a double archiving – that of recalling, in specific terms and numbers, the extent of women’s participation, whether or not they were registered as veterans, as well as placing Armane’s research and its findings centre stage. This is quite a deft move as Armane’s work is required in order that Lucas can make her point. One woman’s achievements – to be registered as a veteran – permits another to use her research to make a point about all women in revolutionary struggle. I respect this cataloguing of intellectual inheritance. In contrast to this, Lucas points to how Algerian women were co-opted into a discourse of a functioning socialism that, however, continued to discriminate against them. Women, she argues, after the revolution, ‘were silenced by fears of accusation of betrayal and by the nationalist myth. But this socialist label was the most effective silencer’ (p. 111; my emphasis). So ironically, the political system that requires a tacit agreement, at least in principle, that all citizens are treated equally, made it all but impossible for women who felt betrayed to speak out. As we now know, many rights for women under colonialism were lost in the postcolonial moment (where politicised religious and ethnic arguments weighed in on the value of women’s contribution to the new nation) and not all of them have been recovered. For example, competing discourses around the value of women according to state requirements as well as competing definitions of tradition won out over protests and demonstrations in Algeria in the 1980s (and brought about the much-debated implementation of the Family Code – which influenced marriage, divorce, work and inheritance).22 Lucas’ enlistment and reprinting of Armane’s work weighs in to tell another story of collaboration that does not stay silent. Lucas en/lists Armane’s research findings around specific work undertaken by women during the Algerian revolutionary struggle: supervising hiding places and food collection; acting as liaisons and guides; collecting and distributing funds and medicine; nursing; cooking and washing; engaging in ‘terrorist’ activities; tailoring; secretarial work; acting as political liaisons; participation in armed fighting. Angry at the treatment of women post-liberation, Lucas laments how little women’s anti-colonial labour was valued in the postcolonial context. Had this work been valued, documented and rewarded, it would inevitably have facilitated an overall reconfiguration of the involvement of women in the national struggle: So much for Fanon’s and others’ myth of the Algerian woman liberated along with her country. These liberated women were in the kitchen, they were sewing clothes (or, flags?), carrying parcels, typing. Nevertheless, since there was no ‘humble task’ in the revolution we did not dispute the roles we had. It would have been mean

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to question the priority of liberating the country, since independence would surely bring an end to discrimination against women. What makes me angrier in retrospect is not women’s confinement but the brainwashing that did not allow us young women even to think of questioning . . . This is the real harm which comes with liberation struggles. (p. 107; my emphasis) McFadden and Tillinghast argue that nationalism is not only a problem for women during the period of anti-colonial mobilization, when women are the ones who grow and cook the food, who keep the family together, and so on. It is also a problem in the post-colonial period.23 Conceding that it remains a problem points to the extent to which these activities decrease in material value immediately after the anti-colonial moment whilst they may escalate in symbolic value in the postcolonial context. ‘Nationalist movements always mobilize the working people on the basis of an anti-colonial rhetoric. They promise education, basic housing, improvement of transportation, etc.’ (p. 5). This may be the case, but on the road to freedom, the teaching and the housekeeping as well as moving information and goods from one point to the next is mobilised by women. There is no ‘humble task’ according to the official voice of the Algerian revolution (as presented by Lucas), but these tasks do not, in the end, bring equality for all. Clearly a knowledge of geography and medical sciences alongside practical skills such as housekeeping, sourcing ammunition, sewing, as well as understanding the finer points of political discourse (enough to negotiate), were all turned into the service of resistance, but not all of these translated into gains for women in the postcolonial moment though they undoubtedly remained crucial to the story of decolonisation. Reflection and research into the above types of labour, however, do give a very strong sense of an alternative discourse – of method and again, of strategy, of training, of knowledge, of decision making, leadership, resourcefulness, suffering. Lucas writes of the inability of the struggle to entertain radical goals in the context of its own discriminatory practices, though I would argue that her engagement with Armane’s work performs different possibilities. Specifically, the work that women did was needed but the ideological nationalist context in which it was performed did not adjust to welcome this work as valuable. This also becomes clear in another example from the Palestinian context, via the work of Eileen Kuttab. In her discussion of the role of women in the general strike in Palestine in 1936, she reminds us of women’s involvement in various activities. Engaging with the work of historian Ellen Fleischman, Kuttab writes that these activities were not confined to demonstrations and protests, but included smuggling of arms and supplies to fighters or in a few cases direct involvement in the armed struggle. Nonetheless, women’s roles generally remained restricted by traditional contexts as even militant women were treated simply as supporters of male fighters.24 There are conversations to be had here that can return us to the space before the ‘nonetheless’ of the above phrase. As Lucas’ exposition teaches us, staying quiet may not be

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the same as not having grievance. In the Palestinian case, where the liberation struggle continues on various fronts, the overlap between women’s and nationalist rights, as Ball reminds us above, is more visible. In this context, where we speak of grievances or complaints against liberation politics, we are speaking of an on-going negotiation between the fluctuating needs of diverse political groupings in the face of an equally fluctuating Israeli political and social infrastructure. I hope it is clear that I am not only talking here about identifying and valuing ‘women’s work’, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. I am also referring to the very specific ways in which certain actions take on a discursive value in the broader language of resistance and then fall by the wayside – for example thinking, researching, cooking, washing, registering your status. These are forgotten perhaps in the more lofty ideals of contemporary Arab feminisms. These are, however, actions that are present in the fight for decolonisation. Being involved in the anti-colonial struggle comprises all of the above activities, each with its attending national discourses and domestic politics. There are many ways to consider the broader social, literary and historical means by which Arab women extended their contributions to the processes of decolonisation, only to find that these were not to be valued at a later stage. Accessing and processing this material can illuminate these possibilities and reveal the vacuous nature of others. I think that we must therefore reframe the term ‘humble tasks’.

Labour I found many of Lucas’ arguments above imagined and represented in Moufida Tlatli’s 1996 film The Silences of the Palace. Set in 1960s Tunisia as it inches towards independence, the film dedicates screen time to those who hide and care for the revolutionaries.25 Whilst the film is interested in the many different forms of labour (the women take on the roles of cooks, cleaners, entertainers, lovers) in the context of the wealthy aristocratic Tunisian family in whose home most of the action takes place, it also seems keen to stage a hierarchy of that labour in the context of revolutionary, anti-colonial activity. One of the servants, Khalti Hadda, is persuaded by her son to take in and hide a revolutionary who is on the run. She has no visible signs of power to do this: she is fearful, and yet, from within that fear she agrees, she participates. Her familiarity with the house, of where the secure places are, knowledge borne out of years of servitude, is put to use. This very antiestablishment anti-colonial move cannot be overstated – for it is with incidents like these that revolutionary movements and anti-colonial positions were able to mobilise. The film captures this participation through Khalti Hadda’s actions but it also makes use of specific mise en scènes that force a consideration of the prescribed role of the revolutionary idealist in relation to the materiality of every day anti-colonial labour. In the scenes below, Khalti Hadda is persuaded by her son Houssine to hide Lotfi for a few days (see Figure 16.1). Lotfi is both a tutor at the house and a member of the nationalist movement and, ironically, needs to be hidden within the very walls that he is fighting to bring down. Tlatli’s deft editing positions the revolutionary Lotfi’s complete reliance on Khalti Hadda to keep him safe, clean and fed (see Figure 16.2). In a different scene, however, he takes the opportunity to abstractly pontificate on his nascent revolutionary politics to the young impressionable Alia,

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Figure 16.1 ‘Lotfi, Sarra and Selim’s teacher, will be staying a few days here’, The Silences of the Palace. © Cinetelefilms / MAgfilms/Matfilms

Figure 16.2 Khalti Hadda washes Lotfi, The Silences of the Palace. © Cinetelefilms/MAgfilms/Matfilms

the protagonist of the film and the illegitimate daughter of one of the beys, on the future of independent Tunisia. ‘Things are going to change’, ‘A new future awaits us’ he tells the beautiful young woman, in an attempt to seduce her through his evocation of future glory (see Figures 16.3 and 16.4). The hollowness of these words is revealed both earlier and later in the film when we see, through Alia’s flashbacks, that the ‘new future’ has not arrived for all women in Tunisia. Whilst Khalti Hadda keeps Lotfi clean and safe, he practises his call to arms! I find this to be an extraordinary example of how we can look at the cultural scene for examples of the discrepancy between the sources and targets of liberation rhetoric. Revolutionary action is facilitated in the midst of fear and social powerlessness. Here, the nationalist would-be-hero can charm young Alia with his generic promises about a shiny new future – what will change exactly and who will it change for? It is not clear, for example, how far Khalti Hadda’s needs are folded into this nationalist agenda.

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Figure 16.3 ‘Things are going to change’, The Silences of the Palace. © Cinetelefilms/MAgfilms/Matfilms

Figure 16.4 ‘A new future awaits us’, The Silences of the Palace. © Cinetelefilms/MAgfilms/ Matfilms Whilst Lotfi imagines a bright future with a beautiful woman by his side, Khalti Hadda risks everything to keep him safe. She, however, does not form part of the discourse of liberation: he does not offer her assurances for a better tomorrow. In fact, the servants in the film are fearful of their future in an independent Tunisia. Although they understand and are aware of the nationalist activity that surrounds them, both through reports on the radio and news that reaches the house, they are not prepared for the swift changes. I do not wish to merely point to perceived and actual injustices in the postcolonial politics of the MENA region but I must contest any readings that would see the status of all women in a state of perpetual progression into an imaginary future that is somewhat loosely described as ‘change’. Indeed, veterans of this cultural scene write of the intense disappointment following revolutionary struggle. One of the fears they articulate is that of the erosion of the very traction that resistance as a concept can or should have maintained. So, for example, there is little consideration as to how women are to survive and thrive in the post-revolutionary landscape if their problematic and often ambivalent

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positions in the colonial and anti-colonial moment are not adequately considered. In The Silences of the Palace, for example, Alia’s mother is both servant and lover of one of the beys. Also, Khalti Hadda remains as a servant in the house even after Tunisia achieves its independence. Alia, to whom Lotfi has promised so much, now seems locked in a miserable relationship with him, and although she is independent and does work as an entertainer, her outlook is bleak and vacant. The film’s structure is reminiscent of the various postcolonial truth and reconciliation commissions that seek to address the injustices of the past through discomfort and often deploy crude forms of confrontations. Whilst these commissions have, of late, received much negative attention, there are some lessons that can be learnt from the process itself – or at the very least a vocabulary that we can take advantage of. Whilst not all of women’s actions or desires in anti-colonial movements are ones that translate into recognisable forms of equality, and whilst some of these actions do not fit in well with a feminist issue based agenda, it should be possible to see them as attempting to reconcile losses in the present or future. The problem with this is that it can sound as though ‘sacrifices’ must be made and accepted. But it might be more productive to stretch the meaning of resistance instead. Can reconciliation with this ambiguity not also be a form of resistance to the extreme needs of a post-national community that seeks certainty and allegiance? As Lazreg points out: Anthropologists have questioned the ease with which researchers have frequently turned conscious acts of behaviour aimed at taking a position, upholding a custom or value, or taking a step toward change, for example, as unmitigated acts of resistance. The ambiguity of the concept of resistance is such that it lends itself to a romanticized view of observed behaviour when the ethnographer is eager to foreground her subjects’ purposive action, which subsequently appears sanitized of ‘politics’. More importantly, the uncritical use of the concept of resistance dispenses with an examination of the minute and insidious ways in which power operates in relationships between women and men.26 This observation by Lazreg is very worrying – not because many literary, cultural and political acts may be refigured by researchers as empowering and resistant to normative forms of authority (though this is still the work of the Humanities in many cases) but because in so doing, what material ground is often lost or conceded is then never theorised or explored. Deploying a reconciliatory frame might help us to navigate the extremes that are often required in the anti-colonial moment that can often obliterate other less visible constituents (the intellectuals, the veterans, the labourers). Lazreg points to another volatile moment in which there might lurk opportunities unspoken or missed: that of the immediate post-independence moment. Here, the chances for implementing a rigorous reflection on revolutionary promise and possibilities have a chance to resurface. It is interesting to see what has been documented of these moments (or at least, in what way feminist work has prioritised them). The section of Opening the Gates entitled ‘Activism’ presents rigorous reclamations by women of their entitlement to all forms of civic engagement – from imaginative and political writing to manifestos on equality from the late nineteenth century to 1980s.27 Arab Feminisms also begins by charting the broad variety in the crafting, understanding and implementation of certain principles of ‘feminism’ in the Arab world.28 Much of this is, however, understood within the contexts set out by the sections in the collection: war; civil conflict;

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military intervention; the development of Islamic Feminism and feminism in a global context. Finally, Mapping Women’s Movements reframes the work done by women in the Middle East as movements, allowing us to see the various trajectories that individual nations have taken. In their introduction, Arenfeldt and Golley write that ‘in contemporary media and popular understanding, Arab countries are often associated with conflict, Islamic fundamentalism, tribalism, conservatism, authoritarianism, and women’s oppression’.29 Although the collection offers a corrective to this by developing and contextualising women’s movements, the above statement nevertheless narrows the parameters of engagement and reinstates the constraints that often seem impossible to shake off. Arab countries also fought profoundly destabilising revolutions. The nationalist movements made promises and asked for women’s help and cooperation. They trained and exposed women to dangerous situations, and they solicited and relied on women to push forward with their agendas. Many promises were made and few were kept in the ensuing postcolonial regimes. Feminist recuperative work in the Arab world can perhaps look deeper into some of the alternative stories, practises and histories, and to moments of the everyday and the uncelebrated. Work around this area can seek to reinstate some of the debates and plans for egalitarian societies in order to engage with the ideas and conversations that were no doubt taking place. Looking explicitly at the juncture between the colonial moment and the prospect of independence, one finds the makings of truly revolutionary questions: what is the meaning of equality? How can all work have meaning? How can we value those that participate in struggle? These are questions that, as we have seen, anti-colonial movements were not always able to encompass or give time to. They are also questions that particular forms of feminist thought were not always able to welcome. Yet authors, activists and film directors who choose to amplify these themes seem to wish for us to reconceptualise how we measure revolutionary success, or at least to recognise and then reconcile with the limitations of anti-colonial ideology and liberation politics. The future is not always new, and it does not always bring change. What the examples here have shown is that there are residual post-independence grievances that need to be attended to. These range from the acknowledgement of intellectual steadfastness to the reimagining of revolutionary ideals and discussions around the meaning of an egalitarian society. They have also shown the potential in re-examining categories that exclude the various forms of labour carried out by women in the revolutionary struggle. Reinstating the figure of the veteran, for instance, illuminates and restructures the terms of ‘combat’. One need only look elsewhere to see other forms of fearless struggle.

Notes 1. Margot Badran and miriam cooke (eds), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago, 1990), p. xix. 2. Badran and cooke, Opening the Gates, p. xxxvi. 3. See Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 4. Gwen Bergner, ‘Who is that Masked Woman? Or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks’, PMLA, 110:1 (1995), pp. 75–88; p. 85. 5. Shereen Abouelnaga, Women in Revolutionary Egypt: Gender and the New Geographics of Identity (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 2016), p. 16.

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6. See Pernille Arenfeldt and Nawar Al-Hassan Golley (eds), Mapping Arab Women’s Movements: A Century of Transformations from Within (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 2012). 7. See Jean Said Makdisi, N. Bayoumi and Rafif Ride Sidawi (eds), Arab Feminisms: Gender and Equality in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). 8. P. McFadden and Muriel Tillinghast, ‘Women and National Liberation Movements’, Yale Journal of Law and Liberation, 2:1 (1991), pp. 1–8; p. 5. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 9. Amal Amireh, ‘Liberation Struggles: Reflections in the Palestinian Women’s Movement’, in Makdisi, Bayoumi and Sidawi, Arab Feminisms, pp. 195–204; p. 196. 10. See Marnia Lazreg, ‘Post-Structuralist Theory and Women in the Middle East: Going in Circles?’, in Makdisi, Bayoumi and Sidawi, Arab Feminisms, pp. 344–54. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 11. Marnia Lazreg, Keynote speech at ‘Women, Empowerment Citizenship and Development’, University of Manchester, 28–29 January 2016. 12. Interview with Marnia Lazreg, Videoconference, 2016. 13. Makdisi, Bayoumi and Sidawi, Arab Feminisms, p. 5. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 14. One notable example is the article that Simone de Beauvoir wrote for Le Monde in 1960 where she gave support to Djamila Boupacha, an Algerian nationalist activist accused of involvement in the bombing of a café and subsequently imprisoned by the French. See Judith Surkis, ‘Ethics and Violence: Simone de Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and the Algerian War’, French Politics, Culture & Society, 28:3 (2010), pp. 38–55. 15. See Hamida Na’na, The Homeland, trans. Martin Asser (Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1995). Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. For an alternative analysis of this novel, see Anastasia Valassopoulos, Contemporary Arab Women Writers: Cultural Production in Context (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 98–102. 16. Anna Ball, Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 49. 17. Abouelnaga, Women in Revolutionary Egypt, p. 19. 18. Masao Adachi (dir.), Declaration of World War (Jordan: Wakamatsu Production/The Red Army/PFLP, 1971). 19. See Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells her Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 20. See Lazreg, ‘Post-Structuralist Theory’. 21. See Marie-Aimée Helie-Lucas, ‘Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle, 1987’, in Badran and cooke, Opening the Gates, pp. 105–14. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 22. It is difficult to imagine that out of a revolutionary struggle came such a restrictive set of laws in relation to women. Yet, in other ways, the restriction of women also serves to devalue their contribution and equal participation in this struggle. As Helie-Lucas writes, rather ironically, ‘During wars of liberation women are not to protest about women’s rights. Nor are they allowed to before and after. It is never the right moment. Defending women’s rights “now” – this now being any historical moment – is always a betrayal of the people, the nation, the revolution, religion, national identity, cultural roots . . .’ (p. 113). 23. McFadden and Tillinghast, ‘Women and National Liberation Movements’, p. 5. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 24. Eileen Kuttab, ‘Discovering the Positive within the Negative: Palestinian Women’s Movements’ in Arenfeldt and Golley, Mapping Arab Women’s Movements, pp. 171–96; p. 174. 25. Moufida Tlatli (dir.), The Silences of the Palace (Tunisia: Capitol Film, 1994).

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26. Lazreg, ‘Post-Structuralist Theory’, p. 351. 27. See Badran and cooke, Opening the Gates, pp. 215–396, especially works included by Nabawiya Musa (pp. 257–69), Fatima Mernissi (pp. 317–27) and Huda Shaarawi (pp. 337–40). 28. See Makdisi, Bayoumi and Sidawi, Arab Feminisms. 29. Arenfeldt and Golley, Mapping Arab Women’s Movements, p. 6.

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Chapter 17 The Queerness of Textuality and/as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat’s THE STONE OF LAUGHTER Lindsey Moore

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his chapter uses Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter (Ḥajar al-Ḑaḥk, 1990, trans. 1995) to explore some of the critical and pedagogical possibilities of working with contemporary Arab literature in translation. On the one hand, translation arguably makes manifest a struggle between authority and inadequacy at the heart of all language, thereby potentially resisting the ‘auto-authorization’ of different communities and their ways of meaning.1 By extension, translation might help to complicate what Jacques Derrida calls ‘homo-hegemon[ic]’ versions of national history.2 As Derrida’s neologism implies, historiography emphasises exclusionary norms and relations, and Arab creative literatures have tended to expose nationalism’s structuring latencies and to elaborate its symptoms. Since the first phase of decolonising writing by authors such as Naguib Mahfouz and Driss Chraïbi, but particularly since the 1967 naksah, creative writers across the Middle East and North Africa have exposed a ‘correlation between authoritarianism, censorship, repression and patriarchal sexuality’.3 On the other hand, one must attend to the fact that the processes that make literature in other languages available to English-reading audiences almost inevitably involve epistemic violence. When read outside the region, contemporary Arab literature is particularly susceptible to reification. Mai al-Nakib regrets that it is seen as intrinsically political,4 and Sinan Antoon critiques the ‘forensic’ interest of twenty-firstcentury Western audiences in a region increasingly seen as the crucible of international violence.5 Both writer-critics highlight insufficient awareness of subtending canons and inattention to the aesthetics and creative ambiguities of imaginative literature. As a supposedly early representation of Arab non-conforming masculinity6 set during the Lebanese war (1975–90), The Stone of Laughter is especially vulnerable to critical co-optation. Marcia Lynx Qualey notes that while politics, religion and sexuality purportedly remain taboo areas in the Arabic literary field, lively fictional depictions of all three subjects (sometimes simultaneously) abound. Indeed, she queries: ‘how many “taboo-busting” novels can we read before we wonder about the strength of this taboo [?]’.7 Nevertheless, ‘positive, normalized depictions of gay male relationships’ remain a relative blind spot, as self-identifying gay and queer Arab writers such as Saleem Haddad and Abdellah Taïa corroborate.8 Particularly complex representational politics pertain when sexuality enters the cross-cultural field, as illustrated by debates over Joseph Massad’s critique of the ‘colonizing’ work implicit in ascriptions

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of particular labels to Arab sexualities;9 or by Jasbir Puar’s exposure of the homonormative privileging that annexes particular national(ist) subjects, whilst reproducing ethnic and sexual others as Oriental, ‘terrorizing’, and irredeemably un-modern.10 The protagonist, Khalil, and narrator of The Stone of Laughter are legible in ways that illuminate intersections of desire and violence and the challenges of translatability in contexts both of national production and of transnational reception. I argue that Sophie Bennett’s translation11 amplifies the implied intentions of Barakat’s novel in its transmission of precariously queer gendered/sexual subjects. This chapter works towards, but also challenges this hypothesis, demonstrating the desirability of collaborative, multilingual, postcolonial engagements with Arab and Middle Eastern literatures as these circulate (selectively) in the world literary domain.12

Postcolonial Pedagogies Postcolonial criticism underlines dynamic resistance to regimes that have successively denied the human rights, diversity and potentiality of citizens in historically constructed polities. A great deal of Arab writing (including in the persistently colonial context of Israel/Palestine) stresses the ongoing need for decolonisation in more than the obvious political sense of liberation from external control. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, modern Arab literatures have also contested a teleological version of nationalism and revealed ways in which national identity formation involves the exercise of repressive power. A postcolonial perspective should therefore also yield insights into nation state configurations and rhetorical practices. Lebanon is not a conventionally postcolonial setting. Compare Egypt or Algeria, for example, which have a territorial integrity that predated colonial rule, but in which national identity cohered and took particular rhetorical forms as an effect of British occupation and French settler colonialism and incorporation within the Hexagon, respectively. Lebanon was not a separate country prior to its absorption within European mandated spheres of political, economic and cultural influence. Moreover, France couched its case for stewardship of parts of erstwhile Bilād al-Shām or Greater Syria strategically in the discourse of minority protection. The resulting hierarchical construction of religious diversity in what would become independent Lebanon produced a particularly fractious national identity politics, exacerbated by power-sharing agreements linked tenuously to demographics.13 Saree Makdisi argues, in fact, that the most enduring effects of European colonialism are evident in the Levant.14 While his point relates in particular to Israel/Palestine – with which Lebanon’s precarious state continues to be intertwined – Lebanese history since ‘independence’ in 1943 exemplifies the frangibility of nations constructed by colonial boundaries. Violence in the contemporary Arab world – supposedly structured by ‘ancient structural deficiencies or ethnic and religious exigencies’ – is complexly linked to an ongoing history of colonial and imperialist interventions in the region.15 As Nouri Gana puts it: The attempt to elide or erase altogether a Euro-American and Zionist interest in almost every aspect of so-called ethnic or sectarian violence in the Arab world is nowhere clearer than in the case of the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990). The very common characterizations of this war as ‘ethnic’, ‘religious’ or ‘sectarian’ not only

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exonerate Western imperialism and its unexorcized legacies but also obscure the incubational historical moments [such as the 1948 Nakba] of which the war is a product.16 Lebanese literature tends to approach its colonial history and its ongoing entanglements with Israel (among other regional powers) obliquely. It characteristically reveals civil violence as multi-axial in its constitution and effects, and privileges diverse and overlapping marginalities. Notably, Lebanese fiction exposes gender norms and sexual violence as integral to the production and maintenance of community boundaries. If certain sorts of (white, masculinist) ‘orientations’17 shore up competing nationalisms within a late capitalist global economy, then the disentangling of intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ‘confession’ (religious identity) and class becomes, in this context, a mode of critiquing homo-hegemonic violence.18 The Stone of Laughter is exemplary in these respects. However, and as a postcolonial orientation reminds us, imaginative texts are ‘worlded’ by historical relations of uneven exchange, so attract ‘particular reading dispositions and desires’.19 Jasmine Zine, Lisa Taylor and Hilary Davis argue that ‘neo-Orientalist imaginaries within the contemporary [post-9/11] political and discursive landscape’ must be ‘continually and vigilantly challenged’ through forms of ‘anti-colonial pedagogy [as well as] praxis’. Western-Arab world relations take place on a terrain that ‘will always bear the imprint of imperial legacies’.20 If we are to engage Arab literatures, languages and representational spaces in the ‘structured dialogic spaces’ of a Western academic setting, this requires critically reflexive approaches.21 In the context of an ongoing ‘war on terror’, economies of antipathy and desire re-animate Orientalism to produce hyperbolic representations of Arabs (p. 298). Zine et al. warn, in this context, that even ‘resistant’ texts struggle to ‘secure deconstructive readings’.22 Specific reception challenges pertaining to Arab literatures intersect with a more diffuse ‘libidinal economy of multicultural literature education’ in the Western academy (Taylor, pp. 300–1). This, when uncritical, ‘structures instrumental desires . . . not only to know the Other’ – through the use of literary texts as cultural proxies, as Antoon suggests – but also, insidiously, ‘to demonstrate one’s . . . cosmopolitan enlightenment regarding [that] Other’ (Taylor, pp. 300–1). Literature can be used to secure an ultimately self-serving passive or projective ‘empathy’ towards ‘pre-defined difference’ which readers strive to overcome in order to ‘identify’ with characters (Taylor, pp. 305–8).23 An anti-colonial pedagogy and praxis of reading must perforce both reflect upon specific contexts of narration, production and reception, and sustain the possibility of resistant residues of meaning or untranslatability. This is part of the wager of a recursive, historicised, situated ethics of reading. Critics engaging the linguistically diverse field of Arab literature tend to argue for new comparative directions in postcolonial studies. Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, for example, support multilingual approaches to the ‘contested gathering points’ of language, identity, property and temporality that creative fiction foregrounds.24 I too advocate a multilingual, critically collaborative approach.25 To this end, I presented the first version of this chapter to an audience of English, French and Arabic speakers, then drew upon feedback to design a ‘masterclass’ on Barakat’s novel at my home institution. Invited participants spanned final-year undergraduate to final-year doctoral level and had a range of prior engagement with Middle Eastern literatures, from no

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pre-existing knowledge to research expertise in one or more Mashreqi, Maghrebi and/ or wider Middle Eastern/Western Asian literary context. Four of the participants (from Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria), one of whom was writing a Lebanese postwar novel (in English), are native Arabic speakers. Some of them work on contemporary Middle Eastern literatures and/or issues germane to Barakat’s novel, such as gender representation in war writing, and others have different contextual, conceptual and/or historical literary interests. The seminar solicited and interrogated multiple linguistic, cultural and conceptual literacies, and, by extension, structures of feeling or ‘regimes of truth’.26 As Nicholas Harrison argues – citing Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism on the ‘emancipatory possibilities of close reading’27 – critics and teachers inevitably advocate particular modes of analysis. These should, though, ideally stand ‘in a creative, dialectical relationship to the hermeneutic and affective richness of their [textual] objects’, which ‘allow considerable space for different readers to react’ in potentially incommensurable ways.28 The pedagogical ideal is to suspend transmission of a particular argument in order ‘to do justice to [the] writing on something like its own terms’.29 Stone’s ‘own terms’ are refracted through translation from Arabic into English, in which most of the seminar participants engaged with it because English is their shared academic language. The elective reading mobility of some of my readers further complicates an understanding of audiences, which are not ‘sedimentation[s] of established values’ so much as ‘amalgamations of perspectives’ that cohere, whether transiently or in more enduring fashion, in particular times and places.30 It may be that we can glean from an audience’s ‘indefinite plurality of perspectives . . . the inexorable fragmentation of any language or work’ (p. 16). Whereas my seminar design encouraged unpredictable outcomes, I also wanted to see how the group would collaboratively untangle a particular conceptual knot – of gender violence, desire and translation – that I perceive as fundamental to The Stone of Laughter’s ways of meaning. To this end, participants were provided with an advance list of non-exhaustive questions focusing on the novel’s critical and paratextual framing; its fictional representation of gender and sexuality in the context of the Lebanese war; and a single page from the original Arabic text (discussed in the final section of this chapter) which enabled us to discuss the possibility of purposeful translation.

The Stone of Laughter: Paratexts and Pretexts The Stone of Laughter is set in the early 1980s: Khalil’s first love, Naji, possibly a spy for a Christian militia, dies crossing the ‘Green Line’; his family is replaced in the apartment block that is the main setting of the novel by rural relatives of Khalil fleeing Israeli fire.31 Not atypically for a Lebanese writer of Christian heritage, Barakat sets her novel in West Beirut; that is, the non-Christian majority side of the front line that bifurcated the city during the war.32 Khalil, unlike many of his friends, is a secular Muslim, though this is not explicitly stated, nor ascertainable from his name. He has a conversation with his friend Nayif, in which the two men reject sectarianism. However, Khalil queries Nayif’s motives in resisting from the ‘wrong’ side of the line, suggesting that such tactics enhance his heroic status and that of his group (pp. 54–5). This critique of the cultural and economic capital of war masculinity pervades the novel, as when Khalil compares lists of martyrs to ‘promotional leaflets of tourism companies and hotels’ (p. 41). Sectarian politics are collapsed into a deconstruction of war ‘logic’.

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Hoda Barakat (1952–), one of Lebanon’s most acclaimed writers,33 returned to Beirut for most of the Lebanese war; she left again in the year of the National Reconciliation Agreement (1989) for Paris, where she still lives. Her first three novels are set retrospectively during the war years. Barakat’s fiction is produced in Arabic but three novels to date have been translated into English, the last two by Marilyn Booth. The time-lagged availability of her work in translation arguably encourages generic assimilation, in that her novels become identifiable as (early) examples of what Syrine Hout terms a ‘transnational brand of Lebanese literature’. As Hout outlines the genre, Lebanese writers of two generations, based both in the country and abroad, and writing in Arabic, French and English, share an emphasis on individual and collective effects of the 1975–90 Lebanese War, such as the ‘psychological internalization of armed conflict’ and the challenges of traumatic memory in an amnesiac (Lebanese) or oblivious (overseas) public domain.34 One can distinguish to an extent between a Beirut-centric Arabic-writing literati with whom Barakat remains associated and which includes authors such as Elias Khoury and Rashid al-Daïf, who continue to focus on ‘internal exile as a psychosocial or political phenomenon’ (p. 4); and diaspora authors such as Rabih Alameddine and Rawi Hage who write in English and juxtapose contexts of war, migration and minoritisation.35 Fritz Lang suggests, though, that Lebanese authors continue to orient themselves strategically towards what literary gatekeepers have defined as a ‘tradition of legitimate writing’.36 This ‘genrefication’ enables brand recognition, marketability and, I would add, teachability. Another frame for reception of Barakat’s work is the established argument that Lebanese women’s writing, in experimental styles, stresses the effects of war on gendered subjectivity and foregrounds private space as critical margin on the nation, thereby exemplifying a ‘decentring’ ethos.37 Barakat wrote Stone during the war in a basement apartment in Beirut – a marginal space comparable to the one in which she locates her protagonist – and has testified to literary writing as alternative to military and political power. ‘I belong to the damp darkness and to the forgetfulness of those making history in the streets’, she asserts, revealing an anti-establishment ethos: she ‘write[s] as the rat that gnaws at foundations and pillars’.38 Barakat reveals a deconstructive orientation in elaborations on her writing: she simultaneously claims marginal presence and self-erasure, gendered embodiment and transcendence, commemoration and ‘the void’ of textuality. This ambivalence is encapsulated in the title of her short ‘autobiographical’ essay, ‘I write against my hand’ (p. 47). Logically, if somewhat testingly, Barakat expresses relative indifference toward ‘women’s issues’, which she also ascribes to her liberal upbringing.39 She is, however, fascinated by a polarised gender dynamic that subjugates both men and women. In a 2004 interview in English, she says: When I write I have no gender. I have all the genders in the universe. It’s wonderful, it’s a moment of freedom. . . . They come to me in these voices – the voices of men – and they want to tell me because I am a woman. I never pretend I’m a man who writes. I’m always a woman who writes about men who tell me something.40 This ventriloquising and translational ethos sheds light on The Stone of Laughter and, in particular, its idiosyncratic narrative perspective. Fadia Faqir, introducing Stone to an English audience, partly recuperates what she calls Barakat’s ‘third space’ poetics to a specifically women’s writing agenda, which

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entails a simultaneous debunking of patriarchal social organisation, standard Arabic and what is considered legitimate historical experience.41 Faqir is aware of Barakat’s ironic claiming of ‘a dual [gendered] perspective’ partly in order ‘to resemble a man, to cut short the time for training . . . and prove my intellectual ability to construct and to invent’.42 She shares the other woman’s scepticism about universalising claims to women’s anti-foundational literary style. Nevertheless, Faqir concludes her introduction to Stone by invoking the ‘double-layered veil’ that Arab women’s writing in translation supposedly invites Western readers to lift.43 More usefully – given the narrative perspective deployed in Stone and discussed below – Faqir elsewhere aligns Barakat’s project with Hélène Cixous’s assertion that ‘feminine’ writing (écriture féminine) is signified by ‘the gender of the text’ rather than the sex (or gender) of the author.44 Paratextual framing of The Stone of Laughter in English translation eschews such subtleties and produces a synthetic representational problematic. The back cover of the 2006 Interlink edition describes it as a virile novel which brings forth the contradictory history of a city under fire through the life and dilemmas of a gay man. The fractured narrative is woven around Khalil, a gay man who tried to avoid ideological or military affiliations as he finds himself confronted with the collapse of civil society. Written sensitively, and without a trace of sentimentality or political propaganda, The Stone of Laughter shook the [sic] Arab readers’ preconceptions about women’s writing and questioned the necessity of political affiliations for Arab authors. The novel is, supposedly, surprising twice over – not only is it unconventionally political (the clumsy prose suggests apolitical), but a woman writer focuses on a male protagonist. The dust jacket collocates terms supposed to be associatively dissonant: virile, fractured, gay, sensitive, sentimental, political and women’s writing. In so doing, however, it is reductive about what and how Arab women might write, how homogenised ‘Arab readers’ are assumed to read, and what might happen in the passage between Arabic and English, and between Arab and non-Arab majority audiences. While one might relatively easily dismiss the ‘insights’ offered by a book cover,45 critics also emphasise the ‘gay’ perspective that this novel purportedly makes available. Mona Katawi, reviewing the novel in Al-Raida, in English, assumes that ‘Khalil is homosexual’, though she acknowledges that his sexual orientation is only one ‘element in his reluctance to choose virility’ as a form of viable masculinity.46 Mona Fayad also invokes ‘the struggle of a gay man’, even as her emphasis falls upon androgyny. She argues that [Barakat] represents two figures who are marginal to the war: a gay male, Khalil, and a narrator who . . . is androgynous until the circumstances, specifically those in which Khalil is obliged to classify himself as masculine in order to take up his role as fighter for his community, force her to forego her androgyny and declare herself as feminine.47 Fayad does recognise that the eventual gender (but not necessarily sexual) conformity of both Khalil and the narrator is strategic, if necessary.

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On the last page of the novel, two discrete entities separate. The narrator, for the first time explicitly claiming a first-person singular perspective, sees Khalil with a moustache and sunglasses, and attempts unsuccessfully to hail him as an intimate. But his car moves off, with a final view of our protagonist ‘broad shouldered in his brown leather jacket’ in the rear window. The narrator concedes that ‘Khalil is gone, he has become a man who laughs. And I remain a woman who writes’ (p. 209). Khalil accedes to a form of homosociality that is hypermasculine and overtly misogynist. He does not, though, ‘become’ heterosexual: the narrator, in more omniscient mode, reveals that he rapes his female neighbour, but also that his movement into the public domain is mediated by the patronage of a well-connected militia commander who desires him. Fayad and Samira Aghacy plausibly interpret the narrator as the eventual personification of a female side to Khalil, who detaches herself as a separate textual presence once he emerges into the public sphere as a sexually violent, militarised man.48 There is evidence for this eventual shift in the stylisation of the novel which, until the final section, moves in and out of focalisation through Khalil’s perspective. At times the narrator directly ‘look[s] at [his] body’ and solicits reader identification, although not necessarily with a female perspective: ‘the eye has only to fall upon him . . . for you to imagine yourself to be Khalil’s father’ (Barakat, p. 11). At other times, Khalil’s perspective is directly transmitted: ‘Do I know so very little about [Naji]? . . . is he that other man, whose evil appetites awake at night and make him go . . . to kill in cold blood and come back to me the next day smiling, handsome and meeker than a sacrificial lamb?’ (p. 57). The early stages of Stone also position Khalil symbolically in an ambivalent ‘narrow passing place’, ‘a stagnant, feminine state of submission to a purely vegetable life’ (p. 12) that, whilst passive and suspended in conception, potentially ‘resist[s] gender as a vector of power’ (Fayad, p. 169). From the ‘phantasmagoric space’ of his room, Khalil tries to evade ‘the hegemonic discourse that defines gender and that seeks to appropriate him as a male national subject’ (Fayad, p. 164). In this context, ‘femininity’, or withheld participation in the public sphere – the latter coded as militaristic and male – might be read as (passively) resistant. One can then argue that the ending of the novel, which ‘outs’ a female (though not necessarily feminine) narrator who is distinct from Khalil, activates the potential of alternative, even ‘queer’, constructions of the nation, at least in writing.49 In a double sense, Barakat’s narrator-proxy assumes a minority position by translating (a man’s and a woman’s) marginal experience into, and so internally reformulating, ‘monological culture . . . that commands and legislates . . . life from above’.50 Barakat has spoken of writing as ideally androgynous or hermaphroditic, suspending judgement on whether such writing would issue from a gender-transcendent space ‘beyond the conditioning and characteristics of male and female social behaviour’, or from a liminal ‘junction . . . full of the elation arising from the blending of the genders’.51 Using a botanical frame of reference, she gestures toward the plenitude (jouissance) of écriture féminine rather than the corporeal neutering that characterises Virginia Woolf’s version of androgynous writing.52 ‘It may be’, Barakat says, ‘that the essence of creative writing lies in that merging of the sexes, the one with the other, which occurs among plants that exchange their pollen in the peace and harmony of open spaces.’53 There is abundant evidence in Barakat’s fiction that firsthand experience of civil war encourages an antipathy towards definitional categories.

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More speculatively, she may also be influenced by French intellectual suspicion of ‘la tentation communautaire’ (‘separatist’ identity politics) and tendency to champion a universal subjectivity.54 This last, rather than the deconstructive awareness Barakat also evinces, may partly account for her (to my mind) peculiar representation of Khalil’s sexual orientation. In one interview in English, she says: So there is a gay man in my first book but it’s not shocking because he narrates a real sentiment of love. He isn’t there to make paysage. He is something you cannot refuse – you have to admit – because he suffers and he’s really in love and . . . I describe how much he is in love and how much he suffers and the beauty of the other [man].55 While it should be acknowledged that Barakat speaks here in her third language, she nevertheless issues a problematic invitation to empathise in a sentimental register. While the first part of the quotation beseeches us to feel with Khalil or to see through his eyes rather than observe him as part of the ‘scenery’ of the text, the empathy evoked is predominantly of an assimilative order, suggesting a partial (in both senses) recognition. We are invited to ‘admit’ – acknowledge and accommodate – a universalised lover: Khalil admires beauty and expresses himself in sentimental and tragic registers. It is perhaps not incidental that he never acts upon his desire in the text. If The Stone of Laughter is not a ‘shocking’ story, as Barakat says defensively, then we might ask what kind of ‘gay’ and/or ‘love’ story might be perceived as such, by whom, and what the stakes are of choosing to plot and populate it in this manner – in this appeal to the reader – rather than some other. Our seminar demonstrated the inadequacy of some of the modes of framing The Stone of Laughter outlined above. The feminist credentials of Barakat’s text, for a start, prompted debate. We eventually agreed that ‘Barakat aims at deconstructing male suppressive values that keep not only the female, but also the male, in subjection, and ensure his [and her] conformity within the matrix of patriarchy’,56 and that this is feminist work. However, Stone is particularly interested in masculinity under duress at a particular historical juncture, and the refraction of Khalil’s ambivalently gendered consciousness through the perspective of a narrator whose sex is only belatedly revealed produces instructive interpretative challenges. Khalil is repulsed by cultural constructions of womanhood, for example the ‘larded, powder-puff femininity’ of a newlywed who moves into his apartment block (Barakat, p. 75). He is, though, also susceptible to the reproduction of binary gender typologies in the way in which he identifies: as ‘a woman, a housewife’, ‘a snow-white old maid’ (p. 9), a ‘plump divorcee’ (p. 23) and (aspirationally) ‘wife of the wrong sex’ (p. 115). His response to real women (characters) tends toward disgust, suggesting a disavowing economy of abjection: he feels ‘intense hatred’ for Zahra, the sister of his second love Youssef, becoming extremely sensitive to and disgusted by the dreadful smell that her armpits exhale, making him certain that two legs of that size, hands as red as that with such thick, animal skin cannot belong to a creature with a soul. He thinks of her as an old rotten fish. (p. 84)

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His radical distrust of women produces fragmenting scopic violence: he ‘doesn’t see all of [his neighbour Rita]. Just a bit of her. He sees her lips which never stop moving’ (p. 7). In a still essentialist, if more positively coded manner, Khalil positively aligns sexually non-available women, particularly mothers, with immanence, earthliness and the ‘[w]isdom of life and death’ (p. 131). We decided that although Khalil is susceptible to misogyny, this is because he fundamentally rejects binary gender.57 In fact, he tends to align women with liminal states: they contain the Other within the self in pregnancy, have ‘excessive’ bodies and mediate the passage from life to death of martyrs. Khalil imagines his room as ‘a womb in which [he] swam, breathing in the cosmic harmony that the light radiates, soaking it up as into his very nature as if it were an extension of his slender body’ (p. 64). Two-way corporealspatial assimilation here underlines the protagonist’s category crisis; it also suggests a melancholic relation to the maternal body. This has political significance in the novel: we learn that Khalil’s mother refused to acknowledge constructions of national identity, hence ‘enemies’, and would have said that Khalil was her daughter in order to prevent his recruitment as a soldier: ‘To hell with your country and every other country, my precious’, she says, and ‘laughed out loud’ (p. 110). Fayad suggests that the novel’s laughter is linked to the Arabic expression yanfajiru ḍuḥkan – to explode with laughter – and so to the violence that civil war inevitably entails.58 Khalil’s alchemical transformation into a ‘man who laughs’ is satirically conceived. However, as one seminar participant observed, the maternal laughter cited above should echo through the novel as counterpoint to the cynical laughter with which it ends, signalling a subtending anti-patriarchal and anti-nationalist orientation: in this way, too, laughter can be seen as explosive. It was agreed, however, that ‘female’ spaces are very tenuously secured in this novel. Khalil’s rape of his neighbour is a narrative shock that distances the reader from the novel’s erstwhile protagonist, and violently displaces the public danger/private safety binary that he himself has attempted to sustain. The narrator herself loses sight of, and the means to signify, her ‘beloved hero . . .’ (p. 209). The seminar group was unanimously resistant to categorising Khalil as ‘gay’. We considered the protagonist’s stymied sexual development and concluded that not only does his desire remain unconsummated, it is neither unidirectional nor fully articulable as desire at any point in the text. Khalil is not a youth who, in rejecting traditional political structures, has ‘broken down the door of conventional masculinity and entered manhood by the wide door of history’; neither has he, like his peers, taken the measure of the war and accordingly ‘laid down plans to fasten their hold on the upper echelons . . . in politics, in leadership, in the press. . .’ (p. 12). His alienation from the homosocial categories that the war privileges is such that while the Brother confidently asserts power whilst admitting that he no longer (also) sleeps with women, Khalil is unable to say what or whom he desires (p. 190). In fact, the novel does not show war’s production of ‘ideal’ (that is, heteronormative) gendered citizens (as argued by Fayad, p. 165) so much as the ways in which nationalism entails homo- as well as heteronormative privileging.59 But Khalil as protagonist confounds expectations about (historically specific) normative masculinity all the way through this novel, and in so doing exceeds containment, either as the ‘beloved’ (object) of the text or its ‘hero’ (subject). We thus disagreed with Khalil Hadeed’s reading of Stone: not his assessment that Barakat presents Khalil’s homosexuality and its ‘encompassing gender liminality’ as

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‘effects of an arrested biological development’ – the novel does link Khalil’s homoeroticism60 to a resisted passage into adulthood. However, the arresting force of civil violence is primarily at stake. The war directs gender and sexual development onto particular homosocial tracks. Khalil must become like Youssef, who ‘has grown up. . . . He’s absorbed in his external time while I’m waiting at the other end of the tunnel, clutching the egg of my dreams like an old hen’ (p. 117). But our main disagreement was with Hadeed’s claim that Khalil’s arrested development produces epistemic closure; that is, replicates the inconceivability of same-sex love (see p. 81). To our minds, The Stone of Laughter proposes utopian feminine masculinity, or androgyny, as more of a challenge to utilitarian nationalism than homosexual preference, which is never definitively ruled out as a future mode of public participation. The plot of The Stone of Laughter closes down gender ambiguity, but not sexual inclination. In keeping with Barakat’s deconstructive tendencies, what is othered by the novel as a whole – rather than merely its plot – are either/or categories: the imperative to be male or female, masculine or feminine, gay or straight.

The Queerness of Textuality and/as Translation The Stone of Laughter stresses the materiality of its protagonist’s ‘pale, pale, still body’, partly counteracting his dematerialisation in normative discourse, ‘a language [that] stole Khalil’s first voice away and did not give him another, a language that did not adopt him’ (p. 144). But it is important that this character is never definitively categorisable or, indeed, translatable in gendered, sexed or sexual terms. Ultimately, he escapes even the narrator’s control.61 Until that point, however, Barakat’s narrator focalises, describes and delimits Khalil’s body, ‘translating’ his thoughts and feelings into the narrative. We recall the author’s self-presentation as ‘a woman who writes about men who tell me something’. However, The Stone of Laughter suggests that it is difficult to avoid complicity with dominant symbolic and scopic regimes. Khalil is partly positioned by the narrator as ‘gender-deviant’: described parodically and pathologically – ‘Poor, sickly Khalil. Poor, lowly Khalil. Poor, puny Khalil’ (p. 145) – or as being in possession of an incomplete body: ‘when one looks at his narrow shoulders, no wider than the little pillow where he lays his head, one is led to question the wisdom of Mother Nature when, sometimes, she stops a stage short and fails to send on hidden desires to their appointed ends’ (p. 11). In these examples and elsewhere, narrative perspective is difficult to disentangle from Khalil’s gender insecurity, as well as from the implied authorial viewpoint. My seminar participants felt that Khalil is never fully realised as a character. This, though, usefully points to the fact that this novel is fundamentally concerned with the entwined problematics of narration and language. In our seminar, we considered queerness – as a continuum that encompasses both eroticism and sexuality as well as, potentially, the absence of desire – both as a means of explicating Khalil’s gender and sexual orientation and in terms of the ways in which this character might resist narrative framing. We then zoomed in on a passage in the translation which explicitly uses the word ‘queer’. Here Khalil is worrying about his erotic dreams, of uncertain content and variable object choice: Khalil knew that a fear of blood to the point of faintness, having short legs, a slight build, straight chestnut hair and large eyes, all these do not make a man a

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hermaphrodite, or effeminate, or make him any less masculine, or . . . queer . . . he knew that the temporary breakdown that he was suffering was only a psychological crisis that the mad world outside had imposed upon him . . . he knew that there were certainly more female hormones in him than there should naturally be, for they protected him from committing the crime of the act, so it was only a passing crisis, it would come to an end . . . he definitely desired women but, at this moment in time, he did not feel particularly susceptible to any particular woman. Khalil’s efforts end in a short, broken phrase in which he says to himself, to no avail: ‘Naji is dead’. (p. 75) Descriptors here destabilise the relationship between sex and gender. ‘Queer’ is one of a series of terms contrasted with ‘a man’ – that is, a made man – that include hermaphrodite, effeminate, less masculine, queer and/or with excessive female hormones. The consciousness transmitted in this passage is anxious about physical, psychological and hormonal deviations from the norm, and defensive about (in)appropriate object choices (‘he definitely desired women’). The passage acknowledges, even as it disavows, gender trouble. It also moves toward an incapacity to mourn – for a specific man, but perhaps for same-sex desire more generally – drawing attention to the ‘short, broken phrase’ that is the novel’s (but not elsewhere the author’s) signature style. Indeed, ‘queer’ itself is partially separated out by ellipsis. The passage flags up language as a critical component of Khalil’s struggle to secure a viable social identity. This is strongly reminiscent of Butler’s argument that queer desire emblematises impossible mourning, because it is unrecognisable or un-nameable as desire.62 Khalil’s desire – to both have and to destroy man(hood) – is profoundly melancholic. After his two loves, Naji and Youssef, are violently killed, we read: I’m like someone whose dead have been stolen away, Khalil said to himself regretfully . . . someone who’s left on the edge of the desert a few seconds before the murder . . . someone who raises his dead with the tears of his eyes . . . who carves their pictures chip by chip and always, before the desire is ripe, before the mellow season comes, always, before Khalil’s buried desire to kill them makes itself clear they kill them and they steal away their corpses, leaving him only with the inability to weep for them and the lack of will to bury them, to remind him, always, that he is not man enough to forge his world of dreams and not woman enough to accept . . . he is at a loss as to what he could possibly do to see his two dead and bury them. (pp. 132–3)63 This evokes a widely distributed structure of feeling in the post-1967 Arab world: wuqūf ‘ala al-aṭlāl, or ‘standing by the ruins’ of a deserted dwelling place and yearning for both it and a lost beloved.64 Ken Seigneurie, analysing (post-)war Lebanese cultural production, positions elegiac humanism (exemplified, for him, by the prefatory naṣīb to the Bedouin qaṣīda) against the teleological impetus of sectarian nationalism and its violent ethos of martyrdom. As he sees it, remembrance should lead to reconciliation and an eventual superseding of loss.65 The fetishisation of the (particularly male) martyr’s body in the service of competing communities is critiqued throughout The Stone of Laughter. However, as the extract above makes clear, it is because the bodies that Khalil grieves are always already impossible objects of desire – a fact that death only enhances – that his murderous and suicidal impulses persist.

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Butler suggests that in attempts to disentangle gender from the ‘sex’ (that is, the sexed body) that shapes, channels and represses its complexity, a degree of untranslatability will inevitably remain. She critiques the fact that gender is compelled to translate the language of unconscious articulation into something coherent: [T]he question may well not be, ‘what gender am I?’ but rather, ‘what does gender want of me?’ or even, ‘whose desire is being carried through the assignment of gender that I have received and how can I possibly respond?’ Quick – give me a way to translate!66 Translation, here, produces a sustained remainder or excess that cannot be reconciled. The Stone of Laughter does reveal gender and sex as translational anomalies. Bodies, in their gender performance and sexual orientation, are portrayed as potentially fluid or hybrid, only bifurcating under duress into virile masculinity, on the one hand, and a ‘woman who writes’, on the other. Until – and even at – the end, both Khalil and the narrator perform sexual ontology queerly, denaturalising a heteronormative symbolic. However, if we follow Butler’s logic, once queer desire and/or identity is named, translated and made comprehensible, it is no longer melancholic – and perhaps loses its critical edge. Puar puts the point differently, querying the implications of the ostensibly non-categorising category ‘queer’ that, in claiming to be ‘singularly transgressive of identity norms’, narrates its own exceptionalism: freedom from norms becomes a fetishised ideal and its own regulatory mechanism.67 This raises the possibility that Khalil’s queerness – qua unassimilable difference – might be reduced, through nomination as such in English, to a category. One recalls Massad’s critique of what he (reductively) calls ‘Gay International’ intervention in Arab affairs, suggesting that it attempts to codify what (in a critique of Butler) he calls ‘another other . . ., namely, those cultural formations whose ontological structure is not based on the hetero-homo binary’ in the first place.68 Massad sees this as symptomatic of unequally structured cross-cultural relations, if also as only partly translated across borders or ‘hegemonic in intellectual and elite circles’. Nevertheless, he warns, elites influence the legislation of ‘norms’, thereby threatening ‘the interstices of Arab societies and psyches’ (p. 49). Hadeed points to the risks of fiction that represents ‘sexually deviant’ characters symptomatically or allegorically, and there are certainly ways in which Stone deploys Khalil’s non-normative masculinity to critique sectarian nationalist thought. Hadeed also draws attention to the limited political benefits of both constructionist and essentialist definitions of homosexuality.69 He nevertheless insists upon the continued urgency of combating sexual discrimination. Because Arab cultural frames of reference for same-sex desire are often antagonistic to rights and freedoms, he argues for the desirable transportability of a politics that ‘rejects a clear demarcation line between homo- and heterosexuality and refuses to delimit, a priori, the potential trajectories along which sexuality may develop’ (p. 272). This deepens the irony of the reductive ‘homosexual’ framing of the novel – in English – highlighted earlier. A comparison of the two versions of the novel suggests that the use of ‘queer’ reflects the ‘decisionism of translation’.70 A sentence from the passage cited earlier – ‘all these do not make a man a hermaphrodite, or effeminate, or make him any less masculine, or . . . queer . . .’ – is, in the original, ‘al-rajul khuntha, aw dhakaran ḍa‘īf al-dhakūrah aw . . . sha‘dhan . . .’. While the dictionary translation of khuntha is

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‘hermaphrodite’71 and al-rajul dhakaran ḍa‘īf al-dhakūrah, ‘an irregular weak man’, plausibly translates as ‘effeminate’, shā dh – translated as ‘queer’ – means unnatural, bizarre or abnormal. The Arabic speakers in my seminar insisted that it has, in relation to sexuality, connotations of deviance that do not challenge heteronormativity but, rather, reinforce it.72 Khalil in the original is, then, differently ‘queer’ to the way in which the term has been reconfigured in English. Indeed, there may not be a term in Arabic that delivers the queerness of ‘queer’.73 One participant in my seminar pointed out, however, that ‘deviant’ could be kept in order to mark the limits of the sexual lexicon of contemporary Arabic, particularly given that the novel itself frequently marks the inadequacies of language. The same person pointed out that ‘deviance’ is not an intrinsically negative term, at least not in English. Puar, in fact, uses deviance as a synonym for queerness, and critiques both as regulatory regimes that (in some places) privilege freedom and individuality.74 It is perhaps no coincidence that Bennett also researches gender and identity in modern Arabic literature.75 This raises the risk of the translator and/or her English-reading audience annexing the Arab other to liberal and/or cosmopolitan, viz ‘enlightened’ values. Such values are, however, learned rather than innate: they are the product of specific environments rather than deep cultural conditioning. All of the Arabic speakers in my UK-located university seminar saw the translation of shādh as ‘queer’ to be both an appropriate metonymical rendering of this novel’s philosophically rich content, and a politically useful representation of non-normative gender identification and sexual desire. We concluded that ‘queer’ is an immanent tendency in the original brought out in the afterlife of translation.76 This consolidated my own view that the (mis)translation of shādh is in line with what the text shows more comprehensively: the competing biological, social and political demands on Khalil’s gendered and sexed body – including the demands that the narrator places on it – and the way in which his desire spans homoeroticism, homosexuality and homosociality (and, ultimately, exceeds definition). The word ‘queer’ gestures toward ontological possibilities that resonate beyond both the conclusion of the plot and narrative closure: Khalil, as protagonist, continues to evade a woman who writes; indeed who, like an irresponsible translator, often tries ‘to speak on the Other’s behalf while at the same time denying this essentially appropriative gesture’.77 However, the narrative frame fails to close upon her ‘darling hero . . .’ (p. 209). Similarly, the elliptical framing of ‘queer’, in the translation, signals a tentative move beyond an understanding of Khalil as either physically aberrant or morally abhorrent. ‘Queer’ can thus be read as aporetic. And as such, it is metonymic of the ‘poetic’ qualities of Stone – which constantly flags up untranslatability – rather than its ‘message’.78 This text’s self-staging contextualises ‘queer’ in open-ended rather than ‘colonising’ ways. Whether we conclude that the purposive translation pinpointed here makes more visible what is already there, or that it strategically reorients the text, however, we can extrapolate that an inexact replication of an original’s ‘way of meaning’ is the work of translation. Appropriately, given Barakat’s preoccupations, Butler has argued that translation – like drag – contests the structuring logic or very notion of an original, or self-presence, so also naturalised gender or sex.79 The work of art mobilises culture against authority, continually ‘articulating new values and world historical orientations’; it disrupts established ways of meaning.80 But because any audience has an indeterminate plurality of perspectives, creative texts are also susceptible to untangling

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in different ways, and even to unravelling. As such, reading in translation can reveal that language is intrinsically ‘a hegemonic formation that requires forever inadequate attempts at discursive domination’ (p. 18). The Stone of Laughter actively invites a deconstructive reading. The fractured style of Barakat’s novel (in both versions) clearly evokes the difficulties of subject-constitution in language/the Symbolic,81 as well as the surreal experience of the Lebanese war with its inescapable cyclical violence and multiple divisive effects on national community. This literary treatment of language’s effects should remind us of two wider truths. First, national and sub-national identities are discursively constituted, and it has been one task of postcolonial writers to expose the exclusionary violence that this inevitably entails. Second, translation does not – cannot – aspire to literal equivalence. It is, rather, a process of active interpretation or co-production: an intimate engagement with another (text). Translation is not just ‘touching’ or empathic: it is exposing, unsettling, even violently wrenching. It can also be seen as queering an original.82 The Stone of Laughter exemplifies ways in which Arab fiction refracts rather than simply transmits the violence of identity politics contested at particular historical junctures. If we wish to engage it and wider Middle Eastern literatures in translation, we must do so in ways that take into account their contexts of emergence, aesthetic complexity and hermeneutic limits, as well as the embodied positionalities and structures of feeling of diverse readers.

Notes 1. Adam Rosen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Politics of the Pure Word: Melancholia, Mourning, and the Task of the Translator’, Canon: The Politics of Language, 16 (2003), http://canononline. org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/melancholia_mourning_rosen.pdf (last accessed 1 July 2017), p. 16. 2. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or: The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 64. 3. Samira Aghacy, Masculine Identity in the Fiction of the Arab East since 1967 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 9. 4. Mai Al-Nakib, ‘Arab Literature: Politics and Nothing But?’, World Literature Today, 90:1 (2016), pp. 30–2. 5. See Malcolm Forbes, ‘Iraqi Writer Sinan Antoon on his novels about his embattled homeland’, The National, 14 May 2015, http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/the-review/iraqiwriter-sinan-antoon-on-his-novels-about-his-embattled-homeland#page3 (last accessed 1 July 2017), n.p. 6. There are much earlier examples: see Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). I allude here to the paratextual framing of this novel discussed in the second section of my chapter. 7. Marcia Lynx Qualey, ‘Homosexuality and the Arabic Novel: The Triumph of Mockery’, Arabic Literature in English, 4 September 2015, https://arablit.org/2015/09/04/homosexuality-and-the-arabic-novel/ (last accessed 1 July 2017), n.p. 8. Qualey, ‘Homosexuality and the Arabic Novel’, n.p. See also Eman Elshaikh, ‘Being Arab, Queer, & Everything in Between: Interviewing Saleem Haddad, the Author of Guapa’, Muftah, 7 March 2016, https://muftah.org/queer-arab-an-interview-with-saleem-haddadthe-author-of-guapa/#.WT5ssMaZOXV (last accessed 1 July 2017) and Alberto Fernández Carbajal, ‘The Wanderings of a Gay Moroccan: An Interview with Abdellah Taïa’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 29 May 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.13279 66 (last accessed 1 July 2017), pp. 1–12.

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9. Massad approvingly cites Diana Fuss on this point: ‘Is it really possible to speak of “homosexuality”, or for that matter “heterosexuality” or “bisexuality”, as universal, global formations? . . . What kinds of colonizations do such translations perform on “other” traditions of sexual difference?’ (Massad, Desiring Arabs, p. 41). 10. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 2, 17. 11. Bennett has also translated two novels by Egyptian author Latifa al-Zayyat, for Quartet. 12. I am grateful to Anna Ball for suggesting that I test my ideas pedagogically. My warm thanks to participants in the resulting 2 May 2017 seminar at Lancaster University (UK): Ghadeer Alhasan, Naji Bakhti, Kirsty Bennett, Húyem Cheurfa, Rachel Fox, Lee Hansen, Madonna Kalousian and Michael Pritchard, and to Michael for feedback on the chapter. 13. See Samir Kassir, Beirut, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 14. Saree Makdisi, ‘“Postcolonial” Literature in a Neo-Colonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity’, boundary 2, 22:1 (1995), pp. 85–115; p. 92. 15. Nouri Gana, ‘Formless Form: Elias Khoury’s City Gates and the Poetics of Trauma’, Comparative Literature Studies, 47:4 (2010), pp. 504–532; p. 506. 16. Gana, ‘Formless Form’, p. 506. 17. See Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomonology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham Duke University Press, 2006). 18. These are characteristics of fiction written both in Lebanon and in the diaspora; in Arabic, French and English; and spanning almost three decades. For a longer discussion of gender and sexual violence as structuring aspects of Lebanese war imaginaries, see Lindsey Moore, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 123–63. 19. Jasmine Zine, Lisa Taylor and Hilary Davis, ‘Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back: Transnational Feminist Reading Practices, Pedagogy and Ethical Concerns’, Intercultural Education, 18:4 (2007), pp. 271–80; p. 276. See also Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993) and Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair-Majaj, ‘Introduction’, in Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair-Majaj (eds), Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 1–26; p. 12. 20. Zine, Taylor and Davis, ‘Reading Muslim Women’, p. 274. 21. Lisa Taylor, ‘Reading Desire: From Empathy to Estrangement, from Enlightenment to Implication’, Intercultural Education, 18:4 (2007), pp. 297–316; p. 298. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 22. Zine, Taylor and Davis, ‘Reading Muslim Women’, p. 276. 23. One could conversely argue for empathy – a feeling ‘into’ the situation of another – as productively unsettling. Taylor accepts that one needs to ‘care’ about texts emotionally and/or aesthetically, but critiques the fact that cross-cultural reading can involve the assimilation of other experience into the familiar, reducing characters to ‘identificatory proxies, screens or foils’ through processes of selective (un-)noticing (p. 307). 24. Waïl S. Hassan and Rebecca Saunders, ‘Introduction’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1–2 (2003), pp. 18–31; p. 23. See also Jane Hiddleston, ‘État présent: Francophone North African Literature’, French Studies, 70:1 (2016), pp. 82–92. 25. Arab literatures are produced in Amazigh, English, French, Hebrew and other languages, as well as Arabic. 26. Taylor, ‘Reading Desire’, p. 302. 27. Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 67.

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28. Nicholas Harrison, ‘Said’s Impact: Lessons for Literary Critics’, in Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Derek Attwell (eds), Debating Orientalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 216–41; pp. 229, 226. 29. Harrison, ‘Said’s Impact’, p. 235. 30. Rosen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Politics of the Pure Word’, p. 16. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 31. Hoda Barakat, The Stone of Laughter, trans. Sophie Bennett (Northampton: Interlink, 2006), p. 78. Subsequent references will be parenthesised in the main text. 32. See also, for example, fiction by Rashid al-Daïf. 33. The Tiller of Waters won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 2000 and Barakat was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker International. 34. Syrine Hout, Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 4. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 35. The picture is complicated by literature in French, and by the fact that many writers move back and forth between Lebanon and other places, in both their life and their work. 36. Felix Lang, ‘Ghosts in the Archive – Lebanon’s Second Generation Post-War Novelists and the Limits of Reconstruction’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 18:5 (2014), pp. 487–95; p. 491. 37. See miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and miriam cooke, Women and the War Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 38. Hoda Barakat, ‘I Write Against My Hand’, in Fadia Faqir (ed.), In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers (Reading: Garnet, 1998), pp. 43–7; p. 46. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 39. Samira Aghacy cites interviews in Mawaqif 73–4 (1993–4) and As-Safir (11 January 1994). See Samira Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s “The Stone of Laughter”: Androgyny or Polarisation?’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 29:–4 (1995), pp. 185–201; pp. 185–6. 40. See Brian Whitaker, ‘An Interview with Hoda Barakat’, Al-Bab, November 2004, http:// al-bab.com/liiterature-section/modern-arab-writers (last accessed 1 July 2017), n.p. 41. Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, in Barakat, The Stone of Laughter, pp. v–viii; p. vii. 42. Barakat, ‘I Write Against My Hand’, p. 44. 43. Fadia Faqir, ‘Introduction’, in Faqir, In the House of Silence, pp. 1–23; p. 19; Faqir, ‘Introduction’, in Barakat, The Stone of Laughter, p. viii. 44. Faqir, ‘Introduction’, In the House of Silence, p. 21. See also Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith and Paul Cohen, Signs, 1:4 (1976), pp. 875–93. 45. See, however, Amireh and Suhair-Majaj, Going Global. 46. Mona Katawi, ‘Masculine Identity in Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter’, Al-Raida, 21:104–5 (2004), pp. 111–12; p. 111. 47. Mona Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny: Passing as Masculine in Barakat’s Stone of Laughter’, in Lisa Suhair Majaj, Paula W. Sunderman and Therese Saliba (eds), Intersections: Gender, Nation, and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 162–79; p. 163. 48. See Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny’ and Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s “The Stone of Laughter”’. Page references for citations from Fayad will henceforth be provided in the main text. 49. A subtle irony pertains to the fact that Khalil eroticises the figure of a male writer on whose ‘strong, supple forearm’ he imagines laying his head (p. 114). 50. Faqir, ‘Introduction’, In the House of Silence, p. 22. See also Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 84. 51. Barakat, ‘I Write Against My Hand’, p. 45.

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52. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Now (London: Routledge, 1988). 53. Barakat, ‘I Write Against My Hand’, p. 45. 54. See Keith Harvey, ‘Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 344–64; pp. 358–9. 55. See Whitaker, ‘An Interview with Hoda Barakat’. 56. Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s “The Stone of Laughter”’, p. 185. 57. Khalil is at first somewhat attracted to his cousin Zahra but then transfers his desire to her brother Youssef. Aghacy links this to the progression of the war and to Khalil’s increasingly urgent desire to remain uncontaminated by normative masculinity – that is, heterosexuality (see Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s “The Stone of Laughter”’, pp. 187–8). Khalid’s misogyny thus reads as symptomatic. There are moments when Khalil does seem to evince desire for women, but this tends to entail a triangulation: he desires (to be) the woman his male beloved desires (see, for example, pp. 68–9). 58. Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny’, p. 171. 59. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 60. I follow Hadeed’s distinction between ‘homosexuality’ as ‘a compelling sexual attraction’ and ‘homoeroticism’ as more diffuse and encompassing of opposite-sex desire (Khalil Hadeed, ‘Homosexuality and Epistemic Closure in Modern Arabic Fiction’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 45 (2013), pp. 271–291; p. 273). 61. Fayad, by contrast, argues that the narrator ‘excribes’ Khalil or makes him, as a conventional male, disappear (Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny’, p. 178). 62. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: Gender and the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 147. 63. The dead have a tellingly liminal status for Khalil: he sees posters of martyrs as ‘souls hanging in the limbo of the street’ (p. 42) and thinks that a corpse ‘bears only a passing resemblance to its living owner, just enough to leave a crack through which doubt can creep in and out . . .’ (p. 56). 64. Ken Seigneurie, Standing by the Ruins: Elegaic Humanism in Wartime and Postwar Lebanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), pp. 14–15. See also Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasib (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 26–7. 65. See Seigneurie, Standing by the Ruins, pp. 1–34. 66. Judith Butler, ‘Gender’, in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), cited in Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), p. 171. 67. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 22. 68. Massad, Desiring Arabs, p. 40. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 69. Constructionism emphasises socially determined, so somewhat malleable orientation, whereas essentialism rests on physically determined, so fixed identity: see Hadeed, ‘Homosexuality and Epistemic Closure’, p. 276. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 70. Apter, Against World Literature, p. 169. 71. A related term is takhannuth, effeminacy. Hadeed suggests that the symbolic function of the mukhannath – the dictionary definition for which encompasses bisexual, effeminate, powerless, impotent and weak – is to police the borders of acceptable masculinity (see Hadeed, ‘Homosexuality and Epistemic Closure’, pp. 276–7). This resonates with Judith Butler’s theorisation of a necessary outside that enables normative bodies to emerge as bodies that matter (see Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 16). All dictionary definitions derive

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72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82.

states of post/coloniality from J. M. Cowan (ed.), The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Urbana: Spoken Language Services, 1994). Aghacy claims that Barakat has described Khalil as ‘sexually deviant’, but does not provide the Arabic expression (Aghacy, ‘Hoda Barakat’s “The Stone of Laughter”’, p. 188). Sofian Merabet relates a (real) traumatic incident in which a doctor invokes ‘the pejorative term, lūṭī (son of Lot), generally used to describe gay men in Lebanon’ instead of ‘the neologism mithlī, as in mithlīyya (sameness, i.e., homosexuality), a word the doctor had certainly come across before’. The same doctor then calls his patient ‘a shādh (pervert in Arabic)’ (Sofian Merabet, Queer Beirut (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), pp. 38–9). ‘Queer’ can be translated either as gharīb, which means strange, obscure, difficult to understand, or as foreign. Same-sex desire, in medical discourse that is starting to be reclaimed – as Merabet notes (see above) – evokes similarity or sameness, also evident in the English ‘homosexuality’. In English, however, queer deliberately exceeds this logic. Apparently ‘kuweer’ is gaining acceptance in cosmopolitan Arabic-speaking circles. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 23. Faqir, ‘Introduction’, The Stone of Laughter, p. viii. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, trans. Steven Rendall, in Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 75–83; p. 77. Rosen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Politics of the Pure Word’, p. 55. Walter Benjamin argues that transmission of the message (what is symbolised) at the expense of the poetic (symbolising) is the mark of a ‘bad’ translation. For him, the afterlife of translation is not interesting in terms of what it reveals about the subjectivity of later readers but, rather, because of what it tells us about untranslatability (see Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, pp. 75, 78, 81, 82). Butler, ‘Gender’, cited in Apter, Against World Literature, p. 167. Rosen argues that Benjamin disavows ‘the irredeemable loss of authority at the very heart of language’ and mistakenly re-erects the translator in confrontation with an original that she or he attempts to redeem (Rosen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Politics of the Pure Word’, p. 16; my emphasis). Language is always already secured by opening itself hospitably to difference, so is a site of de- and restructuration before it enters an inter-linguistic domain (see ibid. p. 18). Rosen, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Politics of the Pure Word’, p. 15. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. On Khalil as un sujet clive, see also Fayad, ‘Strategic Androgyny’, p. 167. Khalil’s resistance to procreative masculinity contrasts interestingly with Benjamin’s suggestion that an original text’s meaning functions like a ‘seed’ that ‘intimate[s] realization’ (Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, p. 77).

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Part III The Post/Colonial Present: Crisis and Engagement in Global Context

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Chapter 18 Anglophone Arab Autobiography and the Postcolonial Middle East: Najla Said and Hisham Matar Tahia Abdel Nasser

I

n the twenty-first century, the form of the Anglophone Arab autobiography might be regarded as a renewal and renovation of that initiated in the twentieth by Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, Fatima Mernissi, and others. Such writers opened up new routes between the Arab world and the West in English-language memoirs that traversed divides both personal and political, and that helped map the newly recognised geographies of Arab diaspora. More recently, writers such as Ahdaf Soueif, Ghada Karmi, Najla Said and Hisham Matar have in their memoirs adapted the characteristic themes of their predecessors for a post-9/11 present in which the global ‘War on Terror’ has renewed stereotypes of the Arab/Muslim ‘other’, and in which the questions of Palestine and of the precarity of the Arab world more generally have become increasingly urgent. Though Anglophone Arab memoirs have been limited in quantity compared to autobiographical writings in Arabic and French, their production has in the twenty-first century been accelerated by regional crises that have demanded representation in a global terrain. Having achieved a critical mass, the genre today represents a primary means by which global audiences are exposed to new imaginings of and engagements with the political, social and cultural upheavals of the region, to its enduring conflicts and contradictions. A prominent device assumed by the contemporary Anglophone Arab memoir is that of the ‘return narrative’. In 2013, Najla Said (b. 1974), daughter of the preeminent critic Edward Said and a theatre actor, published Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (henceforth Looking for Palestine), a memoir which focuses on the author’s upbringing in the United States and her later discovery of Palestine. In 2016, Hisham Matar (b. 1970), a London-based Libyan novelist, published The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between (henceforth The Return), a memoir of the author’s return to post-Qaddafi Libya after a thirty-three-year search for his disappeared father. These memoirs, whose appearance dovetailed with significant upheavals in the Arab world, focus on key moments in the Middle East. Said returns to Lebanon in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90) and to Palestine in the 1990s during her father’s historic visit there, and her memoir was published immediately prior to the Gaza War of 2014. Matar revisits Libya’s colonial history in a narrative of return set before the Libyan Civil War (2011–present), and his memoir was published during the events of that highly visible crisis.

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Looking for Palestine and The Return represent a new form of transnational literature that explicitly seeks to cut across the Orientalised circuits of literary and cultural exchange by which memoirs from the Arab world are typically written, published and read. They trace personal and political trajectories that draw attention to the Middle East of the twenty-first century and that explore the dynamics of return in this rapidly changing context. By closely attending to these memoirs of return, I aim in this chapter to reveal how the genre of Anglophone Arab autobiography engages established networks of literary transmission and reception, and, in so doing, sheds new light on the Middle East during a time of widespread change and misunderstanding. The term ‘diaspora’ has a vexed history in the Middle East. It has, however, recently acquired strong critical currency in studies of Arabic literature that focus on questions of dispossession, migration, exile from the homeland, and assimilation into new cultures. Gayatri Spivak notes ‘old and new diasporas’ that produce transnational forms of writing.1 Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter emphasise ‘postcolonial diasporas’, a concept which encompasses Arab, especially Lebanese and Palestinian, migrations to the West and beyond.2 Carol Fadda-Conrey suggests ‘transnational diaspora’ to refer to the interstitial locus of Arab-American identity and writing.3 Against this strain of thought and criticism, Edward Said rejects the term ‘diaspora’, positing instead the Arabic ‘shatāt’ (dispersion or exile) as well as ‘dispossession’ to characterise Palestinian experience in the place of a term that implies the impossibility of return and the assimilation into the host culture.4 Further, the deployment of the term ‘postcolonial’ to describe the Middle East is fraught with controversy, especially in light of the continued colonisation of Palestine. Patrick Williams notes the pitfalls of both ‘postcolonial’ and ‘diaspora’ in his examination of Said’s work, a critique that may be adopted in examinations of Anglophone Arab memoirs. He explains: For Said, as for his people – dispersed, dispossessed, if not automatically diasporic – the struggle for justice and return in the liberated space of the post-colonial goes on. Their achievement, and the concomitant end of exile, would be just one of the reasons why, for Said, such a thing as a postcolonial diaspora could never exist (p. 102). Along the lines of such criticism, I would like to pivot towards the concept of the ‘transnational’ as one of greater interpretative power when considering the genre of Anglophone Arab autobiography. While texts associated with this genre do often engage questions of diaspora, this term potentially obscures their even broader engagement with the traumatic histories that have seen the widespread dispersal of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians and nationals from other Arab countries around the world. Focalised around a range of transnational experiences beyond the diasporic, they raise new questions about affect, identity and cultural production at a time when such have become increasingly pertinent for Arabs both at home and abroad. To address Anglophone Arab autobiography in light of these questions, I turn to the work of Stuart Hall. Hall fruitfully suggests two means to conceptualise the relationship between identity and culture in transnational contexts. The first is a collective one that stresses shared culture, history and ancestry as grounds for a stable identity that is sought and expressed through (literary) representation. The second emphasises

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the differences by which identity is constituted – as history, culture and power are in a process of constant and continuous change, identity and its representation become ‘matter[s] of “becoming” as well as being’.5 As he notes, ‘What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say “in our own name”, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical’ (p. 234). Identity thus becomes ‘a “production” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ and ‘the “I” who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, “enunciated”. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific’ (p. 234). It is from the perspective of this second understanding of the relationship between identity and culture that I read the memoirs under discussion. Hall acknowledges other problematic connotations of the term ‘diaspora’ – namely its deployment by the Zionist movement as a justification for its quest to establish a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Seeking to distance himself from this interpretation, he uses ‘diaspora’ in a more metaphorical sense, to refer to hybridity and difference in general rather than to a specific national identity connected to a sacralised homeland to which it must return. He writes: We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of this backward-looking conception of diaspora – and the complicity of the West with it. The diaspora as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (p. 244; emphasis in original) The memoirs I discuss in this chapter both embody and express the alternate, more general and metaphoric sense of diaspora articulated by Hall. They are important transcultural artefacts that contribute to the growing body of Anglophone Arab literature in the post-9/11 world.6 However, and due to the problematic historical connotations of ‘diaspora’ as noted by Said, Williams and Hall, I refer to these memoirs not as ‘diasporic’, but rather as ‘transnational’. I propose that these memoirs be read as part of a broader category of transnational literature, a category characterised by various forms of Arab migration, displacement, exile and relocation around the world beyond the exclusively diasporic. Said’s and Matar’s memoirs appeared at the moment of renewed crisis precipitated by ‘the Arab Spring’ as well as by new developments in the Israel-Palestine Conflict. They explore the effects of upheavals in the Middle East and revisit the histories of Palestine and Libya from the 1970s. Read alongside one another, they offer new transnational models and forms that contest the Orientalised reception of Arabic literature and suggest ‘return’ as a new modality in Anglophone Arab writing. They thus cumulatively represent a renegotiation of Arab identity and culture in transnational context. Further, their circulation in English provides an important means by which to complicate and contest the often misrepresentative accounts of Palestine and Libya in Anglophone and, more broadly, Western cultures. As Karim Mattar notes: ‘the genre of Palestinian life-writing is a uniquely compelling means to transmit the archetypal features of Palestinian reality – exile, diaspora, dispossession, occupation,

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and war – to international audiences otherwise exposed mainly to foreign, corporate narratives, if to any at all’.7 Likewise, the genre of Libyan life-writing might be considered to draw attention to the little-known history of Libya in particular and to the political abuses there that are wilfully ignored by the West. As Layla Al-Maleh concludes of Anglophone Arab autobiography more generally, it might be said that a generation of Anglophone Arab writers who have grown up in the West have brought hitherto unexplored experiences and histories to Western readers.8 I now turn to Said’s and Matar’s memoirs in more detail so as to flesh out the contributions made by their return narratives to the genre of Anglophone Arab autobiography, newly conceived as a transnational one. In so doing, I highlight how their unique engagements with questions of transnational Arab identity and of the Middle East complicate a contemporary Orientalist imaginary of such defined by misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

Looking for Palestine Born in the United States in 1974, Said grew up in New York at a time of intense political instability in the Middle East and of the widespread misrepresentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West. In 1992, she undertook a trip to Palestine with her famous father. The result of this experience, her memoir Looking for Palestine, offers unique insight into questions of Arab-American identity in the United States as mediated by what was in her family the overarching question of Palestine. The memoir was adapted from Said’s one-woman play Palestine, which was performed off-Broadway in 2010. In a sense, it grew out of Said’s desire to reach a wider audience than was possible in the theatre, as ‘a more comprehensive written version’.9 She notes: ‘With a great deal of outside encouragement and support, in 2009 I turned my life story into a play, and the play has now evolved into this book. I performed the play Off Broadway for two months, and I continue to perform it all over the country.’10 By her account, she needed to be coaxed into writing her story due to insecurities about her ‘authority to speak’ about the Middle East (p. 254), an anxiety that relates to what Hall describes as practices of representation that are intimately intertwined with the position from which we speak or write.11 As her particular story, the play-turned-memoir is Said’s attempt to work through her confusion about the Middle East and her anxieties about the representation of this region in the West. As such, it belongs to a wider canon of cultural production by second- or third-generation Palestinians living abroad, also including Suheir Hammad, Anne-Marie Jacir and Lina Meruane.12 Looking for Palestine problematises Orientalist conceptions of Middle Eastern, especially Palestinian and Lebanese identity in the United States, conceptions to which Said responded so acutely in part due to the influence of her father. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said notes: The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed.13

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Extrapolating from Edward Said, Hall underlines the role of representation in creating and distorting the Orientalist subject’s self-identity: ‘Not only, in Said’s “Orientalist” sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes [of representation]. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as “Other”’.14 Such circumstances only intensified in the 1980s contexts of Said’s upbringing, as the excesses of both the Lebanese Civil War and the Arab-Israeli conflict continued to feed into a United States political and cultural imaginary of the Arab as violent, terroristic, and radically Islamic, as ‘other’. Said, to a degree internalising these attitudes, thus saw and experienced herself as other in the United States and felt that she had no authority to speak about a Middle East whose reified image in the culture so sharply contrasted with her own sense of self and identity. Said begins Looking for Palestine with an account of her Arab-American background and ends it with a reflection on the post-9/11 moment of renewed stereotypes of and hostility towards Arabs and the Arab world more generally. Recollecting Orientalist television and popular culture representations of Arabs during her youth, she notes that such images waned as the Lebanese Civil War came to a close and arose once again in post-9/11 America. With particular poignancy, she recounts how in the 1980s she sought to identify with the dominant culture by distancing herself from the political upheavals of the Middle East and, by extension, from recognition of her own heritage. In this way, she sets the scene for her momentous and indeed revelatory discovery and acceptance of her Arab-American identity in early adulthood. The memoir opens with an unexpected disclosure. In her very first sentences, Said writes: I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a Jew in New York City. I began my life, however, as a WASP. I was born in Boston to an Ivy League literature professor and his wife, baptized into the Episcopal Church at the age of one. (p. 2) Echoing Hall’s account of the many cultural ‘presences’ that infuse any given identityposition or formation, she proceeds to parse the complexities of her multifaceted American, Episcopalian and Arab identity by detailing her White Anglo-Saxon Protestant girlhood, her friendships with Jewish Americans, and her upbringing in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood. Further complicating her narrative of self, she tells of how as a Chapin schoolgirl she was introduced to prominent figures in the worlds of both Western academia, such as Cornell West, and of the Palestinian Resistance, such as Mahmoud Darwish. Growing up in the midst of this multitude of powerful and influential presences was, as one might expect, thus ‘confusing and unsettling’ (p. 2). The most powerful of such presences was undoubtedly that of Edward Said. From the outset of Looking for Palestine, and throughout the memoir, her father’s formative impact on Said’s evolving understanding of herself in her and her family’s American milieu is evinced in the language by which she articulates the ‘East/West’ dynamic against which her early life was (unconsciously) set. Framing her account of how this dynamic affected her personally, she notes, alluding to the work of her father, that

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the ‘“East” as seen through a Western lens, becomes distorted and degraded so that anything “other” than what we Westerners recognize as familiar is not just exotic, mysterious, and sensual but also inherently inferior’ (p. 5). She then details how she was to absorb an essentially Orientalised image of herself, leading to a disconnect with her family. Too young to understand the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics, and overwhelmingly exposed to images of Arabs and Muslims as ‘violent terrorists’ (p. 52), ‘violent, machine-gun-wielding lunatics’ (p. 52) and ‘angry’ (p. 52), she recalls ‘looking back in the mirror’ and feeling ‘confounded’ (p. 63). Ironically enough, this experience took place during the very same period in which her father was writing Orientalism. This atmosphere only intensified in the 1980s, when, in addition to the Lebanese Civil War and the Arab-Israeli conflict, images of the Iranian Revolution (1978–9) and the radical theocracy established in its wake started to saturate the media. In this period, she explains, ‘the region . . . became synonymous with all that was uncivilized, evil, barbaric, violent, and foreign in the world’ (p. 82). For Said, the upshot of her exposure to such imagery and discourses was the need to repress her Arab roots as a self-defense mechanism in the face of a culture demonstrably hostile to such. It is only after she returns to the Middle East for the first time that Said starts to come to terms with her conflicted identity and reconnect with her family. She narrates a trip to Lebanon with her mother and brother in the summer of 1982, a summer which saw the renewed irruption of hostilities related to the Civil War and the Said family stranded in Beirut. Based on her experiences there and her rekindling of ties with her extended family, she explains how she came to the realisation that ‘even if I didn’t entirely identify with Arabs as they were presented to me in America, I actually was one of them just as much as I was an American from New York’ (p. 99). Further, this newfound stirring of self-awareness starts to inflect her response to the sorts of images and discourses of Arabs that she had hitherto uncritically absorbed. She recalls reading Albert Camus’ novel L’Étranger (1942) in this period, and experiencing ‘a visceral, pained reaction to the constant use of “l’Arabe”’ in the text (p. 149; emphasis in original). Having ‘suffered through’ the book, she notes how Camus’ imagery of the mute, unnamed Arab in colonial Algeria was continuous and resonated with the images and representations to which she had been exposed in the United States. Thus newly attuned to the contemporaneity of Orientalism and to the effects of its imaginary upon herself, and guided by her father’s critical readings of such in especially Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said starts to critically reread and respond to the hitherto marginalised Arab side of her own identity.15 This trajectory comes to its culmination with Said’s second visit to the Middle East, this time to Palestine with her father in 1992. This was the year in which Edward Said was diagnosed with leukemia, and due to this the family trip assumes a doubled urgency. As Said narrates, her father, ‘suddenly aware of his mortality’, ‘had resolved himself to return [for the first time since 1947], with his wife and children, to the land in which he was born’ (p. 156). However, the experience of Palestine is vastly different for father and daughter, and the trip carries with it a distinct significance for each. For her father, ‘the trip was clearly an important, emotional one. It was as if he ached to return at that particular time, with us, to come to terms with his own history and mortality’ (p. 157). For Said, it is the disjunct between the image of Palestine to which she had been exposed in the United States and the reality of the country she encounters on the ground that becomes particularly affective and noteworthy. Amid

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the barbed wire, the lived reality of separation and apartheid, she comes into contact with a Palestine – its people, history and heritage – that contrasts radically with that that had been presented to her by the American media and in the American public discourse more generally. Looking for Palestine tells through Said’s individual story of overcoming internalised assumptions about an unfamiliar land the wider story of image and reality that has determined much of the recent history of Palestine. Comparable to other recent memoirs of return (such as those of Mourid Barghouti and Lina Meruane), Looking for Palestine also features significant reflections on the Palestinian landscape. With anti-climactic irony, Said narrates her experience of such during a car ride on her way to a hotel in East Jerusalem: There it was, speeding by my window: the Promised Land. It looked to me like nothing but a horrifically frightening place. There was greenery, but I noticed only shrubs. There was water, but I noticed only desert. And everywhere that there was a small Arab town it seemed to be surrounded by concrete slabs of unmovable earth. These, I learned, were the “settlements”.’ (pp. 159–60) Travelling through the country, she notes how Arab villages and towns are consistently surrounded by settlements, and learns that the Palestinian landscape is one that is defined not by Biblical promises of an abundant and welcoming ‘homeland’, but rather by ‘division, separation’ (p. 160). Such topographical fragmentation is matched by the linguistic and cultural distance she elsewhere experiences among the Palestinian community: ‘The Arabs spoke to me in Hebrew, or Italian, or Spanish, but never in Arabic’ (p. 160). Confused, conspicuous and self-conscious, her overwhelming experience of Palestine thus becomes one of ‘absurdity’ (p. 161). This feeling is aggravated as Said and her family continue to travel across Palestine. They visit Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus and Nazareth, eventually to cross over to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, and witness first-hand the horrors and brutality of the Occupation as these seem to incrementally mount every step of the way. However, it comes to its crux and achieves its fullest symbolic as well as emotional significance when they visit the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. Entering the camp through a military checkpoint where ‘there were army posts and intimidating soldiers manning stations all over the area, and more barbed wire than I have ever seen’, her father comments, Said recounts, ‘that the entrance gave the place “the appearance of an enormous concentration camp”’ (p. 169). It is this Palestine, Said provocatively concludes, that ‘always returns to me’ (p. 250). Another important theme that Said addresses in Looking for Palestine is that of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and their traumatic aftermath especially on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States. She recalls how the dominant culture at the time came to the ‘collective, silent conclusion’ that the perpetrators were ‘Arab terrorists’, and notes that ‘that was the moment my life changed forever’ (p. 214; emphasis in original). Forced in post-9/11 America to publicly identify herself as an Arab-American, this leads to a new quandary of self and soul. As Said explains, I don’t feel entirely American, never have, but it’s not because I don’t want to or because I don’t seem it – I do want to, I do seem it. I don’t feel entirely Arab though either, for the same reasons. But I also certainly don’t feel like any combination of the two’. (p. 217; emphasis in original)

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It is precisely against the sort of political, social and cultural demands to account for herself and her identity in post-9/11 America that Said embarks on the trajectory that was to eventually lead to Looking for Palestine. She first joins forces with an Arab-American theatre company to work on a documentary project about Arabs in America, and, learning through this experience how to better ‘bridg[e] the gap between two worlds that don’t understand each other’, soon sets out to bring her personal perspective to bear on such issues in the form of her play and, finally, memoir (p. 251). Looking for Palestine traces Said’s eventual recognition of her Palestinian identity from her childhood in an Arab immigrant family in the US, to her return to her homeland, to her alienation from an increasingly anti-Arabist American culture. This recognition is crystallised towards the end of her narrative, when she encounters a young woman protesting for Palestinian rights on Broadway and experiences an acute sense of being ‘Palestinian’ (p. 252; emphasis in original). As she recounts in her memoir, this sense comes to mediate her relationship with her American environs and to motivate her engagement with its culture. The result of this lifelong quest, Looking for Palestine thus suggests a powerful new form of transnational literature that cuts across established narratives of the Arab ‘other’ while shedding new light on personal stories and political histories typically obscured by such.

Libyan Return Matar, the London-based Libyan novelist to whose work I now turn, was born in New York, and grew up in Tripoli and Cairo. He is the author of the novels In the Country of Men (2006), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011).16 In 2012, he returned to Libya in search of his mysteriously disappeared father after decades of exile. The result of this investigation, The Return is Matar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about his father and about the violence and brutality of a Libya where the rule of law and human rights have been widely disregarded. The Return traces Matar’s search for his missing father in 2012, when the Libyan Civil War (2011–present) had in its confusion and upheaval suggested the possibility of the release of political prisoners. Jaballa, Matar’s father, was a leading Libyan political dissident who had been arrested by Egyptian security forces in Cairo in 1990, and then extradited to Libya and imprisoned in the infamous Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. No word had been heard from or about him since 1996. Elegiac in tone, The Return bears comparison with Héctor Abad Faciolince’s El olvido que seremos (Oblivion: A Memoir; 2006, trans. 2016), a memoir similarly concerned with the murder of the author’s activist father by, in this case, paramilitary forces in Colombia.17 Both memoirs elegise fathers who had been caught, and lost, in the vortex of their countries’ turbulent political histories. In both, deeply personal narratives of loss are shown to intertwine with political histories of wider impact and significance. The Return opens in London in March 2012, with Matar en route to Libya with his wife and mother in order to ascertain his father’s fate. Along the way, it recounts how the author’s family had left Libya in 1979 and settled in Cairo, and how Jaballa had continued in his dissident activities while in exile. The tension that structures and motivates the narrative is comprised of Matar’s uncertainty about what exactly had happened to his father after his consequent imprisonment. He discovers that sometime between 1990

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and 1996, Jaballa had either been moved to another wing in the Abu Salim prison, or executed. On 29 June 1996, 1,270 prisoners were executed in the prison courtyard in what came to be known as the ‘Abu Salim prison massacre’. However, when Tripoli fell in August 2011, his father was not in any of the cells in the prison or among the political prisoners who were released. This sense of uncertainty, Matar writes, had plagued his family for decades: ‘My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future.’18 After a chance encounter with another former prisoner at Abu Salim, he decides to return to Libya and discover the truth in order to honour his father’s memory and attempt to heal the wounds of the past. The Return is in some senses a continuation of the project that Matar had embarked on in his earlier novels. Both In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance are likewise concerned with the relationship between fathers and sons, and, as Barbara Harlow notes in an important recent study, both might be considered ‘autobiographical novels’.19 The novels chart Matar’s trajectory from ‘a country of men’ where boys come of age prematurely due to its pervasive violence to ‘a country that separates fathers and sons’. In In the Country of Men, the son comes of age with his father’s arrest and torture, and in Anatomy of a Disappearance, the emotional and existential impact of such a loss is investigated in detail. Though Matar has discouraged a strictly autobiographical reading of his fictional works, considering these in relation to his memoir is worthwhile and compelling insofar as the later text revisits the characters, events and themes around which the earlier novels revolve. In the Country of Men tells the story of Suleiman el Dewani, a Libyan boy whose childhood is disrupted by the political violence that surrounds him – public hangings broadcast on television, the surveillance of his family, his father’s torture by the Revolutionary Committee, and his eventual exile. After he is sent to live in Cairo, he is never reunited with his family. Anatomy of a Disappearance tells that of Nuri el-Alfi, a young man who seeks out his father after he had been exiled from Iraq and disappeared in Egypt. As with these texts, The Return is concerned with the fate of a disappeared father. Further, it aims to inscribe Matar’s particular, and particularly Libyan, story in the arc of world literary history. Throughout, allusions to and comparisons with famous sons from the literary heritage whose fathers are likewise absent or dead – sons like Telemachus from Homer’s The Odyssey, Edgar from William Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Hamlet – are made. As Matar puts it, Like that famous son in The Odyssey – like most sons, I suspect – I wished that ‘at least I had some happy man/as father, growing old in his own house’. But, unlike Telemachus, I continue, after twenty-five years, to endure my father’s ‘unknown death and silence’. (p. 32) As the memoir’s subtitle suggests, Matar’s interest is not just in the relationship between himself and his father, but also in the land that has separated them and that could yet bring them back together. Fraught with uncertainty, his return to Libya is also a homecoming of sorts, and Matar provides a nuanced and evocative reflection on his country of origin as experienced during his exile and after his return. Upon his return, he notes ‘How often exiles romanticize the landscape of the homeland’, a landscape that, tinged with nostalgia, is ‘more luminous then I remembered’ (p. 37). This is, after all, ‘the land my father loved more than anything else’, which imbues

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Matar’s experience of it with a special filial attachment (p. 38). However, it is also the land that has separated father and son, and it thus gives rise to a sense of alienation as well as of attachment: The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here. Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons . . . have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift. (p. 51) Matar proceeds to detail what is consequently rendered his fundamentally ambiguous and contradictory relationship to his homeland, one that is haunted by the ghostly presence of his father, in his account of his reunion with members of his extended family, his meetings with old friends and admirers of his father, his visit to his father’s hometown of Ajdabiya, and his return to his family home at a moment when the unfolding events of the Libyan Civil War recall the dissident activities that had taken place there in the past. Naturally, Jaballa Matar is a central narrative presence in The Return. A ‘poet turned officer turned, reluctantly, diplomat’, Jaballa, Matar learns from his former fellow inmates, would recite poetry to them during the quieter moments at Abu Salim (p. 31). Like Odysseus, he achieves an almost mythic status in the Matar household, where his story is ‘told and retold’ in ritual fashion on each anniversary of his disappearance (p. 195). Further, Jaballa’s story is linked by Matar to that of modern Libya itself. Indeed, part of Matar’s intention in this text is to rectify through his father’s tale the omissions and occlusions of official state history and of colonial history alike. He thus traces a revisionist Libyan history from the period of Italian colonialism (1911–43), when his grandfather Hamed had been involved in the national resistance movement, to that of the Libyan Civil War, when the Abu Salim prison is finally opened. Eventually, he discovers that one of his fellow inmates had in his possession an old, faded photograph of his father during his incarceration in Abu Salim. Matar and his family, who speculate upon his father dying in the Abu Salim massacre, welcome not only the certainty of truth, but also the knowledge that Jaballa did not die alone. What most terrified them during their search for Jaballa was the idea ‘of him dying alone’ (p. 209). The Return thus uncovers through its narrative of an intimate family trauma the wider collective trauma of Libya itself under the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi (1969–2011). During these long decades, writers, journalists, dissidents and other opponents of the regime were systematically and on a mass scale censored, imprisoned, tortured, executed and, if lucky, exiled. In addition to his father, these circumstances directly impacted other members of Matar’s extended family. Both his uncle Hamad and his cousin Ali had spent two decades in prison, and he recounts how another of his uncles, Mahmoud, would scribble poems on his pillowcase and then sew this into his underwear during his own twenty-one years of imprisonment in Abu Salim. The memoir comes to its culmination with Matar’s description of the Abu Salim massacre, a little-known episode in Libyan history that for the author acts as the point of intersection between the intertwined personal and political stories he is telling, and that symbolises the essential nature of the Gaddafi regime. He details how in 2011 the remains of the 1,270 executed prisoners were exhumed, and how their bones were

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ground into a powder that was then poured into the sea. No trace, he learns, was therefore left of his father – no corpse, no letters, no reports, and no confirmed sightings apart from that of an aged, blind inmate who had been in solitary confinement for decades. Despite the release of his uncles and cousins in 2011, there was no sign of his father. The Return also tells of how, prior to 2011, Matar had attempted to mobilise international human rights sentiment and to lobby the British government on behalf of his father, assumed up to that point to be still in prison. Orchestrating a large public campaign directed towards this end, he especially foregrounds the hypocrisy of the British government when, in 2004, it resumed diplomatic relations with Libya while wide-scale human rights and other abuses were still rife in that country. Such hypocrisy is powerfully suggested by Matar’s description of the ‘mothers and wives’ who, at this very same moment of rapprochement, ‘began to camp outside Abu Salim prison, holding framed photographs of their sons and husbands’ and whose ‘grief was never acknowledged’ (p. 216). Only in 2011, when photographs of those slain by his dictatorial regime started to replace those of Gaddafi in its public places, was some gesture towards an acknowledgement and working-through of collective historical trauma to become possible in Libya. While the memoir tells of a literal return, it also charts a more figurative return as well. Such is focalised around Ajdabiya, Matar’s grandfather Hamed’s hometown. By returning there, Matar feels ‘as though I were returning him [his father], in my imagination, to his father’s house’ (p. 220). This act of imaginatively burying his father in the land of his origins is raised to epic proportions in Matar’s recollection of the words of Telemachus as he, similarly, mediates on his father’s absence and dreams of his return: I wish at least I had some happy man as father, growing old in his own house – but unknown death and silence are the fate of him. . . . (p. 236) By its close, The Return reverts in its focus back towards the position of the son, who, despite his newfound knowledge about Jaballa’s fate, is nevertheless condemned to remain lost and in exile due to his identification with the loss of his father and, by extension, homeland. At this point, Matar recalls The Odyssey once again, and he realises that the passage cited above is ‘just as much about Odysseus as [it is] about Telemachus; just as much about the father as [it was] about the son . . . As long as Odysseus is lost, Telemachus cannot leave home. As long as Odysseus is not home, he is everywhere unknown’ (p. 236). This concluding note suggests not just Matar’s attempt to inscribe his and his country’s story within the epic of world literary history, but also a reimagining of that heritage from the perspective of his unique trajectory of loss. The Return was published during the fallout of the Libyan Civil War, by which point the country had descended into a comprehensive state of fragmentation, destruction and chaos. In this context, it functions to challenge Orientalist projections of the Arab world then in wide circulation in the Western media, and to refocus attention on the underrepresented history of colonialism and modernity in the region that had given

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rise to Gaddafi-era nationalism and thence the Libyan Civil War in the first place. In so doing, it stresses deep engagement with the past and its traumas as a prerequisite for a more sustainable future, both for Libya and for the Middle East at large. The production, circulation and reception in English of Said’s Looking for Palestine and Matar’s The Return suggest a new Arab transnational literature for the twentyfirst century. By directly engaging with questions of Orientalist representation, colonial history and neo-imperialism, these memoirs bring to international audiences a deeper, more nuanced understanding of and indeed vision for a new Middle East whose conflicts and crises are all too often misunderstood. They thus represent not only an important development of the genre of the Anglophone Arab autobiography, but also an important new means of cross-cultural literary and political mediation to meet the challenges of our post-9/11 world.

Notes 1. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World’, Textual Practice, 10:2 (1996), pp. 245–69. 2. See Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter, ‘Introduction: Theorizing Postcolonial Diaspora’, in Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter (eds), Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–18. 3. See Carol Fadda-Conrey, ‘Transnational Diaspora and the Search for Home in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters’, in Layla al-Maleh (ed.), Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 163–86. 4. Patrick Williams, ‘“Naturally, I Reject the Term ‘Diaspora’”: Said and Palestinian Dispossession’, in Keown, Murphy and Procter, Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas, pp. 83–103; p. 83. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 5. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (eds), Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), pp. 233–47; p. 236. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 6. See Geoffrey Nash, Anglo-Arab Encounter: Fiction and Autobiography by Arab Writers in English (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), p. 188 and Layla al-Maleh, ‘Anglophone Arab Literature: An Overview’, in al-Maleh, Arab Voices in Diaspora, pp. 1–64; p. 1. 7. Karim Mattar, ‘Review: Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor’s Tales of Life in Galilee, by Hatim Kanaaneh, and Return: A Palestinian Memoir, by Ghada Karmi’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 45:3 (2016), pp. 54–7; p. 54. 8. Al-Maleh, ‘Anglophone Arab Literature’, p. 21. 9. Najla Said, ‘My Arab-American Story is not Typical in any Way’, Salon, 28 July 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/07/28/najla_said_my_arab_american_story_is_not_typical_ in_any_way/ (last accessed 21 March 2017), n.p. 10. Najla Said, Looking for Palestine (New York: Riverhead Books, 2013), pp. 253–4. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 11. See Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, p. 234. 12. In 2013, Chilean writer Lina Meruane published a memoir, Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine) about her return to Palestine in search of the origins of her Arab surname and to learn about her Palestinian ancestry. Both memoirs appeared in the same year, remaking the memoir of return in English and Spanish from the perspective of second-generation Arabs of Palestinian ancestry in North and South America. See Lina Meruane, Volverse Palestina (Barcelona: Penguin Random House, 2013).

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13. 14. 15. 16.

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 27. Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, p. 236; emphasis in original. See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). See Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men (London: Penguin Books, 2006) and Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance (London: Viking, 2011). 17. The citation for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner in biography or autobiography reads: ‘For a first-person elegy for home and father that examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region’. ‘Pulitzer Prizes’, 2017, http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/ hisham-matar (last accessed 10 April 2017), n.p. See Héctor Abad Faciolince, El Olvido que seremos (Bogotá: Planeta, 2006) and Héctor Abad Faciolince, Oblivion: A Memoir, trans. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey (Newton Abbot: Old Street Publishing, 2016). 18. Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 145. Page references to citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 19. Barbara Harlow, ‘From Flying Carpets to No-Fly Zones: Libya’s Elusive Revolution(s), According to Ruth First, Hisham Matar, and the International Criminal Court’, Journal of Arabic Literature, 43 (2012), pp. 431–57; p. 442.

Acknowledgements I thank Najla Said for providing materials on her memoir. I am grateful to Karim Mattar and Anna Ball for very helpful feedback on the chapter.

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Chapter 19 Bare Life in the ‘New Iraq’1 Ikram Masmoudi

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he 2003 war in Iraq spawned a decade of violence, chaos and suffering. The so-called end of hostilities with the regime of Saddam Hussein opened a new era that will last for several years in which the politics and the policies of democratisation and pacification of the country will function in fact as a continuation of war. Beneath the intentions and the actions of pacification implemented in the form of building a new Iraq with democratic institutions, many battles raged, and violence is still lurking, involving different antagonistic groups and giving rise to more warring parties. All of this has perplexed and frustrated the Iraqi people, shattering their hopes for a better life, dignity and security, and revealing to them the contradictions and the paradoxes of the American occupation. It seems as though the promise of a peaceful, democratic Iraq was pitched so high that it could not be reached before the country sank deep into waves of violence and corruption that would lead to an uncertain future and a present that looks no less dehumanised and dehumanising than the awful face of the former regime. Today, [. . .] Iraq is still in the throes of not a war in the conventional sense of the word but a cycle of violence and non-violence, where the end of a war that was supposed to establish the ground for peace and to realise the aspirations for law and order was only a fertile breeding ground for more killings and more human rights abuses. These realities of the occupation with its promises, its paradoxes, and its failures have been only partially and unevenly reflected on and debated in the news, military analysis and policy reports. Iraqi authors have also started to come close to reflecting in fiction the intricacies of the events of these years. Their perspectives offer a better understanding of the different experiences in a multifaceted war, the strategies of life in the ‘new Iraq’ and the choices for the future. In this chapter, the analysis of selected novels shows how during the occupation the Iraqi people were entrapped in an unsafe, dangerous space. They were caught between the claws of the politics of the occupation and its war on terror, on the one hand, and the abuse of the lords of a sectarian war, on the other. These novels portray the ordinary Iraqi man with not much of a choice: he either kills or is killed. The category of homo sacer can potentially be extended to anyone, anywhere, anytime; one can be killed whether in the Green Zone or in the Red Zone; all the occupied space is alienating and produces ‘bare life’. Novels such as al-Minṭaqa al-khaḑrā’ (The Green Zone, 2009), Baghdad mālbūrū (Baghdad Marlboro, 2012), al-Ḥafīda al-Amrīkiyya (2009, trans. The American Granddaughter (2012)) and Ru’ūs al-ḥurriya al-mukayyasa (The freedom of the bagged heads, 2007) clearly show the continuation of war and the return to its classical duality and even its privatisation. I look in particular at the first

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[two] novels named here and examine how they shed light on the power relations between the occupier and the occupied and the privatisation of the business of war, which led to its proliferation and to the emergence of the private warrior on both the American and the Iraqi sides. In these fictional narratives, central to the understanding of the occupation are the management of the occupied space and the different tensions between the different actors inside this space, including the marines and the Iraqi translators, the colonel and his local aids, the raiders and the Iraqi family, the kidnapped American and the militia, and the translator who is torn between the militia and the marines and solves his dilemma by becoming a suicide bomber. In these fictional accounts, all of these different entities are portrayed in their conflicts and entanglements in such a way that only fiction can achieve, using an aesthetic that problematises and dramatises the human experiences of the Americans and the Iraqis in their existential struggles with life and death. Shākir Nūrī’s novel The Green Zone2 rightfully refers to the continuation of war in the form of the uninterrupted battle that goes on beneath the surface of the civil order. The novel is set in the area named the ‘Green Zone’ by the Americans and selected to be their safe haven and a citadel of law, order and culture. Five Iraqi translators cross daily into this zone and have to be screened twice every day when entering and exiting, where they work with a colonel, a chief translator and five marines. The novel builds on the relationships between these figures, which are ambiguous and fraught with hypocrisy and suspicion. Friendly on the surface, they are dominated by silent tensions and hatred. Focusing on one translator in particular, Ibrāhīm, The Green Zone highlights the choice that some Iraqi individuals in this position have made: to respond violently to the occupation. The second novel discussed in this chapter is Najm Wālī’s Baghdad Marlboro (2012),3 a fictional exploration of the past three decades in Iraq and the friendship of two war veterans – one American and one Iraqi. The American war veteran (Daniel Brooks), who had served in 1991 Gulf War and killed many innocent Iraqis, comes to seek forgiveness from the families of the victims and to meet the narrator and hand him a relic he had found in the Iraqi desert with the narrator’s name and address on it. When militiamen abduct Daniel, the narrator is confronted with an awful choice: either to kill this American or be killed. Tirelessly trying to evade the fatality of this alternative and hunted by the militia, the narrator sacrifices his house, his life, and his hometown to escape war-torn Baghdad and the lords of the sectarian war. This novel and The Green Zone offer two different approaches to dealing with violence, but I argue that neither of these responses is satisfying to build a safer Iraq and that Iraq remains no place to live a life of integrity for the Iraqi subject. [. . .] In the first section, I explore the geography of the occupation and the organisation of the occupied territory opposing two paradigmatic spaces: the city (the Green Zone) versus outside the city – the inside/outside division of space under the occupation. I examine the depictions of the city, the paradoxes the occupation creates and the humiliating practices it involves and show how these practices deepen the divisions and inspire more violence. [. . .] The [second] section focuses on the violence in the country and the homo sacer in the ‘new Iraq’. The contrast between the choices made by Ibrāhīm in The Green Zone and the narrator of Baghdad Marlboro highlights the fraying of the path of hope for the end

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of the spiral of violence that still engulfs the country. This section also examines how, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, ‘places no longer protect, however strongly they are armed and fortified. Strength and weakness, threat and security have now become, essentially, extraterritorial (and diffuse) issues that evade territorial (and focused) solutions’.4 Using an anthropological analysis and approach, I conclude the chapter by examining the background and secular politics of the suicide bomber, focusing on the character of Ibrāhīm as translator/suicide bomber.

The Eternal Return of Occupation ‘Good morning! Do you know that this is the twelfth time that Baghdad has fallen?’ Then he went on counting its falls throughout history. Najm Wālī, Baghdad Marlboro Genghis Khān is here anew, but this time around he is wearing a military garb and boasts on his arm the American flag. Shākir Nūrī, The Green Zone What hurt him most was that the invaders were lowly, and he couldn’t get along with them. They didn’t rise up to his history or to his ancestry. This was a painful paradox. Shākir Nūrī, The Green Zone As noted earlier, in Shākir Nūrī’s The Green Zone five Iraqi translators cross into the Green Zone daily and have to be screened twice every day when entering and exiting it, where they work with Colonel David, Ms Betty (a chief translator who has earned not just a job in the zone but also the heart of the colonel in charge of it) and five marines. The marines – who like rap music and find themselves performing tasks they do not necessarily believe in – have the job of checking and clearing the translators. They also conduct with the help of the translators different home raids of suspected Iraqi terrorists. Although the marines are friendly with the translators on the surface, their relationship to them is dominated by silent tensions and hatred. As the tensions in the novel build and culminate with raids, killings, kidnappings and death threats, we witness the emergence of the private warring parties. Ibrāhīm, the protagonist, who is one of the Iraqi translators working in the Green Zone, enjoys a good deal of trust from the colonel, David, and a good margin of mobility. Ibrāhīm can cross over from one space to another. Ibrāhīm’s meditations and reflections on the new invaders of his country ‘They didn’t rise up to his history or to his ancestry’ are ambiguous as he is tormented by the return of the occupation and by the lowliness of the new occupiers. Is he to remind the Americans of the centuries-old history of Iraq, the cradle of civilisations, or to remind the Iraqis of a painful history made of successive and bloody invasions and occupations? The answer is a double ‘yes’: while Ibrāhīm, the narrator of the story, tries to boast a long history, he is aware at the same time that it is a painful history that whips him with the re-enactment of the blows of mythical and perennial invasions. Iraq’s history goes back to Ur, but the American colonel in the Green Zone in Baghdad, in

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his ignorance and arrogance, mistakes the remains of Ur for a military base and is ready to demolish it until he is reminded of its historical importance by an enlightened co-worker: ‘The American colonel was completely ignorant about the land he was walking on’.5 The remembrance of the mythical age of the beginnings in his country is a source of mixed feelings of pride and pain that weigh heavily on the conscience of Ibrāhīm, who is humiliated by his job as a translator working for the American occupier. Two iconic dates are among the most painful, one echoing the other in a kind of a mythical re-enactment of the past: the 2003 invasion and fall of Baghdad brings back the bloody memory of the resounding fall in 1258. Ibrāhīm recounts that it is these two dates that frustrated drunkards inscribe on the pillars of al-Rasheed Street on their way home late at night and then pee on until they have erased them. From Ur to Hūlāgū to Tamerlane to the British to the Ottomans, the Iranians, the Hashemite and the more recent bloody coups, ‘the idea of the eternal return’ of the same imposes itself forcefully on the narrator: We were governed by the idea of the eternal return . . . The war wanted to take us back to Ur as if we were governed one more time by the myth . . . the myth of the war this time around. The idea of the eternal return has repeated itself nineteen times, and history keeps repeating itself, and Baghdad is besieged. (p. 72)

The Inside/Outside Divide I did not imagine that the country was really divided into two: the Green Zone and another area that I cannot name as it is outside human life. Shākir Nūrī, The Green Zone In the beginning there was the fence. Jost Trier, quoted in Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth The only safe place was inside the walls. That’s why they called it the Green Zone. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers, are shown by barracks and police stations. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Historically and symbolically it is the wall that defines a city by drawing a clear geographical demarcation between the inside and the outside, as the myth of the creation of Rome tells us. ‘There is no Rome without the walls’.6 From its beginning, walls marked the US occupation of Iraq. Blast walls, roadblocks, military checkpoints and barbedwire barriers were used to surround the Green Zone in Baghdad. With the election of the Green Zone as a safe haven, a place for law and order, and with the erection of walls and security devices around it, the spatiality of the occupation first manifested itself in the assertion of the inside/outside divide that separated the city from the lawlessness and the disorder of the outside. This separation evoked an old and similar distinction that separated the Old Continent (Europe) and the ‘New World’ of the colonies, a distinction

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developed in Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth.7 According to Schmitt’s concept, the Amity Line created a distinction between the realm of law (Europe) and the realm of nature (America). Similarly, during the years of the occupation, ‘the new world’ was now Iraq, where the legitimacy of American military actions knew no limits to target the ‘barbarians’ of the ‘rogue state’, which was expected to absorb all kinds of violence and abuse, so that Iraq and the world could be free of the evil of terrorism. The history of the area elected by the occupation authority to be the locus of power and law did not start with the American takeover of Baghdad. It was a part of the city that bore the marks of a spatial divide in Baghdad and had already been surrounded with walls during Saddam’s time. The Green Zone gives us insight into the history of the palace of the Green Zone, Karrādat Maryam. The palace was initially built west of Baghdad in the Hārithiyya neighbourhood in the late 1950s; it was later used and expanded by Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s. On the banks of the Tigris, this area, including the Republican palace, became home to the American and British embassies. The area was connected to the opposite bank of the river with a bridge called ‘the Hanging Bridge’, which in Saddam’s time provided open access between the two sides of the river. The Americans closed the bridge and closed any other access to the Green Zone. This place has been there for a long time, but obviously its new name, ‘Green Zone’, is an American addition that was originally meant to evoke a haven of peace, fertility and hope. Looking for safety and security and finding the commodities and equipment the area offered, the Americans needed only to annex a few more convenient locations, such as al-Rashīd Hotel and a convention centre, in order to make it ‘chez soi’, ‘a place with borders that could be made tight and impermeable, from which trespassing could be effectively barred and entry could be strictly regulated and controlled’.8 For that purpose, the Americans had to close the bridge, cutting off the zone from the other side of the river, and to fortify the perimeter of the area with ‘seventeen foot-high blast barriers made of foot-thick concrete topped with coils of razor wire’.9 In other words, the area where the Republican Palace stands and where the elite of Baghdad lived during Saddam’s time had already been conceived along an inside/ outside division of space in Baghdad – a city inside the city. But ‘there is a big difference between the walls of yesterday and those of today’ (p. 91), laments Ibrāhīm. The Americans appropriated the established division and emphasised the separation with even more walls, more guards and a sophisticated technology. How then did this appropriation of the old divide and its reinforcement inaugurate a new era and announce a rupture from the past? Ibrāhīm wonders how these segregating principles upon which the Green Zone was founded can promise democracy in the new Iraq. He is keen in reminding us of the history of walls in Baghdad, such as those found in the Kaljiyya neighbourhood, which go back to the Mongolian invasion and are named after their soldiers. The area of Kaljiyya was instituted as a red-light district by the British and was surrounded by high walls during the monarchy to hide the sight of the prostitutes from the people. In other words, walls were placed there to hide an ugly reality. [. . .] This brings us face to face with the first contradiction in the building of a ‘new Iraq’ on the dividing principles of the past and on more segregating devices such as the walls and the different checkpoints that separate the different areas and neighbourhoods in Baghdad.

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The American Generals felt that they inherited this area to establish in it their power, calling it the Green Zone. At every intersection, huge Abrams tanks secure the protection, while tens of convoys of armoured cars patrol protected by concrete blocks scattered in the middle of the roads in order to block car bombs. On the roof of the buildings, the snipers stand with their guns, and in the skies the helicopters hover. (p. 95) The Americans’ occupation takes hold of what is known among Baghdadis as Karrādat Maryam or the Republican Palace, cutting it off from the outside world by erecting more walls and implanting new security devices and guards in order to make it a peaceful locus of order, law and culture. This law and culture have their origins not in the word, which builds bridges between the people, but in the fence, re-enacting the old idea of the fence as security and separation. The culture that is built on fences and walls segregates and creates an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and mistrust across the divide. In the novel, the relations between the Americans and the Iraqis who work in the Green Zone (the translators, for example) are tarnished with deeply rooted fears and feelings of suspicion despite the different opportunities of connection through common interests in language, music and dance. The American soldiers make Iraqi rap music and create songs, and the Iraqi translators are invited to the Americans’ tango parties in the marble ballroom at the palace. But all these expressive possibilities fail, and the language of violence and fire is the only code that passes between the two parties. As a consequence, the spiral of violence becomes full blown with the rise of attacks on the Green Zone and terrorist hunting raids. Ibrāhīm is amazed at the organisation and order of the Green Zone. Everything in it – the lifestyle and social life, the government and business models – is modelled according to patterns in use in the United States, so much so that many call the Green Zone ‘Little America’. This comparison evokes the image of a larger America – the early America that was the land of wilderness and lawlessness inhabited by the barbaric, as John Locke formulated it: ‘in the beginning, all the world was America’.10 But the land of wilderness and chaos is now Iraq, where the Green Zone is just an island. With the occupation of Iraqi land and the new spatial organisation, it is as if the Americans have taken with them their mythology to re-enact the history of their continent during their civilising and ordering mission in the heart of the Middle East, thousands of miles away from home. ‘For the inhabitants of Baghdad just to get close to the Green Zone could mean their immediate death with a bullet’ (p. 93). No one can access this fortified citadel with its high walls, recounts the narrator, except with a permit issued from the highest level of the occupation authority and after one is subjected to fingerprinting and eye scanning as part of the dramatic and radical security measures, especially after it became common for some people to deceive the security with false identity cards and false permits in order to breach the zone’s wall. [. . .] In the geographical ordering of the space under the occupation, the civilised world of the Green Zone stands in stark contrast with what is dubbed the Red Zone – the residential and dangerous neighbourhoods of Baghdad ‘where the mob, the populace and the filthy terrorists live’ according to the Americans (p. 14), and where security is poor, the traffic is always jammed, insurgents are everywhere, and lawlessness and chaos are the norm. The erection of fences, walls, boundaries, checkpoints and

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police stations and the production of hierarchies are what make the spatial geography of colonial occupation. Accompanying the marines to a Sunni village to look for potential terrorists, Ibrāhīm feels as if they are crossing into a totally different country completely at odds with the Green Zone. There is no traffic pattern, the streets are full of potholes and cars maintain a distance from the Americans’ Humvee. In this lawless space, nothing protects the Iraqis, says Ibrāhīm, except the American soldiers’ use of ‘the killing force’ (p. 131). These descriptions evoke Frantz Fanon’s description of the space or the town of the colonised and its disorder and lawlessness: The town belonging to the colonised people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how, they die there it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness, men live there on top of each other . . . The native town is a town on its knees.11 In Baghdad Marlboro, the Red Zone is not just the dangerous neighbourhoods of Baghdad in contrast to the area of the Green Zone, but the whole country and the chaos into which it has sunk, its trash piling up in every corner and threats of killing and kidnapping everywhere. In his flight from one town to another, hiding from the militia who have invaded his house and threatened to kill him, the narrator of Baghdad Marlboro comes to a conclusion about the depth of the chaos from his observations: He who leaves the capital of trash, killing and kidnapping, whether he heads south or north, east or west, will see trash piling up on the streets, mountains of trash flooding residential neighbourhood so that the spill reaches over the sidewalks . . . as if the whole country has become a ruin, a garbage can unique of its kind.12 The distinction between the Green Zone and the Red Zone also calls to mind the old medieval Islamic distinction of space with the political duality between Dār al-Islam and Dār al-Ḥarb. In this Arabo-Islamic distinction, Dār al-Islam is the territory where Islamic law, peace and civilisation reign. ‘Dār al-Ḥarb, on the contrary, is a lawless territory; it is the abode of the barbarians and is characterized by a permanent state of war’.13 Dār al-Ḥarb is in a permanent state of war both with itself and with Dār al-Islam. In the geography of occupied Iraq, the story is changed: the words Islam and salām and ḥarb are euphemised and replaced by the use of the colours green (a symbol of fertility, hope and peace) and red (a symbol of danger, blood and war), with no allusion to religion. The duality is stripped of its religious connotations. The opposition in the occupied space of Iraq is now between Little America (the abode of peace), where law and culture reign, and Baghdad – formerly Dār al-Salām (the Abode of Peace) but now Dār al-Ḥarb (the Abode of War) – which is in a state of war internally and externally, with lawlessness ruling the day. As Ibrāhīm wanders in his city meditating about his country and its new fate, he summarises the past and the present: A city that apparently no one wants to continue to call the ‘Abode of Peace’ since for decades it was prepared to be the ‘Abode of War’, and it ended being an occupied city. We cannot speak about it in a relaxed way, and it is in a coma now, completely wounded and defenceless to the invaders, as to the stupid politicians, without walls protecting it, a city disputed by history in the past and by politics in the present, while it was burnt twice but is still fighting for life. (p. 96)

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Following the old distinction between Dār al-Islam and Dār al-Ḥarb in radical political Islam, the relationship between the two worlds is called ‘jihād’. The new relationship between the two worlds redefined as the Green Zone and the Red Zone is now reduced to a security issue. US politics of security replace jihād with the ‘war on terror’, a new concept that equates the old and the new distinctions despite the dropping of the old religious connotations. As Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen put it, In this context there is a significant kinship between religious fundamentalism and the politics of security, which may be understood as a new religion because it also reduces all political problems and issues to a ‘fundamental’ problem of security. . . . What unites Islamic terror and the war against terrorism today is that in both a cosmic battle between order and disorder is at the forefront. (p. 445) Nūrī acknowledges through his protagonist that, in contrast with the tightened security of the Green Zone, Baghdad’s frontiers were left wide open from all sides to the other newcomers, ‘the fundamentalists’, as Ibrāhīm calls those who entered the ‘land of the battle’ and spread to all corners of the city, whose sky now ‘is full of helicopters hovering like insects with their huge noses, as the Baghdadis like to describe them, and controlling the city tirelessly’ (p. 92). During the invasion and in the first days of the occupation, Baghdad was left to its fate and was in the throes of unprecedented levels of violence and chaos, where looting and the lack of basic services such as electricity and water made the major headlines. [. . .] In an article in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman went as far as talking about the predominance of the Hobbesian state of nature in Iraq after Saddam’s fall: ‘The Iraqi people were “in a pre-political, primordial state of nature”. For the moment Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not Bush’.14 As Derek Gregory argues, however, this state of nature was not an eternal state of nature; it was of course produced: ‘“Bush” begat “Hobbes”’ (p. 220). But no one is better placed than Ibrāhīm to give us an insider view with the appropriate language and the right metaphors. He knows this city very well: The city looks as if grabbed by an iron fist, just like it used to be before the fall of the regime. It is bathing in endless chaos. Nothing has changed in essence because the old power is still alive and was not totally killed off, as it may have seemed in the beginning. There is a mixture of Saddam’s loyalists, nationalists who joined the resistance, and Islamists both Sunni and Shi‘a, gangs and militias; all of them found in this time an excellent opportunity and good luck. Everything is permitted for ‘Ali Bābā: forbidden traffic of all kinds – weapons, cigarettes, drugs, money and valuable artefacts. (p. 92) ‘Ali Bābā, a character from A Thousand and One Nights, takes on a particular meaning in this context. The reference to him conjures up the robberies of the forty thieves who accompanied ‘Ali Bābā. By extension, it alludes to all those who enjoyed a free hand and took advantage of the absence of law in the early days of the occupation: ‘those who attacked everything and ransacked shops, taking alcohol, perfume, tobacco, watches, jewellery, computers in all immunity, without being charged or condemned’ (p. 95). The occupation forces’ unwillingness to establish civil order, to prevent pillage

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and theft, and to provide security for the population was seen as a major failure that angered and frustrated the people and eventually turned opinion against them. Another character from A Thousand and One Nights invoked in the narrator’s reflections about his city and the chaos into which it has been plunged is Scheherazade. In her capacity as witness, she can testify to the majesty and splendour of Baghdad in its golden age. Scheherazade, whose statue in Baghdad was miraculously spared from bombing, is persistent in her desire to live on: ‘For the second time she escaped a decreed death’, exclaims Ibrāhīm, but ‘no doubt she must be witnessing a totally different and alien life for Baghdad’ (p. 96). The contrast is total, as the narrator observes, between the past and the present of the city, between the Abode of Peace and the Abode of War, in which the doubted newcomers divide up the space and define it anew according to their own interests and calculations and in which some (the occupiers and their collaborators) end up dancing the tango in the marble ballroom of the palace in the Green Zone, while others (suspect locals and ‘terrorists’) are locked up in mobile prisons and camps spread throughout the desert, a new American invention for the occupation and the war on terror: The city of A Thousand and One Nights whose minarets used to compete with the moon sleeps tonight doubtful, with all the suspects who landed here. The Green Zone seems safe, and its bars, its restaurants and its small markets give to the night a false meaning and an artificial flavour just like the ambience of a black and white movie. (pp. 46–7) These two popular figures, Scheherazade and ‘Ali Bābā, symbolise the two paradigmatic forces, evil and good. Evil and violence in the form of ‘Ali Bābā are let loose in the Iraqi society under the occupation, but the desire for life and order incarnated in the figure of Scheherazade, who, defying death and war, persists as a good omen. Letting the country initially plunge into lawlessness and chaos would ironically justify the colonial mission – in a replay of the first colonisation – by allowing the occupying forces to take Iraq ‘from darkness to lead it into light’, as former lieutenant general Jay Garner, the first civilian administrator of occupied Iraq, put it and as Colonel David formulates it in The Green Zone when he tells Ibrāhīm that they are there to kill the barbarians, those strange, uncivilised creatures ‘Gog and Magog’, clearly betraying with this discourse the ideological and irrational underpinnings of the occupation: ‘We came to fight Gog and Magog’ he says, ‘yes, the strange creatures that appeared here, or so we understood’ (p. 53). [. . .]

All Wars Considered: Terror and Sectarianism I did not understand why pedestrians were the preferred targets for American soldiers. Perhaps it was because of their silent walking, which rendered their movements strange, like the movements of ghosts who had to be made to disappear with precise bullets. And that was their fate . . . The gate of death is open to us and to all passers-by. Shākir Nūrī, The Green Zone

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For the Iraqis who experienced the Gulf War in 1991 with its invisible soldiers fighting at a distance and its hit-and-run attacks, the war during the occupation was different, taking weary Iraqis back to the age of real battles on the ground, with the return of visible soldiers made of ‘flesh and bone’ attacking the insurgents and other militants and, above all, with the overwhelming presence of the injured body that no longer could be hidden. The narrator of The Green Zone puts it this way when he explains Ibrāhīm’s opinion: He got tired of wars, and he was not ready to welcome a war where the invisible warriors were transformed into real soldiers made of flesh and bone, with their military suits, their machine guns and their equipment. They are no longer dropping their bombs from high in the sky and then safely returning to their bases; they are now occupying our streets and government buildings, looking us in the eye and killing us as they please. (p. 64) With the occupation, the sky is no longer the theatre of operations, and the essential and classic antagonism and duality of the war are back; they are now re-inscribed in the paradigm of the war on terror and the militia war, with its kidnapping and slaughtering of hostages. Although we clearly know the identity of those who occupy Iraq, we do not really know who the lords of the sectarian war and the different militias are. The narrator of Baghdad Marlboro, whose house is invaded by militiamen, reflects exactly on this new striking reality of the sectarian war: ‘Those who occupy Iraq, he says, we know who they are, but those who occupy my house and other houses, nobody knows who they are’.15 In Baghdad Marlboro, the sectarian war is described as something even beyond the classical duality of the war, involving the primitive condition of multiplicity, an exacerbated state of nature, in which everybody is killing everybody, and where, thanks to information technology and the Internet, the kidnapping and the killing can sometimes be as fake as the resounding Islamic names of the organisations carrying them out and just staged to abuse people and extort ransoms: ‘Everybody is killing everybody’, says the narrator, ‘and I am running away from men who wanted me to be one of those for whom killing has become like a daily exercise or a live entertainment’ (p. 262). The landscape of the sectarian war is even more complex and volatile to describe because the identity of the war actors is blurred and difficult to track. What we know is that the lords of this war are gangs looking for money and opportunities, as the story of the kidnapping of Daniel Brooks shows. This man who visits Iraq looking for forgiveness for the killings he committed in the 1991 War (even though his commanding officer forced him to do it) comes loaded with dollars he has saved in America and wants to give to the families of the victims. His abductors take all this money, and this is why they do not ask the narrator for more money; they just ask him to kill Daniel. These private warriors are like ghosts. Nameless, with covered faces, they are just referred to as ‘the veiled ones’ in Baghdad Marlboro. They hide their real identities behind resounding Islamic names they give themselves. These unknown, armed men storm into the narrator’s house, offering him a deadly alternative. Their methods are in fact modelled on the dealings of the American occupier, as the narrator says, with the only difference being that the American occupier’s identity is known, whereas these men’s identity remains unknown. After they invade the narrator’s house, they

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blindfold him, and take him to a secret location, giving him an ultimatum to kill Daniel before they let him go: They blindfolded me after they took me with them and led me to the car. Thank god, they did not cover my head with a plastic bag, which was a widespread practice in those days. The Americans used it before the kidnappers started using it with their victims. They only blindfolded me with a piece of dark fabric. (p. 236) The depth of this sectarian war that fills the newspapers is frightening to the narrator of Baghdad Marlboro. After he runs from those who have threatened him, he eagerly looks for any news about the American hostage Daniel Brooks, following the news of the sectarian war and the widespread kidnapping in the newspapers, on television, as well as on video footage and websites that specialise in showcasing the daily killing and beheading of hostages and victims. The new war is now staged on the screen in the form of recorded footage, whether it is real or fabricated, just for the purpose of extorting money, as in one ‘tragicomic kidnapping’ story related by the narrator: Since the month of April and after the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, kidnapping, which was unknown in Iraq, was on the rise to the point that those groups not only gave themselves Islamic-sounding names to cover up for their real objective and abuse for money but started fabricating stories of kidnap, such as the news of that tragicomic kidnapping when an Iraqi organisation claimed that it was keeping an American soldier hostage and threatened to kill him. The paradox is that the footage that was posted on an Islamic website attracted the attention of the marketing coordinator of Dragon Models Company, who confirmed that the soldier on the footage and the gun used are in fact plastic toys manufactured by the company. (p. 260) The victims of this sectarian war are not only Iraqis but also the Americans working in Iraq, the foreign journalists, the visitors and the innocent random people. But after following this war in the media for a while, the narrator gets tired of it and stops looking for news about Daniel. I didn’t want to read what was just confirming the same events over and over. What is the point reading newspapers that do not relate anything except for slaughtering, killings and explosions, while death pours from every mouth? I said to myself, whether you take a bus or walk on the street, buy this or that merchandise, sit in a café or at the doctor’s office, go into a hotel lobby or say hello to your neighbour, you don’t hear anything except for news of killing . . . [W]here did this violence come from? (p. 262) In both novels, The Green Zone and Baghdad Marlboro, the Red Zone as the zone of disorder, deadly attacks and death gains more and more space, covering most of Iraq – in particular what was called the Sunni Triangle and all the Sunni areas, with the exception of Kurdistān. In fact, organised and spontaneous forms of insurgency and resistance to what was seen as a colonial occupation did increase in number and

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intensity as people’s feelings of abuse and humiliation grew. The situation became more complex when attacks against the occupation forces were doubled by internal fights and targeted actions among rival warlords of different sects as well as by attacks targeting those among Iraqis who helped, worked with or dealt with the occupying forces, including members of the Iraqi Governing Council. All this called for decisive action on the part of the occupation forces. The insurgency and the new forms of violence and organised terror gave the war on terror a fully-fledged legitimacy and existence. In addition to trying to re-establish order, the strategy of invoking the war on terror had the advantage of boosting the American mission in Iraq and diffusing the real burden of the occupation, as Derek Gregory argues: ‘The generic invocation of “terrorism” was an attempt to rehabilitate one of Bush’s central arguments for the war, to obscure the reality of occupation and to try to rescue the American mission in Iraq by reflagging it as another front in the continuing “war on terror”.’16 The politics of security adopted by the occupation forces in an effort to stem the violence failed to pursue human rights as a measure and a method of pacification. Instead, the Americans committed horrific abuses and in this way produced the reverse of pacification, increasing feelings of resentment and more vengeful violence. The adopted strategy transformed a politics of security into a politics of insecurity and terror. [. . .]

Individual Choices How does the Iraqi novel respond to the challenges and abuses of the politics of security enforced by the Americans and to the sectarian violence engulfing the country? What are the alternatives and the choices offered in the novels to navigate the complex labyrinth of life in a landscape filled with death? Is there a way to escape the violence? Two different responses are formulated in two of the novels examined here: one responds to violence by engaging in the cycle of killing and the other by escaping the non-alternative of death or death. But neither response, as we will see in the analysis, is satisfying, and neither helps solve the dilemma in which Iraq finds itself. Ibrāhīm, a translator working with the Americans, ends a suicide bomber in the Green Zone; his answer to the violence and the abuse he suffers from both the Americans and the militias is to kill himself and to commit more killing. He becomes the private kind of warrior that proliferated in Iraq during the heyday of the occupation and continues to this day. His choice contrasts with that of the main character of Baghdad Marlboro, who rejects all violence and after two years in hiding from the sectarian war ends up leaving the country altogether and finding refuge in the United States after he falls in love with the widow of one of his friends. Neither response offers an adequate or humane solution to the problem of the proliferation of killing: either one stays in Iraq and is a potential homo sacer or one leaves the country.

The Making of a Suicide Bomber In The Green Zone, Ibrāhīm might have felt satisfied with a translation job with the Americans and housing offered in the Green Zone. But the reality is far more complex because he feels bad that he is working with the occupiers of his country and abused

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when his work pushes him to become an informant. He feels imprisoned in the Green Zone, as if he is silently witnessing a crime from afar. [. . .] Confused and torn between feelings of guilt and necessity, [Ibrāhīm] is tortured; he becomes prey to contradictory thoughts. He has to provide for his family, but he feels like a traitor serving the occupier and helping him in his war by ‘offering his country and his countrymen on a silver platter’ (p. 52). In addition, he is overwhelmed with humiliation as on a daily basis he is subjected to a thorough security clearance before entering and exiting the Green Zone. The friendship between the translators and the marines does not interfere with their job, but for Ibrāhīm there is still a feeling of humiliation and bitterness when he sees the behaviour and the arrogance of these soldiers who never tire of searching us every time we cross the checkpoint . . . We used to wait for a hand sign, a word, or a nod from a soldier to get the permission to enter to a dear part of our city, which they locked and surrounded with gates and guards . . . Every time we crossed this checkpoint, Neil and his friends searched us from head to toe; and sometimes we didn’t understand their reactions or didn’t understand them at all. Neil would yell at us, asking for our IDs; he would examine the signature of Colonel David and rub our IDs against his butt to dust off our photos, saying: ‘I don’t want to see your ugly photos before lunch’; then he would throw them to us, and sometimes they would fall short of our hands, so we had to bend down in order to pick them from the ground, and he would affect a hypocritical smile, saying: ‘We are friends, but orders are orders’. (pp. 14–15) Whether crossing into the Green Zone or into the Red Zone, Ibrāhīm cannot hold his head high because on both sides stand electronic devices, soldiers, barracks, checkpoints, electronic gates by which he needs to be cleared so that he can either cross or evade the eyes of the resistance and militant factions. [. . .] Caught between the American forces and the resistance, the Iraqi translator lives in the nightmare of a dilemma. Between the threats and the warnings from the militia and the resistance, the humiliation meted out by the Americans and the absence of protection outside the Green Zone, the translator is exposed and threatened. He can die at any time, and anyone can kill him without his murder being considered a homicide in the lawless space of occupied Iraq. This zero degree of protection makes the Iraqi linguist a perfect candidate as homo sacer. The militiamen play with the translators’ nerves, Ibrāhīm says. ‘They have put on their list nine thousand men to liquidate, a terrifying number if we add the families’ (pp. 64–5). [. . .] In the Manichean discourse underpinning the war and the occupation of Iraq and espoused by both sides, good and evil fight it out until good triumphs. This simple and narrow way of thinking is tempting and contagious for Ibrāhīm, who feels resentment regarding the dehumanising ways the marines treat the people. Driven by this Manichean division, the idea of exploding these soldiers crosses Ibrāhīm’s mind from the time he accepts the job as translator, but he gives it a wait; he tries to get to know and develop a friendship with the marines, given that they are already facing many challenges outside the Green Zone:

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When I saw their ways of dealing with the people entering and exiting the Green Zone, I thought of blowing them up, these evil bastards. In their own world, there is only good and evil, a stupid and disgusting division of things, as if they were blinded and lost the sense of all other colours except for black and white. Their miserable sight carrying tens of kilograms of military heavy equipment made me wait before moving ahead with my idea to turn them into flying dust; there were already other people hunting them outside this place. (p. 17) Ibrāhīm’s intention to kill Americans matures throughout the novel, however, and peaks with the growing pressures he faces from Colonel David and the militia who kidnap [his fiancée and later wife] Viviane. The novel frames Ibrāhīm’s act in folkloric and mythological terms that escape a rational explanation and prepare the reader to understand his action and empathise with him in his predicament. It is in his ancestral village and its folklore that Ibrāhīm finds his inspiration. His natal village, Tal al-Yāqūt, situated in the province of Nāsiriyya, is where millennial history meets the myth and the imagination and where ancestral heritage and culture meet folkloric practices. In the novel, Tal al-Yāqūt perhaps stands for what is known today as Tal al-Muqayyar, a region located in the heartland of Mesopotamian civilisation and where the patron deity of the ancient city of Ūr, Nana, was adorned in the shrine of the Ziggurāt. In the novel, it is in this chosen site that the insurgency against the occupation is the strongest. When the colonel rebukes Ibrāhīm for this connection as if he has a share in the attacks, he is asked to spy on his own people, but he cannot do that: ‘The people of your village have the highest record in targeting and killing Americans. . . . You have to realise, Ibrāhīm, that your people are responsible for the deaths of tens of American soldiers’ (pp. 172–3). Although the colonel does not know what to do with Ibrāhīm, whether to keep him as a translator or to dismiss him from his job, he warns him and remains convinced that all those who live outside the Green Zone are terrorists. On a visit back to his village, which he had left many years ago, but now hoping to reach a deal with Viviane’s kidnappers, Ibrāhīm is welcomed by the people of the village with a peculiar festivity drawn from traditional folklore: the Zīrān dance. It is in the inspiring moment of the dance that Ibrāhīm finds not only motivation and determination but also ecstatic feelings. This traditional and folkloric dance is quite widespread in many places in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia and Iraq. It is performed barefoot on fire and burning coal, the sound and rhythm of the drums slowly taking the performer into a state of trance so that he is not burned. He repeats words such as ‘Allah is Truth’ until he loses consciousness and reaches an ecstatic condition of purification and liberation from his body or sometimes until he is liberated from a jinni who presumably has possessed him. But what is new in Nūrī’s use of the dance is that with the occupation the villagers of Tal al-Yāqūt turn it into an instrument of galvanisation and encouragement to inflame the people and to rise against the invaders and push them out. The evil jinni is the occupier that they want to exorcise from the country to purify its soul. The dance is elevated into an imaginary of freedom and liberation. Ibrāhīm wonders: Is it possible that the people of his village turned into human beings walking on fire at night in order to plant explosive devices on the roads at dawn? The American occupation made them recycle these dance gatherings, which they had forgotten about until the invasion, and now American patrols called them ‘the

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Red Feet’. The rule was that if someone walked on fire at night, he would perform a suicide attack at dawn. Everything changed in the dance, and the jinni had no place in it any more. They transcended reality and exploded their bodies without feeling anything. They united with fire and purified their bodies and minds. . . . The Zīrān dance became a way to train the soul to get ready for the adventure, make a foray and cross into death through incantations, prayers, dance and purifying fire. (pp. 187–8) Welcomed by a Zīrān dance party on the night of his arrival at his ancestral village, Ibrāhīm is fascinated by the fire and captivated by the dance and the performers’ defiance. So is this how they welcome me, with the dance on coal? I asked one of the attendants sitting next to me, and he whispered into my ear: ‘Every time our men dance, this means they are considering a great action’. . . . One of the villagers whispered to me: ‘Do you want to walk barefoot on fire?’ and this meant that I would pledge to perpetrate a suicide attack at dawn and get ready for that. (pp. 186–7) Earlier Ibrāhīm had made a deal with the militia who kidnapped Viviane. He was supposed to facilitate the entrance of a suicide bomber into the Green Zone, at which point Viviane would be freed. But after he was convinced that the militias were playing him and that Viviane was left to die from hunger and thirst to punish her for working with the Americans, he decides to take matters into his own hands by transposing the Zīrān dance from one space to another, from his village Tal al-Yāqūt to the tango ballroom in the heart of the Green Zone, where he will mix tango with Zīrān in an act of transgression and blow himself up. Ibrāhīm, who has nothing more to lose and feels he must stand up for his dignity, conceives of this act as vengeance and a sacrifice for all those who have died, all the victims, whether they are innocent Iraqis or innocent Americans. It is for all the victims that Ibrāhīm in the Green Zone – named after the prophet Ibrāhīm (Abraham), who was ready to sacrifice his son according to God’s commandment – claims his action: This time, for the sake of Viviane, I decided to bury my cowardice forever. I will not go to the ballroom shaking and empty-handed like a rat. I will shed my humiliation for once, hold my head high and avenge all the victims: Murād and Richard, who lost their limbs; Bachelor, who died from a splinter; and Viviane and all the corpses piled up at the central morgue. (p. 200) Ibrāhīm’s act is also the last chance for him to recover his dignity and to cleanse himself of the impurity that clings to him because of his job. This is how he urges himself right before he goes to the tango party: ‘Don’t forget that the exam of dignity passes by here, from the Green Zone, so make it red with your own blood so that it may become green again for others’ (p. 202, emphasis added). When he is ready to act, though, he gets confused. In his head, tango music gets mixed up with the sound of the drums. He suddenly discovers the depth and the strength of his dark side: ‘That I possess a basis and a ferment that enables me to be the greatest terrorist in the world’ (p. 203, emphasis added).

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‘But what is a terrorist’, wonders Ibrāhīm in all his lucidity? Trying to define a terrorist, he makes the analogy to the condition of being homeless because, for him, just as nobody is homeless in essence, nobody is born a terrorist but rather made into one when Americans kill a father in front of his son, rape a girl before her father’s eyes, smash the head of an old man or put an innocent in a steel container until he dies and kill innocent pedestrians and accuse them of being terrorists. . . . They make the terrorists in their labs. (p. 203) Ibrāhīm’s suicide is not framed in the vocabulary of martyrdom and jihād. There is no trace in the novel of the vocabulary of Islamic militancy. Nevertheless, his suicide does have a sacrificial dimension in that Ibrāhīm considers that he is avenging all the innocent people who have died during the occupation and all the bodies he has seen piled up in the morgue of Baghdad. It is not an Islamist motivation that pushes Ibrāhīm to his final act. He is a secularminded linguist who loves literature and the English language, drinks alcohol and goes to dancing parties. It is obvious that he does not fit the stereotype of the suicide bomber we see in the news and/or on Internet videos. Ibrāhīm belongs to a different category of suicide fighter that disturbs old patterns because his religious subjectivity is the biggest blank in the portrait drawn of his character throughout the novel. Rather, the novel focuses on Ibrāhīm’s growing political subjectivity until his act materialises in the attack. His politics is absolutely secular: we do not know anything about his religious and ethnic affiliations, whether he is Sunni or Shi‘a or whether he is a Kurd or an Arab. The author purposely keeps these facts outside of the reader’s reach because he does not see in them any relevance to the situation in which Ibrāhīm finds himself. In addition to Ibrāhīm’s secular politics, Nūri insists on portraying his character time and again in bars, where he often takes refuge after work – in this way stressing the facts of his non-religiosity and secular orientation. Ibrāhīm never attends mosque or speaks of Islamic militancy. This forces us to eliminate the Islamic or religious motivation as a justification for his act and to look at his suicide as devoid of any metaphysical consideration. Although conceptualising his act as vengeance for those who have died wrongfully, Ibrāhīm is not sacrificing himself for his country. He is acting alone, unconnected to any terrorist organisation or militia group. His suicide operation cannot be identified as ‘religious terrorism’, as this type of act is often described and analysed in the media. If Ibrāhīm’s act is empty of any religious dimension, does he thus embody another example of the homo sacer? We saw how he is captive in a zone where his countrymen consider him a traitor while the Americans deem him a potential terrorist and how he might be killed by the militias, while at the same time he has no expectation of protection by the Americans. The life of this Iraqi translator is now bare life that is ‘exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed’ in Agamben’s words. Ibrahim is subject to death threats from both the inside and the outside. His death is almost decreed, and so he feels like a living dead man, caught between two worlds where he is neither fully living nor fully one of the deceased: ‘He was no longer able to distinguish between life and death’ (p. 202). In these circumstances, where no protection is afforded him as someone working for the Americans, Ibrāhīm falls into the category of the homo

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sacer whose life and death are without value and who can be killed without sacrifice. However, instead of being subject to this fate, Ibrāhīm claims back his agency as an individual and as a political human being by acting on his own life. He prefers to kill himself in sacrifice for all the war victims rather than being killed by any militia. The sacrificial dimension of his act redeems his death and his terror act. By acting on his life, he recaptures his sovereignty over his own fate and body, seizing back the responsibility for his own life and death from both the Americans and the Islamist militias as well as from the resistance groups who represent no less of a threat to his life. The sacrificial dimension of his act saves him from being a homo sacer by dedicating his action to all those who died wrongfully in the war and occupation. In the case of Islamic militancy, suicide operations are claimed as martyrdom, and the suicide bomber is called a martyr. May Jayyusi analyses the category of the martyr as the exact opposite of Agamben’s homo sacer: If homo sacer is he who can be killed and not sacrificed, then the martyr inverses this relation to sovereignty, transforming himself into he who can be sacrificed and not killed. Many testaments of martyrs are signed with the words ‘the living martyr’[,] ‘ash-shahīd al-ḥayy’. They can be sacrificed but not killed, the Koranic verse ‘Do not count those who are martyred for the sake of God dead but alive with their lord’ is the signature of every bayān.17 Ibrāhīm’s act has no signature, and he leaves no testament except that in his act he wants to avenge Viviane, his wife, his friends who died or lost limbs and all those who have ended up in the morgue in this occupational war. If, according to Agamben, homo sacer is ‘life that may be killed but not sacrificed’, and if the martyr, according to Jayyusi, is ‘he who can be sacrificed and not killed’, Ibrāhīm’s act makes him he who can be killed and sacrificed.18 His sacrifice redeems him, just as the martyr is redeemed by his faith and his belief, but with the difference that Ibrāhīm does not claim to do his act with the expectation of any metaphysical rewards or of being still alive with his lord. His act is truly devoid of any metaphysical connotations. With Ibrāhīm’s destructive act, the marble ballroom is turned into dust. It is not just the life of the suicide bomber that is destroyed but also the lives of all the guests of the tango party – ‘ministers, presidents, generals, officers, businessmen and advisers, and also leaders of the Iraqi Ṣaḥwa [awareness groups]’ (p. 199). They, too, can be said to have become ‘bare life’. Ibrāhīm’s terror act transgresses the order and the security inside the Green Zone, and it defies all the walls and all the gates and blurs the frontier drawn between the inside and the outside, bringing the fate of the homo sacer to the heart of the Abode of Peace. All those who die at the tango party embody the condition of the homo sacer; they become bare lives with Ibrāhīm’s act. Here the novel emphasises the idea of the end of the city as a safe social space, the end of the wall as a protective device. From an enclave of law and order and a haven of safety and peace, the Green Zone becomes red, the locus of the materialisation of the state of exception and a zone of indistinction, an ambiguous zone of order and transgression, law and lawlessness, safety and danger. Ibrāhīm’s case is similar to the cases brought to light confirming the data showing that there is little connection, if any, between suicide-bombing operations and Islamic

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fundamentalism. As the study by Robert Pape shows, out of the 188 cases of suicide operations perpetrated from 1980 to 2000, the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group that is adamantly opposed to religion, were the leading instigators of suicide attacks.19 Ibrāhīm’s act may then be analysed within the framework of recent research suggesting that suicide operations are in fact an expression of ‘the political culture of death that has emerged in modern times in the Middle East’, an idea put forward by the political scientist Bruno Étienne, who places suicide operations in the Middle East and North Africa in their context of long histories of violence, whether colonial violence or the brutality of violent dictatorial regimes (quoted p. 50). In this context, it is possible to look at Ibrāhīm’s act as the cumulative effect of the violence he has been subjected to as an Iraqi who has lived under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and its successive wars and who has witnessed first-hand the violence, the contempt and the humiliation of an occupational war with its walls, checkpoints, abuse and disregard for human rights. And this is what Ibrāhīm himself refers to as being the ‘basis’ and the ‘ferment’ that has prepared and pushed him not just to be a terrorist but, in his own words, to be ‘the greatest terrorist in the world’ (p. 203).

Full Circle You have a week to make up your mind and take a decision. Remember we are at war. It is either you kill the enemy or you be killed. Najm Wālī, Baghdad Marlboro We are in hell, and all that is left to us is to help those who do not make it worse. Najm Wālī, Baghdad Marlboro What happens to the unnamed narrator of Baghdad Marlboro is very surreal and Kafkaesque, as he himself puts it many times throughout the narration. This comparison is not fortuitous because what is really taking place, according to the narrator, surpasses in its strangeness and luridness any fictional reality. Who could have imagined that my house could become a fictional place; for sure if Kafka were still alive, he would have been jealous of me. . . . If this story didn’t happen to me, nobody would have believed it; he would have thought it to be a creative fiction of a novelist who wanted to imitate Kafka, no more and no less than that. (p. 251) A well-to-do businessman in Baghdad who has just lost his wife in a bombing finds himself one day, out of the blue, entangled with militiamen in the kidnapping of an American hostage. The American Daniel Brooks comes from the United States to visit the narrator in his home in Baghdad and hands him something with the narrator’s name on it that he had found in the desert during the Gulf War and had kept for more than ten years. Daniel Brooks has also come with sums of money for the families of the victims he had killed in the war. He is spotted by a militiaman right away, though, and kidnapped. His abductors are easily able to kill him after they take his money, but they

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instead want the narrator to do the killing so that he can clear himself of the dishonour of having dealings with an American, or they will kill him. The militiamen give the narrator this ultimatum and invade his house to force him to act. Thus pushed out of his house, the narrator has nowhere to go because many would just blame him for not simply accepting the task of killing an American. He leaves town in order to escape the vicious circle of killing. ‘All that I thought of was to leave as quickly as possible so that nobody could force me to kill’ (p. 248). [. . .] On the run for more than two years, having to change jobs every time he changes towns, restless and without peace, this character strangely reminds us of the figure of the Iraqi war deserter who escaped the war front so that he did not have to kill. This is how the narrator of Baghdad Marlboro thinks of himself as being ‘like a war deserter; I didn’t want to go to the front so that I wouldn’t have to choose between killing or getting killed’ (p. 247). The war deserter is a figure associated with the Iran-Iraq War under the Ba‘ath and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein [. . .]. But why does a man in flight in occupied Iraq compare himself to a figure who belongs to the past and who is supposed to have been buried forever with the fall of the regime that created it? Why is the memory of the war deserter still vivid in the mind of the Iraqi person twenty years after that war? Does this mean that the situation in which Iraq finds itself today is no different from its situation in the years of the Iran-Iraq War, with its coercion, abuse and disregard for human life? For the Iraqi individual, in the midst of the sectarian war and the chaos engulfing the country, the situation has not changed from the days when one deserted to avoid killing.20 In this regard, the narrator and main character of Baghdad Marlboro is just like the characters of ‘Īsā, Khiḍr and other war deserters who either ended up captives or found death or, if lucky, were able to find refuge in another country. In the occupied Baghdad of Baghdad Marlboro, the narrator seems to follow in the footsteps of these war deserters, reenacting the same pattern, as if nothing has changed. The dictatorship has fallen, but the choices offered in the present are no different from the choices presented in the past. In Baghdad Marlboro, the past and the present come full circle, offering the new-old alternative of to kill or be killed irrespective of any superficial change in circumstances. It is this fatality that a taxi driver, an average citizen with whom the narrator discusses the situation in Baghdad, underscores. ‘“The bottom line, sir,”’ says the taxi driver to the narrator, ‘this defenceless citizen – like me and you, who is armed only with a strong desire for life, who hasn’t secured himself in the Green Zone like the politicians of this country, for whom high concrete walls built around their houses block off even the air – this citizen who goes out every day looking for his bread and the bread of his kids, he has to accept his fate and the fatality of a death prepared for him by this “obscure” enemy’. . . . ‘Death in Baghdad’, continued the driver, ‘might strike at your doorstep, in the street, at the bus station or before boarding a taxi, on the highway or in a checkpoint, before entering your workplace or when exiting, in al-Karkh neighborhood or in al-Ruṣāfa. We sleep and wake up with the muzzle of a gun directed at our temples.’ (pp. 310–11)

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In the sectarian war, the defenceless Iraqi citizen ends up as bare life in the new Iraq, with only a desire for life but without any protection or rights. He is abandoned to death and can be killed by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Mark Danner points to this vulnerability in his essay ‘Iraq: The War of the Imagination’: As Iraqis do their shopping or say their prayers they are blown to pieces by suicide bombers. As they drive through the cities in broad daylight they are pulled from their cars by armed men at roadblocks who behead them or shoot them in the back of their neck. As they sit at home at night they are kidnapped by men in police or army uniform who load them in the trunks of their cars and carry them off to secret places to be tortured and executed, their bound and headless bodies to be found during the following days in fields or dumps or by the roadside.21 After being away from his home and from Baghdad for more than two years, the narrator hears of the death of Daniel Brooks and decides to return home and confront the militiamen who invaded and took possession of it. He buys a weapon, as all Iraqis have done, but every day he surprises himself by postponing the confrontation. He is close to committing suicide because of his indecision and his lack of determination when he finally gives up everything, the house, life in Baghdad and the killing that it entails to be there. He decides to leave the country after he discovers he is in love with the widow of his friend. The Iraqi deserter in the ‘new Iraq’ rejects violence and chooses to leave the country as the only way out of the spiral of killing in the sectarian war and the war on terror, as if to suggest that the new Iraq after the American occupation is no place for life and no place for safety and peace and that the only way for Iraqis to live in peace today is to leave their country. Here we come face to face with Iraqis’ only alternatives: either they become suicide bombers, killing themselves and others, or they reject killing and desert not just a war but the country. Is it possible for the Iraqi subject to live and remain in Iraq without having to kill or to be killed? Neither The Green Zone nor Baghdad Marlboro is able to answer this simple question positively in the war-loaded landscape of the new Iraq.

Conclusion Using different fictional representations to portray the experiences of the occupation and the sectarian war, this chapter about ‘bare life’ in the ‘new Iraq’ shows two men trying to navigate existential tortuous paths amid terror, kidnapping and death threats. Feeling besieged, these characters try to recover their freedom and their agency by choosing two antagonistic routes. Both become bare life and embody the fate of the homo sacer, who can be killed by anyone without his killing becoming a murder. Feeling abused, Ibrāhīm of The Green Zone choses to kill himself in a suicide operation. The narrator of Baghdad Marlboro becomes like a war deserter, fleeing Iraq and thus re-enacting a strategy (desertion) of the past. The past and the present are equally dehumanising, and the only choices left in these situations of abuse during war and occupation are narrowed down to desertion and suicide bombing. With these choices, is it possible for the present in Iraq to see a future less frightening than the awful past?

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Notes 1. This chapter was originally published in Ikram Masmoudi, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 134–83. Minor edits have been applied here. 2. Shākir Nūri, al-Minṭaqa al-khaḑrā’ (The Green Zone) (Dubai: Thaqāfa li al-nashr wa al-tawzī‘, 2009). 3. Najm Wālī, Baghdad mālbūrū (Baghdad Marlboro) (Beirut: al-Mu’assasa al-’arabiyya li-aldirāsāt wa al-nashr, 2012). 4. Zygmunt Bauman, Society under Siege (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 88. 5. Nūri, The Green Zone, p. 71. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text; my translations throughout. 6. Quoted in Bulent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lausten, ‘The Camp’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 88:4 (2006), pp. 443–52; p. 444. 7. See Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003). 8. Bauman, Society under Siege, p. 88. 9. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 14. 10. Quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 36. 11. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 32. 12. Wālī, Baghdad Marlboro, p. 257. My translation. 13. Diken and Lausten, ‘The Camp’, p. 445. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 14. Quoted in Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), p. 217. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 15. Wālī, Baghdad Marlboro, p. 234. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text; my translations throughout. 16. Gregory, The Colonial Present, p. 237. 17. Quoted in Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 48. 18. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 83. 19. Quoted in Asad, On Suicide Bombing, p. 54. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 20. See Ikram Masmoudi, War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 28–84. 21. Mark Danner, ‘Iraq: The War of the Imagination’, New York Review of Books, 21 December 2006, p. 84.

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Chapter 20 Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature? Iranian Literary Blogs and the Evolution of the Literary Field Laetitia Nanquette

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his chapter will explore the role and importance of blogs in the Iranian literary field. To what extent did they prove to be a crucial element of literary changes in the 2000s and some of the 2010s, and how did they help redefine Iranian literary discourse? What formal or topical innovations did they introduce? How far did they democratise the literary discourse and empower writers who were not part of it previously? What were the conditions that led to their proliferation and decline, and how was censorship crucial to this process? Persian blogs are much less prominent today than they were ten years ago, but one can see the continuation of their influence in new media like Facebook and Telegram, the most widely used messaging application in Iran (Etehad). Analysing the Iranian literary blogosphere, or ‘Blogistan’ (its practices, its products, its interactions with more established literary communities and institutions), I will explore the role literary blogs play in Iranian literary networks, and will ask whether their history (proliferation and then decline) is evidence of a literature in the process of becoming global. I do not see blogs as more representative of literary trends than print books but do consider them to constitute an intervention in the literary field that needs to be acknowledged and studied for the part it played in recent evolutions. My conclusion will be that they have brought some evolutions but nothing like a revolution. This discussion contributes to the postcolonial analysis of transnational identities and cultures in so far as it examines the specific case of the Persian blogosphere as a transnational circulation of a literary product. It also answers some of the postcolonial reflections present in this volume, which seek to identify the manifestations of socio-political and cultural hegemonies. In this, I follow Bourdieusian scholars such as Sarah Brouillette, who argue that ‘the social production of literature often translates into literature itself’.1 While Brouillette considers the influence of the global literary marketplace on texts by South Asian authors writing in English, what I endeavour to do is to analyse the mechanisms of literary blog production and the effect they had on the whole literary field. Like Brouillette, I believe it is important to ‘encourage more analyses of the relationships between literature, politics, and economics, and therefore more interaction between humanities and social sciences approaches to cultural production’ (p. 176).

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The term ‘postcolonial’ has rarely been applied to Iran, because the country was never formally colonised by Western powers, although it was semi-colonised by the UK and then the US.2 Despite the very anti-colonial agenda of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its implementation of an Islamic regime that repeatedly calls for resistance to Western hegemony as much as to the Eastern bloc model, ‘Neither East nor West’ being a fundamental slogan of the 1979 revolution, Iran is still a country that is in some ways under the hegemony of Western powers, at least culturally. There is also a disjunction between the official anti-Western discourse and the interest in the West among the actual population. The example of translation is telling in this matter. In the last five years, around 30 per cent of literary texts published in Iran have been translations, and they enjoy considerable commercial success.3 Although the official rhetoric of the Islamic government is against cultural imperialism (tahājom-e farhangī), Iranian market trends align with English-speaking cultural dominance across the globe. As I have stated elsewhere, English is the most translated language in Iran, with some 7981 translations between 1979 and 2011, significantly more than French and Arabic, which account for only around 700 translations each . . . In the same 30-year period, however, there have been only 350 translations from Persian in the US.4 Iranian blogs first emerged in 2001, when Hossein Derakhshan (Hoder) founded his own weblog in Persian and put together a guide for Persian speakers to blogging on the free site, blogger.com. The critics Arash Falashiri and Nazarin Ghanavizi write of the rapidity with which interest in blogging expanded: ‘Within a few months, the first free blog service, Persianblog.ir, appeared, initiated by three young engineers in Tehran. In less than a year, it had more than one hundred thousand blogs in Persian.’5 The popularity of blogs exploded, in line with global trends: ‘blogging reached a high popularity in 2004, the year that is also called ‘the year of blogs’ throughout the world’ (p. 128). A blog, or weblog, is a personal site that has entries, ‘posts’, usually in reverse chronological order, characterised by its interactivity and dialogue with readers through comments on posts. In contrast to a website, a blog is easy to set up, usually free, and does not require much technical knowledge. I define a literary blog as a blog that engages with literature, for example by publishing texts, reviews of books, interviews with authors, or discussion about the literary world. I accept that some literary blogs may have content which is not directly literary, but most of the content of the blog must be about literature for it to be included here. Literary blogs became a popular mode of writing within Iran from around 2002, when the blog Khābgard (Sleepwalker) was launched.6 Persian has been reported as both the fourth and the tenth most-used language in the blogosphere.7 Whatever the exact ranking, Persian is among the ten most used languages in this arena, which is surprising from a population of only 110 million speakers, which includes Persian speakers in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Since these last two countries have scant access to the Internet, most Persian blogs come from Iran. This chapter examines blogs by Iranian nationals, which not only includes those by Iranians in Iran, but also material written in languages other than Persian by Iranians in the diaspora, primarily in English and French. It does not include blogs by Persian speakers from Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

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In recent years, a discourse among journalists and academics has portrayed Iranian bloggers as young people resisting the power of the state through their blogs.8 More generally in Middle Eastern Studies, the dominant argument is that new media belongs to the youth, resists the state, is inherently liberating and a cause to celebrate.9 The Iranian blogosphere has similarly been depicted as a space of resistance and a potential tool for the development of democracy. Although I agree with the idea that blogs can theoretically constitute an alternate public sphere, and more generally that social media facilitates communication between those oppressed by the state, such approaches do not capture the multi-dimensional character of the Iranian blogosphere. The current Iranian blogosphere does not always speak easily to a straightforwardly oppositional postcolonial politics. Babak Rahimi and David Faris’s edited collection is a particularly important exploration of the ambiguities of new media in Iran: ‘social media as a “many-to-many interactive” medium is a multilayered and permeable form of computer-mediated communication, and accordingly, its impact on offline domains of Iranian life or beyond is ambiguous and multidirectional’.10 Other researchers have shown that many other discourses populate the Iranian blogosphere, including blogs by conservative, religious people, young or old, and have demonstrated how the Iranian state has been particularly successful at populating the blogosphere with its own interventions.11 This has been effective because ‘unlike many other electronic devices, such as video players and satellite television networks, the Internet was generally received as of possible use to the state and was thus acceptable to Islamic Iran’.12 Furthermore, I am concerned that the discourse that insists only on the resisting power of the blogosphere shares traits with ‘digital Orientalism’.13 ‘Cyberutopians’, as Evgeny Morozov calls them, tend to forget that oppressive regimes benefit from using the Internet just as much as supporters of democracy. They also often overlook the negative impact of the Internet: ‘as we are beginning to debate the impact of the Internet on how we think and learn – tolerating the possibility that it may actually impede rather than facilitate those processes – we rarely pose such questions in the authoritarian context’ (p. 241). It is also worth noting that I am concerned with literary blogs only, although some of them have political resonance, and I will show that these blogs in particular often reproduce the milieu of the offline world. The chapter will begin by describing the context in which Persian literary blogs are conceived, to assess how far Persian literary blogs share features of English literary blogs. It will then analyse two literary blogs and define the specificities of Iranian blogs. It will finally question the extent to which blogs have changed the Iranian literary field and increased its globalisation. This study emerges as a counter-narrative to the celebratory discourse of new media’s transnationalism. Nonetheless, it will show that small positive exchanges and changes have happened in the Iranian literary blogosphere, which prepared the way for interesting innovations on other platforms, especially Facebook and Telegram.

Iranian Literary Blogs in Comparative Perspective A particularly relevant feature of the Iranian literary field that has a bearing on blogs is the existence of censorship (sānsur or, a more roundabout term, momayyezī, in Persian).14 Although the rules changed with the Islamic government, it has always been part of the Iranian literary field. As with all cultural products, publishers require permission from

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the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to publish a book. ‘The book is scrutinized and can be banned altogether; often, the author is asked to change some of the content. The process is slow and usually takes at least a couple of years, sometimes much more.’15 Before the Islamic Revolution, censorship was focused on politics. After the Islamic Revolution, and specifically after 1981 and the creation of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, morality was added to the list.16 The censor has to make sure that each book complies with Islamic morality. As an example, it is not possible to describe even a husband and wife kissing in a literary text. The result is that writers use coded language to describe intimate life. The journalist Nazila Fathi mentions examples of such coded language when it comes to sexuality: ‘Two figures were moving under the sheet’, is how Ms. Haj Seyed Javadi informs readers that two characters in ‘Drunkard Morning’ have a sexual relationship. The readers of Ms. Pirzad’s ‘We Get Used to It’ learn that Arezou and Sohrab have kissed when Arezou asks Sohrab if he prefers the taste of the toothpaste to lipstick. ‘All three’, he says, meaning both and her lips, which are never directly mentioned.17 Such limitations have been internalised by every writer and Iranian in general, and ultimately have a bearing on the construction of Iran as an ‘imagined community’: it has to be an Islamic community in the way defined by the regime if it is to receive permission to exist. There is, however, variability around what such an Islamic community might be, what it is possible to write and publish according to who is the censor at the moment and who is the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Nevertheless, there is a relatively good understanding of what the Islamic community is, and what can and cannot be written, and for this reason, I see censorship, as in China, not as ‘a polluting factor but as an integral component of literary life’.18 I also want to emphasise that censorship is ‘a truly subjective procedure, and the system as a whole is highly susceptible to current waves in the political ocean’.19 The critic Bavand Behpoor insists on this subjectivity, linked to the fact that censorship is not a monolithic institution but ultimately is about the relationship with one censor: An Iranian author’s anxieties about censorship come not from the shifting nature of the system and its codes, but rather the fact that in the absence of specific laws, one must appeal to a single censor. As a result, authors must attempt to insert that person’s subjectivity into their texts. (p. 41) It is indeed common that books are given permissions at certain times, to be banned just a few weeks later by another individual, or then unbanned by the censor. Censorship is thus eminently flexible. It is a negotiation between different elements that collectively comprise Iranian literature’s complexity. Despite this caveat, and even taking into account the argument that it can boost creativity as writers try to find ways around it, censorship remains a burden for the whole of the literary field: it slows down the publication process and orientates the production in certain directions, limiting innovation. I will show later how literary blogs are particularly interesting in this regard because they have largely avoided such hold-ups and have accelerated some literary evolutions that would have taken longer to achieve in the offline world. Here, though, it also remains

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important to remember that while the censorship of blogs is not carried out by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, it nevertheless falls under the jurisdiction of the Attorney-General of Iran and the Commission to Determine the Instances of Criminal Content, which censor the Internet with the help of the Cyber Police and Supreme Council of Cyberspace. Some Iranian writers, who were published in print before the 2000s but resented censorship, took up blogs with enthusiasm, partly because initially this sphere was not controlled by censorship, and even today, is not completely subject to censorship. Additionally, the emergence of blogs also saw new writers begin blogging about literature, thus indicating the appeal of the blog as a relatively uncensored site of literary production. Literary blogs are one of the most popular blogging genres in Iran. As of April 2015, 31,227 blogs were classified in ‘Literature and poetry’ on Blogfa, the main Persian weblog service, and 2,593 in ‘Book’, this category including many literary blogs.20 By way of comparison, ‘Humour’ accounted for 4,047 blogs, ‘Computer’ for 8,060, and ‘Education/research’ for 5,987. ‘Family’ (private and public blogs about life in general) was the largest category with 45,479 blogs. It might be striking for non-Iranians to note that, after general blogs, literary blogs are the most prolific, and that other categories come well after. This reminds us of the extent to which Iran is a literary nation, of people who see themselves as a nation of poets, and who hold their literary figures in high esteem. Classical poets are a crucial part of Iran’s imagined community, as classical poets’ tombs like Hafez, Saadi, Khayyam, are constantly visited by Iranians and a primary site of pilgrimage. Contemporary poets also benefit from this. For example, when the famous poet Ahmad Shamlou died in 2000, ‘Thousands joined the cortege escorting the ambulance which was carrying his body from Iranmehr hospital to Mirdamad Street in Tehran’.21 Before honing in on Persian literary blogs in detail, it is useful to offer a broader comparative perspective on the history of blogs, as well as their characteristics, in other parts of the world as some of their usage and characteristics are structural to the medium, and not specific to Iran. English is the most commonly used language of the Internet. If we assume that literary blogs follow the same tendencies as blogs in general, the history of blogging in English offers a useful comparison.22 ‘In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the Internet. By the middle of 2006, there were 50 million blogs according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report.’23 There has been a short delay in Persian blogs catching up with English ones because of the difficulty of adjusting to a non-Latin alphabet. Iranians within Iran did not have easy access to most platforms because these were in English. But when Hoder published a guide in Persian on how to blog, this started a trend and the history of Persian blogs has followed a similar path to English blogging since its emergence in 2001. What is interesting here is that Iran, which has been somewhat isolated from worldwide trends politically, culturally, economically, has followed a similar track to that of betterconnected countries in the evolution of its blogosphere. The English blogosphere experienced a decline around 2005: ‘Eight to ten years ago [article dating from 2011], blogs were becoming the primary point of communication for individuals online. But with the advent of social media and social networking in the past five years, blogs have become only one portion of an individual’s online persona’ (Technorati, n.p.). Famous literary bloggers in English confirm this statement: ‘The conversation seems to have moved on from blogs to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook

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and the rest. Blogs now feel very Web 1.0.’24 The evolution of the Persian blogosphere derives from this English trend. As in other places, there has been a boom and then decline of Iranian blogs, in line with the emergence of other technologies. It has been argued that women in particular benefited from and contributed to this boom of the blogosphere.25 One important argument is that the anonymity of blogs allowed women to talk about their private lives and selves, which is not a given in a Persian society where outer (zāher) and inner (bāten), visible and hidden, are fundamentally separated. Although there are no reliable statistics available about the gender of bloggers, who are often anonymous, it is clear from the popularity of some female bloggers that they are playing a role in opening up the online discourse. The activist and journalist Masih Alinejad, who has lived in the diaspora since 2009, used to have a blog but now publishes her stories on Facebook, Telegram and Twitter. Massoumeh Ebtekar, the first female Vice President of Iran, started a blog in Persian in 2006 and a year later in English.26 The poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari, mentioned in more detail below, had a writing workshop online.27 In all cases, at opposite ends of the political spectrum, these blogs appealed to both the younger generation and an international/diasporic audience and demonstrated an attempt to move past gender bias in Iran in general and in the Iranian technological world in particular. The online role of women should not be overstated though, as Akhavan reminds us, and should not be reduced to the argument that whereas women are oppressed in the public sphere, they are free online.28 In any case, I would argue that the role of women is not as evident in literary blogs as in other blogs concerning general and social matters, including those on gender issues. One of the foundations of Iranian literature, the prevalence of men when it comes to literary situations of power,29 is still prevalent online. Indeed, although females are more active in the literary field today than ever before in Iranian history, and many best-selling authors are women, the book industry is still male-dominated, as women write only 20 per cent of published books (all categories, even the prolific field of religious writing, included) (see p. 32). In Iran, the boom in blogs after 2005 was curtailed, partly due to the state deciding to crack down on bloggers and arresting several prominent members of that community. With the contested presidential election of 2009, this decline accelerated. A main factor was that censorship was strengthened in all areas, including the blogosphere. In addition, a study of Iran’s blogosphere finds ‘a decline in overall blogging activity among our survey respondents, with nearly half reporting having stopped their activity, in large part because of time spent on social media’.30 Indeed, it is maybe as much due to censorship as to the restrictions of the medium and a tendency to use other platforms that blogs have declined. The importance of social media is emphasised in many comments, and accounted for as an explanation for the decrease in the number of blogs: Psychologically, maybe a blogger feels more loneliness. However, in social media he/she virtually finds himself/herself among the friends. . . . This might be another factor that reduced the number of bloggers in comparison with the past. Due to such factors, weblog gradually has more become a media for elites rather than a media for the public.31 There has been, during the 2000s and 2010s, a supplanting of blogs by other forms of Internet literature: ‘The growth of social media, and, in particular, social networking

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sites (SNSs) like Facebook, is also among the most important causes of the erosion of Blogestan.’32 Quoting state-filtering practices, Arash Falashiri and Nazanin Ghanavizi also claim that ‘the main reason for the apparent decline of blogging practices can be found in the effect of social networks as a new platform for self-expression and critical discourse’,33 and go on to explain that ‘the number of Iranians in the country joining Facebook increased dramatically after the 2009 incidents, in spite of the government’s intermittent blocks of the site’ (p. 134). Facebook has been blocked permanently since 2009. This is also evident in the fact that many creative writing workshops, which would be presented on blogs ten years ago, can now be found on Instagram and Facebook – for example one run on Facebook by the famous US-based Iranian writer Moniru Ravanipour.34 Another technological reason for the decline in blogs is the shift from the use of computers in the 2000s to smartphones and tablets in the 2010s. It is difficult to update a weblog from a smartphone, while smartphone users can easily log into and use social media applications, which all started to offer smartphone versions. Around 2011, 3G was introduced to Iran, so Internet connections outside of home or the office became possible. In 2017, it is estimated that half of the Iranian population owns a smartphone.35 All these suggest that, while filtering has played an important role in the decline of blogs, other factors also influenced this decline, especially the fact that blogs are generation-oriented. Young Iranian people today primarily use other tools of expression, such as Instagram, Facebook, Viber, Twitter, Telegram and WhatsApp, accessed on smartphones. If blogs have not been replaced entirely, there is an intermedial exchange as they work in interaction with other tools. Blogs more often become personal archives of writings that have appeared in a multitude of other Internet platforms, as an anonymous blogger states in his interview with Laurent Giacobino: ‘It is a common practice now that an individual would set up a blog in order to keep track of his writings elsewhere.’36 If there is a similar history between English and Persian blogs because of the characteristics of the medium, though, blogs in Persian have specificities due to the Iranian context that also need to be analysed. My key hypothesis is that there is a difference between print publishing and weblog publishing in Iran, due to two characteristics of online publishing: the novelty of the medium which allowed for more experimentation in style, form and content, and the importance of censorship. Although censorship of the Iranian blogosphere by the Attorney-General of Iran is quite effective today, there are gaps present on the Internet that are simply not permitted in print publishing. In addition, censorship took several years to become implemented effectively online; blog innovations bloomed during this period. In the next section, I will analyse two influential literary blogs that assume different political perspectives, in order to give a sense of the kind of texts that are published in literary blogs.

Literary Blogs in Focus Khābgard is a good representative of a certain type of literary blog as it has been described as one of the best weblogs in different platforms, based on criteria such as the continuity of blogging; the use of a unique language; the influence or authority; the strong networking; and success in attracting audiences. It has also started

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trends, for example by creating a literary prize (the Bahram Sadeghi Prize), as I will explore in greater detail further on. In addition, Khābgard has been described as an ‘ultra-weblog’: By this, I don’t mean that it is superior (although it has the characteristics of a superior weblog). I mean that it is more than a weblog. It is a comprehensive website that encompasses different layers. From another point of view, it might be considered as an online magazine . . . but it is not really a magazine because it is overtly under the shadow of its blogger’s personality.37 Khābgard is run by Seyed Reza Shokrolahi, writer and editor, who used to work for well-known independent publishers like Cheshmeh and Ofogh, as well as for IRIB, the national radio and television broadcaster. This meant that he was well-connected and already familiar within the literary milieu when he began to blog. Shokrolahi started Khābgard in November 2002. It gradually evolved from a personal weblog to one that publishes short stories, reviews, articles and translations, and became probably the most famous literary blog in Iran. Shokrolahi’s taste and attitude is pivotal in selecting and organising the website’s articles and notes; indeed, the main page’s subtitle is ‘Critical View on Culture, Art and Literature’. Khābgard was not politically oriented in an obvious way until 2009, when Shokrolahi decided to publish political posts advocating reform during and after that year’s presidential elections, and the blog was subsequently filtered. As early as 2003, Khābgard published fortnightly reports about the book market and publications, which did not exist outside of mainstream media at the time. Khābgard also published the news and reports of the Shahr-e Ketāb (Book City, now the biggest bookshop in Tehran) and supported the Shahr-e Ketāb’s Short Story Award.38 It also set up an online library with texts that had not been through censorship, with Persian short stories and translations. Shokrolahi’s personal interest is in Persian proverbs and their link to folklore and history. He reproduces his posts about this topic in a column in the reformist newspaper Etemad Daily. Another well-known writer, Mohammad Hassan Shahsavari, has his blog Panjere-ye poshtī (Backwindow) linked to Khābgard. Khābgard thus has supported and continues to support various literary enterprises both online and offline, and uses its influential Internet presence to promote projects. What is striking in the blog’s reviews of current books is how much it reproduces the conventions of offline literary discourse. We are dealing with a relatively small circle of established writers, sometimes young, who navigate between independent publishers like Cheshmeh and literary prizes like the Golshiri. Is this also the case, however, within a more minor and personal literary blog that does not represent the young milieu of reformist-oriented writers? Abdol Jabbar Kakaei has a weblog called Sālhā-ye Tākonūn (Years to Today).39 It is an example of a personal blog that started more recently and is representative of a more individual take on literature, whereas Khābgard very much represents the viewpoint of the reformist literary elite while being conservative in its use of language and philosophy of writing. Politically, Kakaei is a well-known conservative-oriented writer, but with a reputation outside of the conservative elements of society. He is also critical of some aspects of the regime. This reminds us that conservative blogs contribute to the

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Iranian literary field since ‘bloggers who are identified with hardline elements aren’t necessarily agents executing orders’.40 Kakaei is a famous contemporary Iranian poet and song-writer, who started to write after the Islamic Revolution. He is known as one of the ‘poets of the revolution’ (Shāer-e enghelāb), famous for his ghazals and masnavī. Among his texts, many are about the Iran-Iraq war, in which he participated, as well as about religious ceremonies like Moharram. He has published academic articles as well as collections of poems. Two of his books, Sālha-ye Tākonūn and Barresī-e Sher-e Pāydarī-e Iran va Jahān, have been selected as Sacred Defence Book of the Year,41 a prize run by the Howzeh-ye Honarī-ye Sāzemān-e Tablighāt-e Eslamī (Artistic Center of the Islamic Development Organization), funded by the state. Kakaei plays important roles in state-backed literary events. For instance, he was director of the 2014 edition of the Fajr International Poetry Festival. Kakaei is a supporter of the Islamic regime. He has written poems expressing his admiration for Khomeini. However, at the same time, he has criticised the government. For example, he has a moving text about the attack on his son by Basijis (volunteer militia linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Supreme Leader) during the 2009 demonstrations, defending his son against the militia, who, according to Kakaei, betrayed what he and his friends stood for during the revolution and the war.42 Kakaei’s blog is simple in its organisation. It features posts with his poems and songs, interviews, and sometimes reflections that criticise those in power in the literary milieus. In most cases, his poems have a political or religious undertone. Sālha-ye Tākonūn started after the boom of blogs in Iran, in January 2007. Until 2008, Kakaei mostly used the blog for publishing his poems and his interviews. However, since 2008 he started to share more, especially by writing introductions to his texts, reporting on some of his trips, for example to India, or recalling stories from his youth. Since 2012, he has also published posts on political issues, becoming vocal about his criticism of censorship. In one of his interviews with the newspaper Shahrvand, he talks in support of songwriters’ freedom. He believes that, decades after the Islamic Revolution, the negative side effects of censorship are detrimental to society. He affirms that this policy of the regime is against the Islamic Revolution, not in support of it. He also talks about self-censorship, and says that songwriters are censoring themselves in order to be able to sell their songs.43 In a similar fashion, in a meeting for the Fajr International Poetry Festival, Kakaei emphasised the importance of the festival’s organisation at the hands of poets, rather than the state. He also expressed his regret for those whose books are banned by the state, and stated that he would do his best to help the writers to get their books published. Kakaei thus presented the festival as a platform for inclusive and free speech. Interestingly, Kakaei’s blog began after the popularity of Persian blogs had already peaked. One can see it as a way for a conservative writer to have an impact on the virtual literary milieu, as well as to orientate the state’s policies in culture thanks to his position of power. Kakaei offers a nuanced literary voice, which does not shy away from expressing dissent through his poems and songs, which speak on topics including censorship or the demonstrations of 2009. His blog supports Akhavan’s argument that conservative voices are important in the Iranian blogosphere, including in the literary blogosphere, and that they are not all conveying a fixed propaganda discourse. If we focus only on the reformist-oriented blogs like Khābgard, we are bound to perform another kind of ‘digital Orientalism’, seeing only what we want to see – that is, the

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utopian vision of blogs as a mode of resistance to a monolithic Islamic state. In reality, the Iranian literary blogosphere is multi-dimensional and includes a variety of voices. While the blogosphere may not therefore be straightforwardly revolutionary, however, it is certainly possible to identify multiple forms of evolution and innovation that have taken place within it. In the next section, I therefore offer a more expansive exploration of the innovations brought forth by literary blogs.

Literary Blogs: A Revolution? Politically revolutionary or not, it is nevertheless important to recognise that in terms of form, blogs have brought forth new literary genres, oriented towards conciseness, that are significantly changing the Iranian literary landscape. Being concise is important in blogging and forms along the genre of flash fiction have thus been stimulated by it. In particular, the genre known as dāstānak (very short story) was encouraged by the nature of online interactions within blogs. One can see examples of such a form in group blogs for flash fiction (‘Dāstānak: weblog-e gorūhi-e dāstānak-nevīsīha-ye Iranī’) or in the fact that a dāstānak blog won the best blog award in 2011.44 The genre is also present on Facebook (‘Dāstānak’), Twitter and Telegram, which are platforms that encourage even shorter literary forms than blogging. Dāstānak builds on a long tradition of short literary forms in Persian literature, for example the hekāyat-e kūtāh (short story) in Saadi’s Golestan or Jaami’s Baharestan. As early as 1998, the newspaper Hamshahri published a collection of twenty-three stories from twenty-three writers in 100 words.45 In 2011, a scholarly book tried to categorise these new short forms.46 This trend towards concise stories accelerated with the arrival of blogs, and there have since been many festivals devoted to flash fiction, SMS fiction and other very short forms, called differently dāstān-e kūtāh-e kūtāh (very, very short story), even dāstān-e kūtāh-e kūtāh-e kūtāh (very, very, very short story), and dāstān-e nāgahān (instant story) but dāstānak is the most common term. This trend includes the state-backed literature, which has been keen on promoting flash fiction on the Iran–Iraq war (as in the Jashnvāre-ye īnternetī-e dāstān-e kūtāh-e kūtāh-e jang, Internet Festival of Short Stories of the War). In this, Iranian literature follows a world-wide trend of increased recognition for the short form. The critic and translator Asadollah Amrei, for example, notes that the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature was given to the short story writer Alice Munro, thus validating the genre as internationally prestigious.47 As a further example, novelist and literary critic Farahnaz Alizadeh has produced a collection of both Iranian and non-Iranian flash fictions.48 The back cover states: Flash Fiction writing is growing in Iran. The aim of this book is to declare that in addition to great foreign authors there are young and talented writers in Iran who [are playing a significant role in making the Flash fiction genre grow in Iran].49 Alizadeh states that she has collected flash fiction from blogs and festivals.50 One can therefore see a correlation between the development of flash fiction and the boom in blogs. In addition, many blogs have used the form of flash fiction and explicitly commented on its usefulness to the medium.51 As such, I believe the changes in Persian

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literary short forms were partly stimulated by blogs. This is all the more important because Persian literature has often been criticised for not adequately using forms deemed ‘Western’, such as the novel.52 Thus we see that dāstānak is a form that is built both on a long Persian literary tradition and develops from the encounter with modern media, with a good reception from readers and the literary establishment alike. Similarly, the development of what has been termed the ‘postmodern ghazal’ has been encouraged by blog writing, although the genre was already in existence prior to the emergence of blogs. The genre can be defined as in keeping with the traditional form of the ghazal (a poetic form using a refrain and rhyming couplets, often dealing with love) and deconstructing its usual topic of love in some ways, usually by including philosophical and societal topics.53 One of the main composers of postmodern ghazals, Seyed Mehdi Moussavi, states that not all poetry that breaks the form of ghazal is postmodern ghazal. For instance, the use of Finglish (transliteration of Persian words in English) words does not make a poem ‘postmodern’. It is, for Moussavi, postmodern thought that renders poems ‘postmodern’:54 this might include the use of deconstructed forms; textual self-awareness, evident in metafiction; or an engagement with epistemological and ontological crisis. Seyed Mehdi Moussavi and fellow poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari developed the genre in their blogs, which were popular during the Green Movement. Ekhtesari was famous in literary circles and became more so after the Iranian German-based rapper Shahin Najafi sang one of her postmodern ghazals. Their weblogs were closed and blocked in 2009 in the post-election turbulence and are not accessible anymore. They left Iran a few years later as a result of heavy sentences on charges of ‘insulting the sacred’ for the social criticism expressed in their poetry.55 In interview, Moussavi, who has been called ‘the father of postmodern ghazal’, says that there were poets who composed in such forms before him and his use of the genre on his blog, like Mohammad Said Mirzay and Hadi Khansari, although they might not have used the term ‘postmodern’.56 This is thus another example of a form that has not been developed through blog writing as such, but which blog writing has facilitated to the point that critics have identified a correlation between the two. In terms of topics, one can see that Iranian literary blogs, as in other blogospheres, have promoted popular genres that were not much part of the literary system. For reasons too long to elaborate here, crime fiction and horror stories, which are bestsellers in other countries, have not developed in Iran in the way they have in the rest of the world. However, erotic fiction is becoming popular and presents a new addition to the literary system, if not yet to the literary canon. Although there is a tradition of erotic writing in Persian literature, to be found in some poems of Saadi and in the obscene poetry of fourteenth-century Obeid Zakani, the genre has been dormant for a long time, if one excludes the beginning of the twentieth-century Iraj Mirza and his colloquial erotic poetry. 3kkk.wordpress.com was a popular pioneer website, allowing comments – so, close to the blog form – dedicated to the production of erotic fiction and teaching about sexuality.57 It also published a PDF version of the Kama Sutra. It stopped after the fortieth issue but its writers are still active on Facebook and other social media platforms, and have introduced a wide vocabulary linked to eroticism into Persian. The stories vary in tone and are sometimes purely pornographic, while others tend towards literariness, but this topic has undoubtedly emerged on the

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Iranian literary scene due to the existence of blogs, which have bypassed modes of both state-led and self-instigated censorship driven by social taboos in Iranian society. It is also possible to identify interesting innovations on other levels, particularly in relation to language. Bloggers’ style is described as ‘blogspeak’. Blog writing is often less formal than traditional journalistic or literary pieces and blogspeak is closer to middle-class language. In Persian, as in English, ‘blogspeak’ has an anti-elite flavour.58 It often uses the spoken form of Persian (as opposed to the written one), as well as spoken vocabulary. It is less prone to using the classical rhetoric of Persian style, and more the everyday one. Politically, blogspeak is thus more democratic than the literary language used by the well-educated. There is one further aspect of Iranian blogs, however, which has not followed the pattern of other parts of the world and can be shown to be more conservative than in other contexts. Blogs have often been considered to encourage the formation of newly democratic online communities around the discussion and dissemination of literary knowledge. Scholars have argued that blogs, and the web in general, constitute a world-scale laboratory for democratic experiences by auto-organising citizens, opening up discussion to new audiences, helping with the organisation of transnational communities, and socialising knowledge. As such, it transforms the nature of democracy.59 Aliasghar Seyedabadi, the founder of the weblog Hanūz, explains how this works for collective blogs: The existence of several individuals in one sharing place leads to confrontations between different taste and ideas, which eventually leads to dialogue. Such dialogues are formed within the circle, but due to the nature of the medium, it opens up a path to a broader milieu. . . . Group blogging can not only be an exercise for us who are not used to dialogue, but also an exercise for accepting diversity and plurality and also respecting differences.60 It is true that pages that aggregate several blogs (collective blogs) like Halgheh-ye malakūt (Heavenly Circle) play a role in creating a democratic platform for exchange. Malakūt is the common domain for a collection of forty-one independent blogs, with a concentration on literature and the arts. How far, though, has this led to a democratisation of online communities? In single-author blogs, the democratic process might emerge out of the potential for readers to comment on posts. Persian blogspeak, like that in other languages, could thus redraw the lines not only of language but, more importantly, of who can speak the language of literature and define it. A connected feature is the blurring of the line between writer and reader. Writers like Leila Sadeghi have mentioned that they edit their texts based on the comments made on their blog posts.61 In a traditional literary culture where the writer has a high status, where there is a relationship of master/pupil between a famous writer and her followers, this complication of authorship is a sign of a possible redefinition of literary relations. What happens to her status if the writer’s text can be commented upon immediately after being posted online with the possibility for the writer to edit it? Such processes have also featured in some blogs in the diaspora, for example Reza Ghassemi’s blog: ‘Reza Ghassemi’s initiative to establish an interactive relationship with his readers is of historical importance . . . In his online diary, readers could follow up on the daily

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progress of one of his latest novels.’62 However, these possibilities have scarcely been seized upon by Iranian writers/bloggers and Sadeghi and Ghassemi are exceptions rather than the norm in appropriating readers’ comments. Writers of popular romance fiction like Homa PourEsfahani and Fereshteh Taat Shahdoost are more open to reader’s comments.63 I would suggest that this is due to the fact that there is a large digital divide within Iran.64 Access to the Internet, and especially to the creation of Internet content, is dependent on demographic issues. The forms of literacy, including computer literacy, required for participating in the blogosphere exclude entire sections of the Iranian population based on age, gender, class and, particularly, education. There has been a lot of discussion on the use of filtershekanhā (circumvention tools) and it is true that they are widely available65 but they do require some computer literacy. Today, because Telegram and Instagram are not filtered, they act as a more direct democratic platform for a population that has wide access to smartphones. Second, literary blogs as a field reproduce much of the offline world. The example of the virulent ‘vulgarity debate’, started by Reza Shokrolahi, the editor of the literary blog Khābgard, who answered back to the even more famous Hoder, is telling. Doostdar describes the debate as such: Sparked off by a controversial blogger who ridiculed assertions that Islam was compatible with human rights, the debate revolved around the claim that blogging had a ‘vulgar spirit’ that made it easy for everything from standards of writing to principles of logical reasoning to be undermined . . . The ‘intellectualist’ frustration with this medium reflects an uneasiness with the linguistic and cultural practices that are becoming prevalent in tandem with the emergence of these generic orientations. I also argue that the vulgarity debate reflects a cultural and political clash between a rowshanfekr (intellectual) class who consider themselves to hold a certain amount of authority in matters of language and culture and a larger group of people who see blogging as just the place to be free from any kind of linguistic or cultural authority.66 Doostdar convincingly shows that the debate reflected a clash between the rowshanfekran, who have cultural capital, and the rebels against the traditional intellectual class, who might be endowed with other less-traditional forms of cultural capital, or with none at all. Blogs more often than not seem to reproduce the sociality that happens outside in the print world. Although Khābgard is a one-person blog with links to another blog, and does not have the characteristics of a collective blog, it came to represent the viewpoint of elite writers with reformist affinities on literature and society. As such, it is an elite blog, not designed for a large audience. It reproduces the structure of the Iranian literary field, namely the interdependency between the different agents. Indeed, one sees that writers for the blog are also judges of the Bahram Sadeghi Prize, for example. It should be remembered that Iranian literature has often been accused of being elitist and working as a closed circle of establishment types. This is complicated by the fact that there are governmental and independent circles. Although the point of going online is sometimes to leave the social spaces dominated by the state and gain relative autonomy, the politics of governmental/independent are partly reproduced

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online. Interestingly, the ‘vulgarity debate’ sparked off by Shokrolahi made him look as though he had sided with the government and wanted to censor the Persian blogosphere: It was particularly ironic that Shokrollahi was accused of siding with censors, as he had dedicated much of his energy on his blog to criticizing censorship, or actively circumventing it – for example, by holding the short story competition completely online or by publishing the full version of a controversial interview with an Iranian novelist whose newest novel had been banned. (p. 27) Blogs are not, for Shokrolahi and his fellow writers, a way to popularise literature, but a channel through which to continue a conversation that was largely happening offline and was slowed down due to the closure of reformist newspapers and more restrictive censorship. Blogs, for Shokrolahi, may introduce a new medium but they do not revolutionise the people’s relationship to literature. In particular, the authority of the writer remains unchallenged. In a sense, literary blogs have extended the length of the writer’s networks and added an online authority to the offline one. As such, Iranian blogs did not contribute as much to democratising the literary discourse as they might have done in other literary spaces around the world. Alireza Doostdar insists that as spaces of expression, social interaction, and political activity, blogs are marked as much by exclusion as by inclusion. . . . Empirical studies of blogs . . . cannot afford to lose sight of the reproduction of older forms of power and inequality, as well as the emergence of new one.67 The example of literary blogs shows that inequality between men and women, and between those with cultural capital and those without, is sometimes transformed but mainly reproduced online. In summary, then, literary blogs have stimulated innovation in terms of form and genre: erotic fiction, the forms of the dāstānak and of the postmodern ghazal, for example, were promoted thanks to blogs. The language of blogspeak also moved closer to everyday language. On the other hand, the authority of the author within literary discourse has not departed much from offline norms. Networks online more often than not reproduce offline networks, which are the sign of a closed literary milieu. This finding challenges existing postcolonial discourses around the web as a site of democratic connectivity, as articulated in books that see the use of new media in the Middle East as liberating, and as an act of resistance.68 When it comes to literary blogs in Iran, the web is indeed a site of connectivity but mainly between people who were already connected offline. It rarely creates new links between people who would not meet offline. I follow Morozov’s idea that such postcolonial discourses that insist mainly on the resistive power of the blogosphere are a form of ‘digital Orientalism’. The use of the Internet in authoritarian regimes like Iran is not necessarily a force for change, or for good.69 In the case of literary blogs, we do not see radical changes in terms of the literary establishment within Iran with the advent of blogs. However, we do see other significant changes, which are worth exploring further. During the ten years of their intense activity, Persian literary blogs created new dynamics within the Iranian literary field. One such feature of this impact is the

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increased importance given to Internet publishing. Much as in other literary fields worldwide, print publishing is generally seen as more prestigious and valued more than online publishing for a variety of reasons, one being that print publishing is selective whereas online publications can be self-published by the author. However, thanks to the internal selection processes that some literary blogs have adopted, Internet publishing has gained some value since the 2000s. For example, the famous best-selling writer Mostafa Mastoor published the story ‘Malakeh Elizabeth’ on Khābgard, which was to be published later in a 2004 collection by the prestigious publisher Qoqnoos. The link between the weblog Khābgard and Shahr-e Ketāb (Book City), the bookshop that organises literary events and is a main cultural centre in Tehran, is another example of this closing gap in prestige. These examples show that the distance between print and online publishing is narrowing and that there are an increasing number of links between offline and online worlds, even though, as I mentioned earlier, the links often reproduce well-known networks and rarely include outsiders. Some writers have also turned to exclusive online publishing of their novels. Mohammad Hassan Shahsavari, mentioned earlier, decided to publish his novel Dear M. on Backwindow, a page that belongs to Khābgard. In an interview with the literary blog Adabīyāt-e mā (Our literature), he says: Obviously, like any other writers I prefer my work to be published via the official channel, in print and by reliable publishers. But when you know that your novel will face censorship, then is there any solution but electronic publishing?70 Publication via blogs has also provided the context for the development of sectors like digital distribution and on-demand publication, which are giving new breadth to Iranian literature within Iran and in the diaspora. In Iran, Fidibo is the largest digital library for books that have received publication permission. In France, Naakojaa is a large print and online library for books published within Iran and outside. In the UK, H&S Media is a firm that specialises in on-demand publication for Persian books that do not have publication permission. Its director notes the problems that Iranian audiences have in accessing these texts, however, explaining that ‘because of international sanctions people in Iran cannot buy our e-books from Amazon or similar foreignbased sites’.71 They have nevertheless found a solution by sidestepping the traditional model of economic exchange that renders the sale of books transparent. Instead, users in Iran donate a book’s price to a charity and when they send its receipt, they are able to download the book. As a result, ‘every month, at least 300 books are sold to readers in Iran using this method’ (n.p.). There are also innovative platforms like Nogaam, also based in the UK, where books are crowd-funded by supporters, and then made available for free online.72 This transnational dynamic of circulation is politically significant in many senses: not only does it sidestep traditional publishing models but it also bridges the link between Iran and the diaspora. As such, it presents a partial redefinition of transnational exchange between Iran and parts of the diaspora – partial because, it should be noted, it remains only accessible to tech-savvy consumers within Iran, and thus cannot be read as a truly connective transnational permeation of all social boundaries. It is significant to note that changes brought about by blogs to the Iranian literary field have been slowed down both by the impact of censorship and by decreased

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interest in the medium, as well as by the substitution of computers with smartphones, which are more oriented towards social media. Studies of the Iranian blogosphere demonstrate the effectiveness of censorship and the online arrival of government forces, in their effort to populate the web with its own discourse, after a brief period of freedom in the early 2000s. As Giacobino et al. note: Of several authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries we have studied, Iran was the first where we saw the regime mount a serious effort to shape the online environment by engaging in it, not just blocking or filtering. Perhaps China began this first, and now it is common practice in Syria, Russia and elsewhere, but Iran was definitely ahead of the curve . . . Our analyses indicate that state intervention has played a central role in reshaping and diffusing Blogestan. In particular, Internet filtering – which began around 2004-2005 and intensified in the post-2009 context – has significantly limited and modified the diversity of voices in the Persian blogosphere, as well as the activity and longevity of certain blogs.73 One can, for example, note that Khābgard was filtered in 2009 after its decision to debate the 2009 presidential elections.74 We thus see an emergent potential between the desire for subversive political intervention, and the reality of extensive state control which indicates, as Rahimi and Faris put it, that ‘Iran . . . has aggressively pursued total mastery of its digital public sphere’.75 But this should not make us forget that the limited reach and growth of blogs is also linked to the structure of the medium: ‘The same factors, including their informal nature, unprofessional aspects, individual orientation and forms of expression, that have contributed to the rapid growth of blogs have also contributed to their limited reach.’76 It should also be remembered that slow Internet access is a constant problem, which affects the development of the field. This is important to remind us that blogs, including literary blogs, have not had the revolutionary impact for which many have argued. Alireza Doostdar suggests convincingly that discourse on Iranian blogging is inundated with uncritical technicist assumptions about the revolutionary impact of blogs on Iranian society, leading to numerous claims about the ways weblogs are rupturing Iran’s social, cultural, and political fabric by promoting such previously nonexistent things as freedom of expression and unfettered relationships between young men and women . . . These analyses have been, in my opinion, overly and naively enthusiastic in extolling the social changes that are (or are wished to be) coming about as a consequence of the adoption of a new communication medium by a small percentage of Iranians.77 This brings us back to the argument for ‘digital Orientalism’ and forces us to rethink the ideals presented, especially at the emergence of the Iranian blogosphere.78 Although literary blogs brought about changes in the Iranian literary field, they did not revolutionise contemporary Iranian literature as expected, due to the restrictions of the medium as well as to factors specific to Iran: the effectiveness of censorship, dissent between independent and governmental literary fields and the closeness of the literary milieu. The dissent between writers inside and outside the country is an additional factor and it is to these transnational dynamics that I will now

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turn. Indeed, another postcolonial argument is that blogs have connected people beyond national borders and I would like to assess whether Iranian literary blogs have indeed increased transnational exchanges in a manner that can be considered positive, even transgressive.

Towards a Globalisation of Contemporary Iranian Literature? The Internet has typically been associated with a connective potential to reinforce ‘imagined communities’ between diasporic and resident national communities.79 However, the Iranian blogosphere challenges these somewhat utopian postcolonial assumptions. Despite the hopes raised by the Internet, the enduring dissent between the diaspora and Iranians from within proves difficult to appease. The literary networks are distinct and we cannot find an integrated literary space online. They do interact and exchange by commenting on each other’s blogs or Facebook posts but there is a strong ‘diaspora effect’,80 analysed by scholars such as Akhavan. A blogger summarised it as such: ‘You are not the same person that you were before you left Iran and the audience notices this. You are like a product which has changed its flavour [sic] and thus needs to market itself again and recreate its audience’ (p. 27). Akhavan rightfully notes that within the Iranian context, ‘physical location remains an issue in determination of loyalty’.81 There is a profound mistrust towards the diaspora, emerging partly from the fact that the Iranian diaspora is relatively recent and has not had much time to come to terms with the contradictions of Iranian postcolonial nationhood. A striking point when considering Iranian literary blogs in the diaspora is that most of the interesting things happen in the Persian language; not much happens in European languages, except maybe in German. Sudabeh Mohafez has a website about her life and work,82 as well as a literary blog that innovates by using small texts of ten lines, along the lines of dāstānak.83 Yadollah Kouchaki Dehshali publishes some of his texts online,84 and Ali Schirasi has a website with poems interspersed among political texts.85 No Iranian writer based in France has written a blog in French. The most well-known French-Iranian writer online, Reza Ghassemi, writes in Persian. His blog, Davāt, Literary Journal has now been banned for eight years.86 When bloggers in the diaspora try to reach audiences within Iran, the effectiveness of the censorship inside Iran comes to shatter their efforts. There are options to break the filters, and although many use them, this is nonetheless a serious impediment to many others who are not tech-savvy and just surf the web. As Akhavan notes, Outside the country, the embrace of the new medium within the Diaspora brought the promise of reconnecting with a lost homeland, but it often also provided evidence of the depth of the chasm between an imagined Iran and the real Iran.87 As a nation comprising a numerically and culturally important but relatively recent diaspora, Iran has not entirely come to terms with some of its paradoxes: Islamic versus secular; global ambitions versus closeness; strong nationalism versus opposition to the regime. There is to some extent a transnational literary circulation thanks to blogs, which is more difficult to achieve in print publishing; this is what the Internet offers. There

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is also, I would argue, a circulation between the independent and the governmental segments of the literary field that is rarer in the offline world, although Shahr-e Ketāb does provide a space for people close to centres of power to discuss literature and the arts regardless of political orientation – as we see in the previously analysed example of the blog by Abdol Jabbar Kakaei, which is commented upon by writers with diverse political views. But we need to remember that the Iranian literary blogosphere has specific characteristics that contest the utopian and revolutionary assumptions of Western commentators who have sought to project their own desires and cultural assumptions onto them, albeit in a utopian spirit: Exclusive attention to the medium led Western journalists to read blogs only in terms of their revolutionary potential. This early optimism about the power of Weblogistan was based on the idea that blogging presented Iranians with a public forum for the exchange of ideas free from government intervention or control. Blogging as a medium was meant to entail its own sort of freedom, which in many ways conformed to the expectations of the liberal West: the right to free expression independent of any local political, cultural, social, or legal pressures.88 Instead, the Iranian literary blogosphere has shown a complex history and evolution, which challenges us to think differently about the nature of the Iranian national project and the ways in which cultural identity is constructed inside and outside Iran. It also invites us to challenge some of the potentially Eurocentric, even Orientalist assumptions that may remain engrained within ‘the postcolonial’, as a discourse that seeks to identify sites of utopian transgression and anti-authoritarian liberation.

Conclusion The Iranian literary blogosphere has had an impact on the Iranian literary sphere by bringing in formal and topical innovations. However, it did not really help to democratise the literary discourse nor to empower writers who were not part of it previously. Persian blogs are much less prominent today than they were ten years ago, but they have helped to change the dynamics of Iranian literature, and one can see the continuation of this development in new media like Facebook, Instagram and Telegram – now the primary platforms for innovative literary discourses, followed by Twitter. The history of literary blogs was an important moment, albeit a transitory one, as they became caught up in both censorship and the restrictions of the medium. The mechanisms of censorship contest a dominant postcolonial understanding of the Internet as a globalising and connective, sometimes utopian arena. Even though some of the material discussed in this chapter is ephemeral, the questions it raises about how to read and analyse unstable, interactive literary texts, how new literary genres and literary fields come into being, how professional and amateur writing communities interact, and how governments regulate literary production are relevant to all countries and all ears.89 In this chapter, the focus on literary blogs has enabled us to question the assumption of resistance to an authoritarian government that has come to be attached to blogging as a phenomenon, and to the online domain more broadly. It showed that they

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did not bring a revolution, as the ‘cyberutopians’ believed, but pushed nevertheless towards interesting evolutions, whereby literary blogs have accelerated some changes that would have taken longer to achieve in the offline world. As a cultural phenomenon, then, the Iranian literary blog reminds us to engage in cross-cultural reading with an eye for nuance, caution and cultural specificity. While the Iranian literary blog has undoubtedly instigated change, this change must be envisaged as a process of evolution, rather than revolution – a discourse rather less familiar within the realms of the postcolonial, and thus an interesting new horizon that it must consider.

Notes 1. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 2. Sanaz Fotouhi uses the term postcolonial to define contemporary Iranian diaspora literature to qualify ‘the unifying and totalitarian pre- and post-revolutionary regimes of Iran, as quasi-colonial and oppressive forces’ (Sanaz Fotouhi, The Literature of the Iranian Diaspora: Meaning and Identity since the Islamic Revolution (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), p. 15). For a general history of modern Iran, see Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran since 1921: The Pahlavis and After (London: Pearson Education, 2003). There are several studies on the 1953 coup against the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, orchestrated by the US and the UK. This is an example of foreign governments’ involvement in Iran’s affairs, known by every Iranian and often referred to. See Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013). 3. See Majid Gholami Jaliseh, Statistics of Book Publications in Iran: 1980–2015 (Tehran: Khāne-ye Ketāb, 2016), p. 32. 4. Laetitia Nanquette, ‘The Translations of Modern Persian Literature in the United States: 1979–2011’, The Translator, 23 (2017), pp. 49–66; pp. 51–2. See also UNESCO Index Translationum, ‘Languages Translated to a Given Target Language: Farsi’, http://www. unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatlist.aspx?m=15 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 5. Arash Falashiri and Nazanin Ghanavizi, ‘The Persian Blogosphere in Dissent’, in Babak Rahimi and David M. Faris (eds), Social Media in Iran: Politics and Society after 2009 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), pp. 123–35; p. 134. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 6. See Reza Shokrolahi, ‘Khābgard (Sleepwalker): Critical View on Culture, Art and Literature’, Khābgard, http://Khābgard.com (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 7. Technorati reports it as the tenth in its 2007 report and Nasrin Alavi as the fourth. See Technorati, ‘State of the Blogosphere’, 2007, http://www.sifry.com/alerts/2007/04/the-stateof-technorati-april-2007 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. and Nasrin Alavi, We Are Iran (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005), p. 1. This difference emerges from different scales of measurement. Such rankings shift rapidly and often, and are to be taken with caution. 8. See for instance Alavi, We Are Iran. 9. See Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman (eds), Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook (London: Routledge, 2013). 10. Rahimi and Faris, Social Media in Iran, p. 12. 11. See Niki Akhavan, Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); John Kelly and Bruce Etling, ‘Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere’, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, April 2008, http://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard. edu/files/Kelly&Etling_Mapping_Irans_Online_Public_2008.pdf (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p.; and Falashiri and Ghanavizi, ‘The Persian Blogosphere in Dissent’, p. 82.

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12. Falashiri and Ghanavizi, ‘The Persian Blogosphere in Dissent’, p. 134. 13. See Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 241–4. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 14. Momayyezī literally means verification or inspection in Persian. It is considered by those undergoing such verification to be an understatement. Sānsur comes from the French censure and perhaps describes the process more effectively. See Blake Atwood, ‘Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran’, World Literature Today, 86:3 (2012), pp. 38–41. 15. Laetitia Nanquette, ‘The Global Circulation of an Iranian Bestseller’, Interventions, 19:1 (2016), pp. 56–72; p. 60. 16. See James Marchant, ‘Writer’s Block: The Story of Censorship in Iran’, Small Media, 2015, https://smallmedia.org.uk/writersblock/file/Writer%27s%20Block.pdf (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 17. Nazila Fathi, ‘Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in Iran’, New York Times, 29 June 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/books/women-writing-novels-emerge-as-starsin-iran.html (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 18. Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 11. For reports on censorship in Iranian literature, see Atwood, ‘Sense and Censorship’ and Marchant, ‘Writer’s Block’. 19. Atwood, ‘Sense and Censorship’, p. 39. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 20. This statistical data is to be taken with caution. First, it is not entirely reliable, and second, many people in Iran view themselves as poets, and as such, might choose the category ‘Literature and poetry’ to classify their blogs, although most of the content will be about life in general, interspersed with their own. This statistic is only given to provide an idea of the categories people use to classify their blogs. For my analysis, I have considered as literary blogs those in which more than approximately 70 per cent of the content was about literature. 21. Kara Abdolmaleki, ‘Ahmad Shamlou’, The Literary Encyclopedia, 10 April 2017, https:// www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?UID=13831&rec=true (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 22. Although blogs are less dominated by English today than when they first started, English is still the most commonly used language of the Internet. At the beginning of this research, I had thought of making a comparison to the Sinophone blogosphere, because of the similarities in the literary fields. However, it seems censorship is less prevalent in the Chinese literary field, outside of political topics, than in Iran. Also, it appears that blogs have not played such a key role in Chinese Internet literature. Hockx gives this example: ‘China’s most famous blogger is Han Han, who is also a famous novelist, but his literary work never appears on his blog’ (Michel Hockx, personal communication, 22 September 2015). Discussion forums seem to have been more important. In addition, the history is different, as Chinese blogs started with Sina around 2003; the decline came when microblogs like Weibo became popular. Thanks to Michel Hockx for sharing his knowledge on this topic. See also Eric Abrahamsen, ‘The Real Censors of China’, New York Times, 16 June 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/ opinion/the-real-censors-of-china.html (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 23. Cameron Chapman, ‘A Brief History of Blogging’, in WebdesignerDepot, 14 March 2011, https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/a-brief-history-of-blogging/ (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 24. Mark Sarvas, ‘Tev 2.0 - Volume 1, Number 1: The Dog, Beha, Plesko and “Life Gets in the Way”’, The Elegant Variation, 16 October 2014, http://tinyletter.com/elegvar/letters/ tev-2-0-volume-1-number-1-the-dog-beha-plesko-and-life-gets-in-the-way (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p.

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25. See Babak Rahimi, ‘Cyberdissent: The Internet in Revolutionary Iran’, Middle East Review of International Affairs, 7:3 (2003), http://www.payvand.com/news/03/sep/1156.html (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 26. See Masoumeh Ebtekar, Persian Paradox, http://ebtekarm.blogspot.co.uk (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 27. Fatemeh Ekhtesari, ‘Online Writing Workshop (Kārgāh-e Majazi Adabīyāt)’, 2011–2014, http://www.havakesh14.blogfa.com (last accessed 28 January 2018). 28. See Niki Akhavan, ‘Exclusionary Cartographies: Gender Liberation and the Iranian Blogosphere’, in Roksana Bahramitash and Eric Hooglund (eds), Gender in Contemporary Iran. Pushing the Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 62–83; p. 63. 29. Women write only 20 per cent of published books in all categories, which includes the prolific field of religious writing. See Marchant, ‘Writer’s Block’, p. 32. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 30. Laurent Giacobino, Arash Adabpour, Collin Anderson, Fred Petrossian and Caroline Nelleman, ‘Whither Blogistan: Evaluating Shifts in Persian Cyberspace’, Iran Media Program, University of Pennsylvania, March 2014, http://repository.upenn.edu/iranmediaprogram/12 (last accessed 28 January 2018), pp. 1–45; p. 3. 31. Naser Khaledian, ‘Weblog: A Quick Chronology’, Khābgard, 4 March 2015, http:// Khābgard.com/?id=1123386575 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 32. Giacobino et al., ‘Whither Blogistan’, p. 4. 33. Falashiri and Ghanavizi, ‘The Persian Blogosphere in Dissent’, pp. 123–35. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 34. She runs a writing workshop online called Kārgāh-e dāstān nevīsī-e kolī-hā, set up as a secret group on Facebook. It is only accessible by invitation. The workshop had a book published as a collection. 35. MohammadReza Azali, ‘There are 48 Million Smartphones in Iran’, Techrasa, 19 July 2017, http://techrasa.com/2017/07/19/48-million-smartphones-iran/ (last accessed 28 January 2018). 36. Giacobino et al., ‘Whither Blogistan’, p. 32. 37. Bamdad Irani, ‘Khābgard Yek Farā-Weblog Ast (Sleepwalker is an Ultra-Weblog)’, Bamdadi, 14 June 2008, http://bambadi.com/tag/ / (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 38. See Reza Shokrolahi, ‘The Personal History of Blogging: This is a Weblog Game, Serious and a Bit Tough’, Khābgard, 1 March 2015, http://Khābgard.com (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 39. See Abdol Jabbar Kakaei, Sālhā-ye Tākonūn, http://jabbarkakaei.blogfa.com (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 40. Akhavan, ‘Exclusionary Cartographies’, p. 39. 41. See ‘A Brief Look at the Life and Work of Abdol Jabar Kakaei, the Poet from Ilam’, Ilam-e Emrooz, 11 June 2006, https://www.ilamtoday.com/article/article.asp?n=140 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 42. See Abdol Jabbar Kakaei, ‘Barā-ye Pesaram ke Emrūz Bigonāh Sīlī Khord (For My Son Who Has Been Slapped Today for No Reason)’, Sālhā-ye Tākonūn, 10 July 2009, http:// jabbarkakaei.blogfa.com/post-112.aspx (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 43. See Abdol Jabbar Kakaei, ‘Interview with Shahrvand: I Do Not Agree with Any Red Line’, Sālhā-ye Tākonūn, http://www.jabbarkakaei.blogfa.com/post-30.aspx (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 44. See Maryam Kamalinejad, ‘Dāstānak’, Storyteller, 29 November 2016, http://mkamali. mihanblog.com, (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 45. See Mohammad Baharloo, ‘Dāstān-e Kūtāh-e Iranī: 23 Dāstān az 23 Nevīsande-ye Iranī’, Vista, 5 August 1998, http://vista.ir/book/320645 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p.

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46. See Mohamad Javad Jazeini, Dāstānak, Flash Fiction, Introduction to the Diffferent Genres of Short Fiction (Tehran: Hezareh Qoqnoos, 2011). 47. See Asadollah Amrei, ‘Nobel be Dāstān-e Kūtāh Tavajjoh Kard’, ISNA, 10 October 2013, https://www.isna.ir/news/92071811891/%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AF%D8%A7% D9%84%D9%84%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C%D B%8C-%D9%86%D9%88%D8%A8%D9%84-%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AF%D 8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86-%DA%A9%D9%88%D8%AA% D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%87-%DA%A9% D8%B1%D8%AF (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 48. See Farahnaz Alizadeh, Dāstān-e Mokāshefeh [Stories of Discovery] (Tehran: Ghatreh 2013). 49. See Farahnaz Alizadeh, ‘Besīyārī az Dāstānakhā Vījegīha-ye Dāstānhā-ye Mīnīmāl ra Nadārand’, IBNA, 1 October 2013, http://www.isna.ir/fa/news/92071811891/%D8% A7%D8%B3%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%8 5%D8%B1%D8%A7%DB%8C%DB%8C-%D9%86%D9%88%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%A8%D9%87-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%86%DA%A9%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%A7%D9%87-%D8%AA%D9%88% D8%AC%D9%87 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 50. See Farahnaz Alizadeh, ‘Montazer-e Daryaft-e Dāstānak-ha Hastam’, A Window on Story and Criticism, 1 October 2013, http://f-alizadeh.mihanblog.com/post/960 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 51. See Amrei, ‘Nobel be Dāstān-e Kūtāh Tavajjoh Kard’, n.p. 52. See Christophe Balaÿ, La genèse du roman persan moderne (Téhéran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1998). 53. Thanks to Fatemeh Shams for introducing me to the postmodern ghazal. 54. Fatemeh Moghadam, ‘Discussion with Mehdi Moussavi, Poet of the Postmodern Ghazal’, Fatemeh Moghadam, 12 July 2010, http://fatemehmoghadam.blogfa.com/post-21.aspx (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 55. International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, ‘Two Poets Sentenced to Flogging and Nine and Eleven Years in Prison’, Iran Human Rights, 14 October 2015, https://www. iranhumanrights.org/2015/10/two-poets-sentenced/ (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 56. See Moghadam, ‘Discussion with Mehdi Moussavi’, n.p. 57. See Cekaf, https://3kkk.wordpress.com (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 58. See Karine Megerdoomian, ‘Analysis of Farsi Weblogs. A Survey of the Literature’, MITRE, August 2008, http://www.zoorna.org/papers/FarsiBlogs-LitSurvey-Chap1.pdf (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 59. See Dominique Cardon, La démocratie Internet. Promesses et limites (Paris: Seuil, 2010). 60. Aliasghar Seyedabadi, ‘Webloghā-ye Gorūhī, Halghehā-ye āghāazīn-e Goftegū’ [Collective Weblogs, Opening the Circles to Dialogue], BBC Persian, 14 November 2014, http://www. bbc.com/persian/iran/story/2004/11/041114_mj-asa-iran-web-logs-anniv.shtml (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 61. See Mostafa Mardani, ‘Interview with Leila Sadeghi’, Leila Sadeghi, 22 May 2009, http:// leilasadeghi.com/leila-sadeghis-work/interview/463-interview-mardani.html (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 62. Nima Mina, ‘Blogs, Cyber-Literature and Vitual Culture in Iran’, George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies, December 2007, http://www.marshallcenter.org/mcpublicweb/ MCDocs/files/College/F_Publications/occPapers/occ-paper_15-en.pdf (last accessed 28 January 2018), p. 37. 63. Thanks to Elham Naeej for introducing me to these writers. 64. See Hamid Abdollahyan, Mehdi Semati and Mohammad Ahmadi, ‘An Analysis of SecondLevel Digital Divide in Iran’, in Massimo Ragnedda and Glenn W. Muschert (eds), The Digital Divide: The Internet and Social Inequality in International Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 237–50.

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65. See Small Media, ‘Iranian Internet Infrastructure and Policy Report’, Small Media, https:// www.smallmedia.org.uk/sites/default/files/u8/IIIP_JULY15.pdf (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. There is a distinction between sites that are filtered (filter shod) or removed (baste shod). Filtered sites can still be accessed within Iran with the help of filtershekān (filter breakers). These refer to any program or software that circumvents the filters that the government puts in place to block access to certain sites, including YouTube. See Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany, Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 82–4. 66. Alireza Doostdar, ‘“The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging”: On Language, Culture, and Power in Persian Weblogestan’, American Anthropologist, 106 (2004), pp. 1–43; pp. 5–6. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 67. Alireza Doostdar, ‘Weblogs’, Encyclopedia Iranica, 15 March 2010, http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/weblogs (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 68. See El Hamamsy and Soliman, Popular Culture in the Middle East, p. 8. 69. See Morozov, The Net Delusion, p. 241. 70. Mohammad Hassan Shahsavari, ‘Interview with Mohammad Hassan Shahsavari About “Dear M”’, in Davoud Atashbeik (ed.), Our Literature: The Voice of the New Generation of Iranian Literature, 2013, http://www.adabiatema.com/index.php/2013-03-02-20-0243/2013-03-20-17-06-42/241-1392/1198-2013-03-20-12-51-13 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 71. Saeed Kamali Dehghan, ‘Digital Age Poses a New Challenge to Iran’s Relentless Book Censors’, The Guardian, 15 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ may/15/digital-age-poses-a-new-challenge-to-irans-relentless-book-censors (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 72. See Marchant, ‘Writer’s Block’, p. 49. 73. Giacobino et al., ‘Whither Blogistan’, p. 4. 74. See Reza Shokrolahi, ‘Linking Khābgard to Other Weblogs’, Khābgard, 31 January 2010, http://Khābgard.com/?id=-1871374833 (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 75. Rahimi and Faris, Social Media in Iran, p. 9. 76. Sreberny and Khiabany, Blogistan, p. 43. 77. Doostdar, ‘The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging’, p. 7. 78. See Alavi, We Are Iran and Sreberny and Khiabany, Blogistan. 79. See Benedict Anderson, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (Amsterdam: Centre for German and European Studies, 1992), p. 12. 80. See Giacobino et al., ‘Whither Blogistan’. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 81. Akhavan, ‘Exclusionary Cartographies’, p. 73. 82. See Sudabeh Mohafez, Zehn Zeilen. Eukapirates versucht sich an der kleinen form, 2007–2013, http://eukapi.twoday.net (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 83. See Sudabeh Mohafez, http://sudabehmohafez.de (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 84. See Yadollah Kouchaki Dehshali, http://www.y-k-shali.com (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 85. See Ali Schirasi, http://www.alischirasi.de (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. Thanks to Nima Mina and Christian Palm for providing me with these references. 86. See Reza Ghassemi, Davāt, 2001–2015, http://www.rezaghassemi.com/davat.htm (last accessed 28 January 2018), n.p. 87. Akhavan, ‘Exclusionary Cartographies’, p. 107. 88. Elizabeth Bucar and Roja Fazaeli, ‘Free Speech in Weblogistan? The Offline Consequences of Online Communication’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 40:3 (2008), pp. 403–19; p. 414. 89. Hockx, Internet Literature in China, p. 194.

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Acknowledgements Thanks to the members of the Iranian Studies Network at UNSW, as well as to Bill Ashcroft, Omid Azadibougar and Setayesh Nooraninejad. Funding for this project: Dr. Nanquette is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE150100329).

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Chapter 21 Popular Culture and the Arab Spring Caroline Rooney

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his chapter will endeavour to trace the continuity between African anticolonial liberation struggles and the Arab Spring by showing how both movements present popular culture as integral to their revolutionary praxis. My aim is to put forward an explanatory narrative of how and why popular culture has played a crucial role in the lead-up to the Arab uprisings and the modes of their ongoing realisations. Accordingly, the chapter will first analyse how a colonial dialectic of appropriation and assimilation serves to foreclose creativity as a popular and collective reality, positing this as the reason why liberation theorists such as Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Amícal Cabral and Frantz Fanon insisted on national culture as indispensable to the achievement of liberation. The chapter will then explore how African and Arab liberation struggles have been respectively thwarted by what may be termed a paradoxical colonisation of popular resistance. It will then go on to offer readings of different revolutionary aesthetics with reference to Egyptian and Syrian cultural practices to reveal how these engage with exposures of cultural hegemony and the overturning of hegemonic appropriations. The chapter will conclude with a reflection on the question of how engagement with popular culture paves the way for emergent participatory epistemologies.

Why Cultural Resistance is Important for Liberation Struggles In an essay entitled ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Edward Said defines the colonised in terms of ‘the dreadful secondariness of a people who, in V. S. Naipaul’s derisory characterization, are condemned only to use a telephone never to invent it’.1 By inference, colonisation may therefore be defined as the claiming of a position of origination. First of all, such a claim is obviously inauthentic for it is a retrospective or belated appropriation of what the claimant does not in fact originate. As such, it serves implicitly to re-cast origination in terms of ownership, which serves simultaneously to disavow the belatedness at stake and to foreclose prior originating sources and provenances, genealogies and histories. Secondly, and accordingly, the nature of the claim is at once rhetorically performative and forcefully self-insistent, both disavowing realities on the ground and seeking to engineer an altered reality. In The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi indicates that Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973) may be seen as a work that anticipates Said’s Orientalism (1978), where Dabashi quotes Asad as follows: ‘The process of European global power has been central to the anthropological task of

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recording and analysing the ways of life of subject populations, even when a serious consideration of that power was theoretically excluded.’2 Dabashi goes on to note that Talal Asad speaks of ‘the fundamental act of subjection by which non-Europeans were made into the simulacra of “human beings”’ (p. 51). The colonial monopolisation of the position of subject/owner of authoritative knowledge serves to position the nonEuropean as a constructed object as opposed to dialogical other. As Dabashi considers, this serves to eradicate the consciousness of the non-European – of what is instituted as the anthropological object – including thereby the consciousness the colonised have of their worlds. Dabashi writes: What we are witnessing unfold in the Arab Spring is an epistemic emancipation from an old, domineering, dehumanizing, and subjugating geography – the geography that anthropologists have mapped out for colonialists to rule. By reclaiming a global public sphere and restoring historical agency, the world is finally discovered to be a planet, not a metaphysical polarity along an East-West axis. (p. 54) The metaphysical polarity Dabashi refers to in the above is further identified by him as a quintessentially Hegelian project. Having myself written of the postcolonial implications of Hegelian Orientalism elsewhere, this is something I would endorse.3 In brief, drawing on my earlier analysis, Hegel’s philosophy of history entails the setting up of a Western subject in opposition to the Orient not just as other to it but rather as its own other. That is, Hegel appropriates the history and culture of the East as the property of the West in the service of the West’s auto-globalising or selfuniversalising mission. Moreover, Hegel sets up his duality of West and East through the foreclosure of the animist non-duality of African cultures, maintaining that Africans can only be brought into history through the master-slave relation. Firstly, what is worth noting is that two mutually reinforcing trajectories are established by this teleological epistemology or dialectic. The one is a trajectory of assimilation. Here, ostensibly or at best, the West accommodates its cultural others within its own history. However, what is at stake is a commodification – both ‘thingification’4 and ownership – of the other as it establishes multiculturalism as the property of the West. This is not a case of positing assimilation as an alternative to multiculturalism but rather of treating toleration of cultural diversity as definitive of Western culture, serving thus to impede recognition of forms of multiculturalism outside of the West or outside of the terms of the West. The second trajectory is one of total erasure and forgetting. That is, whatever cannot be assimilated into Western history through subordination becomes completely expendable. What this actually means is a foreclosure of any revolutionary potential capable of overturning what is in effect the capitalist imperialism of the West. With respect to the above trajectories, the Hegelian project serves to establish both a relative past and an absolute past. The relative past is signified by the Orient, in relation to which the Hegelian subject inverts its own belatedness. That is, the Orient is accorded no priority or pre-existence of its own (as might position the West as secondary), but equated with the West’s own past or surpassed childhood. This transmutes what may have once originated with the East into supposed ‘Eastern backwardness’. Thus, when Said refers to the secondariness imposed on the colonised, this disguises

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the factual secondariness of the coloniser. In contradistinction to this, the absolute past is signified by a forsaken Africa as that which is lost beyond any possible recuperation and even representation. In his influential essay ‘National Liberation and Culture’, Amícal Cabral states, To take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize, to paralyze, its cultural life. For, with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be assured its perpetuation.5 He goes on to say that for this reason the idea of foreign or imperial domination is presented with two alternatives: a genocide of the indigenous population or a process of cultural assimilation, as touched on above. However, of the latter he maintains, ‘the so-called theory of progressive assimilation of native populations . . . turns out to be a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question’ (p. 53). Thus, while assimilation is much less extreme than genocide, it aims to effect what may be regarded as incremental culturecide.6 Whereas genocide targets the actual lives of unwanted populations, culturecide focuses instead on erasing the cultural markers of those to be usurped in order to refute the evidential signs (or signs as evidence) of historical and geographical priority. For Cabral, culture is not merely textual (as in certain postmodernist and poststructuralist theories) but more importantly the manifestation of the historical and geographical existence of a people. He argues, ‘Culture, the fruit of history, reflects at every moment the material and spiritual reality of society’ (my emphasis).7 Thus, culture is a testimony to the lived and living presence of a people in a particular place over a traceable time. In ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Said comments, ‘I do not think the anti-imperialist challenge represented by Fanon or Césaire or others like these has by any means been met.’8 What he refers to may be clarified by an earlier statement in the essay where Said suggests, With Césaire and C. L. R. James, Fanon’s model for the postimperial world depended on the idea of a collective as well as a plural destiny for mankind, Western and non-Western alike. As Césaire says . . . no one has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength. There is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest. (p. 224) It may be proposed that Western imperialism, largely based on an implicitly Hegelian logic, serves to singularise the universal; to claim or appropriate the value of the universal for a Western singularity. Given that, Said’s emphasis on the collective and plural is apt and serves to indicate that what imperialism and colonialism serve to foreclose is, as I have argued at length, collective consciousness.9 In turning the colonised into ‘simulacra’ of the human, in Asad’s expression – a correlate of the ‘mimic men’ of Naipaul and Bhabha – it is not so much individual consciousness that is repressed as alternative senses of belonging and universality. Said maintains that Fanon was not really interested in the question of a national consciousness so much as in the possibility of universality conceived outside of the ideologically limited universality of the Western appropriation of universality. However,

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for Fanon, as for Cabral, national consciousness, achieved through popular culture, is crucial to the liberation struggle. Fanon maintains, National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period.10 For Fanon, the danger of regression lies not in nationalism, which revives the possibility of collective consciousness for the present, but rather in the appeal to ethnic folk traditions as a source of cultural pride. Thus, Fanon denounces Négritude stating, for instance, ‘This historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley’ (p. 39). Where Fanon and Said are in agreement is over how the cultural expression of the liberation struggle should be in accordance with its contemporary moment of unfolding. The above said, what should be noted is that liberation theorists from the Caribbean, such as Fanon and Césaire, write as alienated from an African past, subject as they are to histories of epistemic violence. Senegalese liberation thinker and poet Léopold Senghor is in a different position precisely because the African culture and philosophy that he celebrates is far from being a lost past for him and accordingly he is able to speak of his as a living heritage.11 From Senghor’s perspective, African culture and philosophy serve to perpetuate a creative outlook that the capitalist and rationalist West has lost. Amongst other things, Senghor refers to the environmental holism and animist sensibilities of his culture, together with forms of signification appropriate to such. I will say more about these various modes of collective consciousness and their cultural expression in relation to the Arab Spring further on. The final point of discussion here is that the collective consciousness at stake differs from the multiculturalism of assimilationist policies. For Senghor, African cultures are said to have a capacity for accommodating otherness through empathy and hospitality, and clearly this differs from the appropriative drive of assimilative colonisation. Dabashi writes: What I believe is happening in countries from Iran to Egypt and Tunisia to Morocco, predicated on ‘the end of Islamic ideology’, is the retrieval of their organic cosmopolitan cultures, at once local and global in terms specific to their historical experiences. The uprisings are geared towards the restitution of this cosmopolitan worldliness. What I mean by cosmopolitanism is not what Kant had argued (and others after him), namely a philosophical and ethical argument for the delineation of moral, political, and legal prerequisites of a global conception of justice, but precisely the opposite: a historical coming to terms with the factual existence of, not an imaginative wishing for, a cosmopolitan worldliness . . . overridden and camouflaged by the heavy ideological autonormativity of the West.12 Thus, this is not cosmopolitanism (and I would add popular collectivism or co-existence) as a regulative iteration of norms but as a lived reality. An example of this is the way

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in which nationalist leaders have justified dictatorial governments on the grounds of keeping fundamentalism and extremism at bay in ways that ironically displace prior liberationist formations of a common ground.13

The Neo-colonial-postcolonial Dabashi’s book on the Arab Spring is subtitled ‘The End of Postcolonialism’, and I think this is largely due to two post-liberation outcomes (that is, dominant trajectories after the removal of colonial powers). The first concerns the assimilation of postcolonial intellectuals into Western multicultural capitalist societies at the expense of worldly continuities with their own cultures. The second concerns how postcolonial movements outside of the West are seen by Dabashi to be formed in reaction to colonialism. He identifies ‘three distinct (prototypical) ideological grand narratives: anticolonial nationalism, Third World socialism and militant Islam’.14 As I have argued in ‘Sufi Springs’,15 I consider this dismissal to be rather too sweeping, and here will attempt to offer a more specific critique of the reactionary postcolonialism to which Dabashi objects. Fanon was well aware of the dangers in store for the nationalism of postcolonial struggles. In The Wretched of the Earth, he warns against the shrinking of the national cause to its elite representatives. What I would like to add to this is that there has been a tendency amongst post-independence leaders to colonise the liberation struggle. Paradoxically and hypocritically, liberation becomes yet again a matter of what is claimed and owned. It is not merely a repetition compulsion but rather the irrational appropriation of the very resistance to appropriation. Certainly leaders such as Mugabe and Gaddafi have posited themselves as the true bearers of the liberation struggle itself, basing the case for their political longevity or monopolisation of the state on this. The persistence of the liberation struggle shrinks to the mere persistence of its figureheads who will not relinquish their power. What is neo-colonial about this is precisely the possessive ownership of the people, one that becomes dictatorial in homogenously singularising the people as the servants of the leader and his state. Mubarak begins his 10 February 2011 address to the nation by declaring, ‘I am addressing you all from the heart, a father’s dialogue with his sons and daughters.’16 Gaddafi in his last speech boasts, ‘I claimed Libya for my people . . . to keep my people free . . . my people, all the thousands who are my children.’17 The claim to paternity is, of course, not a matter of actual origination but merely one of ownership. I would like now to distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian versions of the familial state with reference to Syrian and Egyptian political situations in the years prior to the Arab Spring. Ownership of the people or the nation by the state can easily become totalitarian. In her study Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official, based on a visit over 1995–6, miriam cooke vividly conveys the atmosphere and mechanisms of Syrian state control of public expression. She comments: Every day, the newspapers carried articles about the various cultural events happening in Damascus and elsewhere. Yet artists and writers secretly complained that they could scarcely breathe. They never knew when they were breaking the rules, were never sure about the consequence of what they did.18

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She speaks of being drawn to a widely circulated slogan: ‘Culture Is Humanity’s Highest Need’, while suspicious of its official deployment. What I think is striking about these observations is the appropriation of national culture by the state: the state usurps the nation. Regarding this, totalitarian regimes seek to close the distance between the state and the people through enforced consensus achieved by means of propaganda, censorship and degrees of intimidation from threats to imprisonment. In exposing the existence of underground dissident art in her book, cooke serves to challenge the totalitarian myth of the perfectly unified nation state. She writes: ‘It is my hope that Dissident Syria will help Syrian culture leave the country and circulate so that it will no longer be so easy to say that a government and its ruler are the same as the people’ (p. 17). The situation in Egypt prior to the revolution cannot really be said to be one of totalitarianism in spite of the activities of the mukhabarat (security police). When I visited the country over the years 2007–10, my concern was similar to cooke’s, namely to counter the conflation in an international arena of Egypt with either Mubarak, on the one hand, or the Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, through drawing attention to popular voices contesting the authority of both the government and Islamism. The political configuration in Egypt prior to the revolution was largely more of an authoritarian one, aligned with neoliberalism, rather than a totalitarian one. Rather than seeking to control all aspects of Egyptian society, Mubarak’s government flagrantly ignored the demands and needs of the people, effecting political negligence. The neoliberal state was ‘weak’ in the sense of not acting for the people, allowing widespread neglect of basic services.19 While the basic distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism may be valid on a somewhat abstract level, in actuality states deploy aspects of both ideological practices. Thus, al-Assad’s Syria was becoming increasingly neoliberal while Mubarak’s government did rely on its security police. What I think explains this is that while the ideology of neoliberalism is against state interference on economic matters, the resulting imbalance of wealth and services means that the role of the pro-neoliberal state becomes one of state security services and measures in defence of privileged elites. It can also be pointed out that both authoritarianism and totalitarianism cast the leader in the role of symbolic father of the people, the difference perhaps being that the totalitarian leader demands to be loved or worshipped by the people as if a form of populism. Beyond the question of the leader as such, Gilbert Achcar in The People Want importantly draws attention to the predominance of patrimonial politics in the Middle East, a case of ruling families or clans. Drawing on Weber, Achcar writes: ‘Patrimonialism is an absolute, hereditary type of autocratic power which is however capable of functioning with an entourage of “kith” and “kin”. The patrimonial power appropriates the state for itself.’20 The important point to be taken from this discussion with respect to the question of postcolonial dictatorships is that the governing elite serves to colonise and monopolise the country’s independence as its own possession and inheritance. Simply, colonial ownership is replaced with neocolonial ownership, yet a neo-colonial ownership of the very desire for liberation. In relation to this predicament, the people are either obliged to go along with this colonisation as if it were their supposed liberation or they are treated as expendable, unnecessary citizens.

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Regarding the question of the ‘as if’ touched on above, Lisa Wedeen in Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria writes astutely about how in Syria the cult of Hafiz al-Assad used the performativity of the ‘as if’ to manufacture a veneer of social normality.21 In a certain respect, this performative normality is uncanny in the way Melville’s story ‘Benito Cereno’ presents its theatre of slavery: the slaves who have revolted hide their revolt through staging a mimicry of normative obedience for the approving gaze of a foreign master.22 The key question concerns how the virtuality of the ideological image both inverts the underlying reality and usurps that reality in taking on a life of its own, as if volitional. Whereas Melville’s theatre of volitional docility hides the truth of a revolt, in a totalitarian society, the surface image of normal life hides the dark machinations of power that pull the strings of a puppet society. The theatre of normality that Wedeen addresses is recognisable to me from the experience of apartheid South Africa. It too manufactured the presence of a normal society, everyone going about their everyday affairs in a seemingly ordinary manner, while the concealed reality was one of violently repressed dissent, the nightmarish daily torture in prison cells, and so on. One of the effects of the theatre of normality, as often observed, is that it serves to isolate people from each other, precisely because it co-opts the entire ground of social unity, and when people are isolated from each other they become afraid. Here, the revolutionary task becomes one of dissidence, daring to speak out in order to expose the ideological illusions and their reliance on force. However, this in itself is insufficient in that the whole structure has to be overturned, overthrown, in the re-establishment or creation of a common ground capable of replacing the ‘as if’ populism or the simulacra of social unity. Prior to the revolution in Egypt, there was an increasing groundswell of popular creativity together with an explicit interest in the role of popular culture, locally in North Africa and yet with transnational dimensions. There were many interconnected strands to this assertion of popular spirit. There was a resurgence of interest in the kind of worldly cosmopolitanism referred to by Dabashi, one especially associated in an Egyptian context with Downtown Cairo.23 This is evident in literary works such as Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building24 and in the music of the aptly named band Wust El-Balad (formed in 1999) whose soft rock combines Egyptian and Latin sounds. (Wust El-Balad singer Hany Adel went on to write ‘Sout Al Horeya’, one of the revolution’s anthems). There was the uptake and dissemination of global youth cultures in the growth of blogging (influenced by Iraqi blogs such as Riverbend’s),25 in rap music and performance (for example, Arabian Knightz and the aptly named Revolution), in the production of graphic novels such as Magdy El Shafee’s Metro, banned in 2008.26 In Tunisia, political graffiti (possibly influenced by the graffiti of Israel’s wall or the Lebanese graffiti scene) was beginning to appear in public places.27 Novels such as Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abas Abd28 and Ahmed Towfiq’s Utopia29 were experimenting with new forms to express youth dissent and grassroots resistance. There was an interest in the earlier forms of Egyptian popular culture that Ziad Fahmy documents in Ordinary Egyptians.30 In addition, Egyptian intellectuals were turning to the cultural studies strand of postcolonial studies, particularly the work of Stuart Hall, seen as particularly relevant for the times.31 This expression of popular spirit through culture was accompanied by a constant stream of workers’ protests. As blogger Rehab Bassam told me in 2010, there were

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daily strikes by workers, whether in Cairo or other parts of Egypt.32 In addition, I ran into a couple of small demonstrations outside Parliament while there. What I wish to suggest is that the Egyptian revolution may be said to have grown out of an anticolonial freedom of spirit that has never really been given up in spite of oppression. For many Egyptians, 2011 was a continuation of the 1977 ‘Bread Riots’ that were a continuation of the 1952 revolution that was a continuation of the 1919 revolution.33 Cabral’s emphasis on the culture of the people as a material and spiritual reality is important in that culture cannot therefore be relegated to the accompanying expression of this or that political movement. For Cabral, culture in being collective consciousness is incapable of being sectarian. Writing of culture as a social reality, he defines it as, ‘independent of the will of men, the colour of their skins or the shape of their eyes’.34 It is not therefore a question of identity politics regulated by norms. Instead, it may be thought of in terms of the combined truth of a history that is shared through being co-experienced. While, like Fanon, Cabral rejects the racialisation of culture, he allows for a particularity of African experience that is African by virtue of its geographical locations and ongoing history. For Cabral, it is the creativity of the people that mobilises the liberation struggle, whereas for Fanon it is more that the liberation struggle serves to pave the way for new cultural formations that will grow out of it. Regarding the Arab Spring, popular culture certainly provided an impetus for the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, while in Syria, where the repression of collective consciousness was, it seems, greater, the uprising brought a new access to popular cultural expression, as described by Malu Halasa and Zaher Omareen who write of a ‘forty-year departure from a long history of silence’.35 They state that revolutionaries ‘observed or participated in an outpouring of free expression that even surprised them, and also shocked the country’s custodians of official culture’ (p. viii). Thus, revolution is both enabled by resilient popular cultures (those that have managed to escape colonisation) and enabling for new forms of popular culture.

Revolutionary Aesthetics and Popular Culture In this section, I aim to analyse forms of cultural protest that serve to expose the hegemonic ‘theatre of normality’ (that serves to deny collective consciousness) together with forms of cultural protest that are more directly expressive of the popular common ground and that more radically overturn and cast aside the performative theatre, revolution being precisely an overturning. An example of the former type of protest culture can be found in the Syrian exposure of state violence in works that are very dark as clearly differing from the carnivalesque spirit of Tahrir square that Sahar Keraitim and Samia Mehrez write of in ‘Mulid al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution’.36 Different as these forms of expression are, what they can be seen to have in common is that they variously undo the state’s appropriation or colonisation of the nation. In his story ‘The Thieves’ Market’ (2014), Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed offers us a mini-allegory of Syria’s march from dictatorship to revolt to war.37 It is told in the form of a coming of age story on the part of a girl called Suad who becomes fond of her name through discovering the Egyptian film star Suad Hosny, especially

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on seeing the 1972 film Watch Out for Zouzou (Khalli balak min Zouzou) in which Hosny sings: ‘Life turns rosy when you’re beside me’. (In Egyptian Arabic, the song, with lyrics composed by popular poet Salah Jaheen, is referred to as ‘El-haya ba‘a lonha bambi’.) We are first given a picture of the Syrian Suad’s childhood at school with her best friend Khadija. One of her most memorable early experiences is when their teacher orders the class to go on a demonstration, the first of many marches for the fledgling citizens. The teacher leads a chant of ‘Syria, Syria, who created you?’ and as he does so he spits out three dirty false teeth. Suad finds this disgusting but closes her eyes to go along with the chant and spew out the required response: ‘The Socialist Ba‘ath Party!’ At the same time, she finds in her mind the words of a poem she has been learning, particularly the haunting line, ‘Oh river, do not flow away, wait for me to follow you’ (p. 18). Another important memory for Suad in ‘The Thieves’ Market’ is when the children are obliged to give blood for the 1973 war effort. Because she faints at the thought of this, Suad’s friend Khadija takes her place and gives blood twice. The children are trained to be very patriotic, chanting for Syria and Palestine, and to praise ‘anti-colonial perseverance’. Then Khadija marries and leaves for Homs, while Suad also marries. Suad’s husband turns out to be a wife-beater, while he is very patriotic and goes on demonstrations that Suad mainly comes to watch on television. She resigns herself to being beaten up by him, especially when he buys her a series of household goods as a means of purchasing her forgiveness, a metaphor presumably for Syrian neoliberalism. Thus, Suad acquires a Samsung freezer, an LG washing machine, a Toshiba fridge, a Sony television and finally a Filipina maid as a result of her husband’s abuse. The climax of the story comes when Suad is watching a Homs demonstration on TV with her maid and is suddenly presented with the image of Khadija, dead and bleeding. A second image shows Khadija slamming onto a Suzuki pick up truck. The reaction of Suad is: ‘My life flashed before my eyes . . . but it was not just my life I saw as if on film, but hers, and not just her death, but mine’ (p. 24). In realising that she and Khadija are conjoined, she has a sudden understanding that the demonstrations and marches she has participated in across her life have been a meaningless tragic farce of popular togetherness. She compares the marches to a ‘catwalk’ and the demonstrations to a ‘market of thieves’ (p. 25), implying that the Ba‘ath party have stolen revolutionary populism for themselves and turned it into a state commodity, leaving people like Khadija to die by the wayside when shot down for failing to conform. Suad decides to attend her friends’ funeral even though there is no official record of her death. In the taxi she takes to go to the funeral, the driver asks her where she is from and she replies she is a Filipina maid. By the end of the story, Khadija, while remaining an individual, has come to stand for all the revolutionaries turned upon by the government while Suad achieves a new popular consciousness of class that, like Cabral’s collective spirit, is unmarked by race, clan or tribe, as she becomes not just a Syrian revolutionary but a Filipina one, and ‘servant’ to the people. Although racially unmarked, this unclaimed space is given to us as a feminine river, where the final demonstration she attends is a funeral of weeping women in this story of feminine friendship. It is worth noting that in Syria and Egypt, the uprisings have foregrounded questions of both women’s liberation and a feminine freedom of spirit.38

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What is remarkable about the story is how much terrain it covers in such a short space. This is not just because it is a condensed history of Syria from the seventies to the moment of revolt. It is much more because of how the story constitutes the overturning of a gross historical lie through a transmutation of its mode of signification. Its style is simple and direct, as if it were a literal account that could be taken at face value. Yet everything that might seem literal is metaphorically transformed into a form of poetic speech, the anecdotal narrative becoming a poem and the riverine line from the poem becoming the story itself. Some examples of this poetic transmutation are worth exploring in further detail. In the Egyptian film Watch Out for Zouzou in which Suad Hosny sings of life as ‘pink’ or ‘rosy’, she plays the character of a young student at Cairo University who tries to conceal from a theatre director lecturer with whom she has fallen in love that she comes from a poor sha‘bi background.39 In particular, her mother is a belly dancer who performs at village weddings. I employ the term sha‘bi here since it reflects this village ‘folk’ culture while the metropolitan version of this has become the electrosha‘bi music played at today’s weddings, music that is snobbishly met with disapproval by the middle classes for being coarse in the same way that belly-dancing was looked down upon in Watch Out for Zouzou. In brief, the character played by Suad Hosny comes to defy the snobbish intellectual culture by affirming her maternal lowlife origins, and also her unashamed femininity (even as she returns to university life with rebellious support from the students). Ossama Mohammed’s story has all this resonating in its background: organic populism associated with female bonding against intellectual elitism. Not only this, but an earlier moment in the story very fleetingly refers to the martyrdom of Ghiath Matar (a peaceful revolutionary who was known to present soldiers with roses and bottles of water and yet was tortured to death). At the end of the story, the real and lyrical life exuberance of the ‘my life is rosy’ song has been transformed into the blood of Khadija’s corpse. The fact that she dies on a Suzuki pickup truck appears to be a reference to ‘the Suzuki intellectuals’ of the Syrian revolution. The term is derived from the actions of a humble worker called Hamza who transformed his Suzuki into a kind of broadcast vehicle of defiance on the streets. He and others like him were seen as the true organic intellectuals of the revolution, braver than many of the country’s officially recognised intellectuals.40 The story serves to show up how the Syrian ruling class have appropriated a discourse of anti-colonial resistance and turned it into mere jargon. Realised as the pure performativity of ‘catwalk’ demonstrations, a commodified populism, they have turned the revolution into something literal and lifeless. In The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East, Charles Tripp writes: ‘When art is used against the established order, in symbolic reversals that form part of a project of resistance, it shows all the intimate familiarity with power that has been apparent in other spheres’.41 While this persuasively accounts for one aspect of Mohammed’s story, I would add it does not quite account for all of it. Tripp’s framework is a Foucauldian one, as he explains, and it may be said that Foucault was pervasively fascinated by the performativity of power. However, for Foucault and his followers, that is all that there is: there is nothing outside of the theatres of power so, at best, it is only possible to expose their machinations. In ‘The Thieves’ Market’ there is a form of signification in play that goes beyond the mimetic (including mimetic reversals), serving not only to critique the performative but also to overthrow it fully. This mode of signification

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is one that I call ostensive, although other terms would be possible. Whereas performative signification is self-enacting, ostensive signification points to realities outside of itself. It functions like a poetic sign language, that is, a non-literal language of hints, pointers, signals, intimations to an elsewhere, to a reality beyond itself. It functions under the radar of official discourse, undetectable by literal habits of thought, accessible only to those on its wavelength. The belly-dancer song, the roses of Ghiath Matar, the Suzuki, and so on, form a kind of ‘code language’ for a real and unbroken freedom of spirit that no text can capture and sell for it is necessarily outside of a market of thieves. ‘The Thieves’ Market’ points not only to the Syrian streets but also in the direction of Tahrir Square. In her first-hand account of the Egyptian revolution, Revolution is My Name, Mona Prince takes us through the festivities and turbulence of the eighteen days to their conclusion with the fall of Mubarak. At this joyful moment, she and friends gather in After Eight (a Downtown night club) and someone fetches a cassette player. A cassette is inserted and this is what we hear: Pink My life is pink. Pink, pink, pink, pink. My life is pink with you by my side. I am by your side, my love, And my love, you are by my side. Suad Hosny’s song does thus transmute into a revolutionary one. What is further amusing is that the Egyptian group change the lyrics to refer to Hosni Mubarak, singing: ‘Pink, pink / My life is pink without you, Hosni’.42 As touched on earlier, the writer of the lyrics is Salah Jaheen who is known as ‘poet of the revolution’ for his poetry around the 1952 revolution. In ‘The Thieves’ Market’, there is a significant moment when a school pupil friend of Suad’s, said to be a communist, changes the script of a Ba‘athist anthem God Protect You, substituting ‘the people’ for ‘God’. The implication here and elsewhere in the story is that the ruling elite appropriate the sacred for themselves, a reference to the religiosity of the cult of the al-Assad clan that Wedeen’s work serves to expose. I do not think that the schoolgirl’s subversive gesture in the story is simply God-denying (although that reading would be possible). I think rather that the implication is that the sacred and the creative are with the people in a way that cannot be politically conscripted. Who creates Syria? Not the socialist Ba‘ath party. In a reading of the murals created by the Egyptian artist Alaa Awad, murals that are inspired by ancient Egyptian ones, Soraya Morayef, drawing on Tripp, writes: Awad’s simple yet terrific strategy of transferring art from a means of supporting the status quo and a form of propaganda intended to glorify the ruling pharaoh to a street performance that subverts the established art form and empowers antiregime protests in modern-day Egypt was practically a rewriting, a retranslation of our past. By decontextualizing the murals and changing subtle but important details, he took something away from the state – something that had upheld the sanctity of the state – and gave it back to the people.43

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One reason that I have turned to Alaa Awad’s frescoes that present neo-Pharaonic iconography based on Ancient Egyptian scenes and rituals is that his practice raises questions concerning Fanon’s admonitions against drawing upon traditional African art for the cultural purposes of national liberation struggles, admonitions in contradistinction to Senghor’s considerations of African traditions as a rich repository of cultural alternatives. At the outset of my analysis, I would say that the revolution dismantled the usual tradition/modernity binarism where what has arguably come to the fore instead is a distinction between genuine art that speaks to the people and the merely kitsch.44 When Ancient Egyptian art and culture is instrumentalised in order to promote state-owned nationalism or commodified for the tourist industry, it can take kitsch forms. As suggested by Morayef above, Awad’s art removes Ancient Egyptian culture from these spheres, and I would say that it makes the past seem thoroughly contemporary in more than one way. First of all, this concerns making Ancient Egyptian art appear relevant to the present. Here, for example, Awad reproduces iconic images of the goddess Ma‘at, the goddess of justice. As Awad states in a Cairo Scene interview: ‘We have a great civilization that could really help us avoid disasters and make great art; Ancient Egyptians depicted goddess Maat, the personification of truth and justice, in their murals to convey their aspirations and their reality.’45 In one of Awad’s murals of Ma‘at, she is suspended against a deep blue sky of yellow stars, Ma‘at being the regulator of the stars. Her outstretched arms extend into wings that form a shelter for the Egyptians who gather below. What we see is a kind of horizontal transcendence in which each and all are embraced in a cosmic unity of symmetrical balance and graceful poise. Awad depicts in Ma‘at’s headdress the feather of truth with which she is associated: Ancient Egyptians believed that the heart or soul of the dead was weighed against the feather, needing to be of equal weight to it or lighter than it for a place in the afterlife. In another mural, Awad recreates an Ancient Egyptian image of a mouse on a throne being attended to by a cat, the cat fanning the mouse with what looks like a lotus flower. Added to this are bald, bearded priests bowing before the mouse and cat. Morayef proposes that Awad ‘seemed to be mocking religious zealots and members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi parties’.46 If so, the suggestion would be that the Islamists are guilty of the shirk or idolatry they set themselves up against. The image though is polysemous. It can alternatively be read as a humourously carnivalesque one in keeping with the spirit of the revolution in that the powerful are placed below the powerless, mice above cats and animals above humans. The mouse-deity is suggestive of an animist world view in which all creatures count, with the sacred lotus as a symbol of perpetual rebirth. In fact, Awad’s art more widely brings animals and nature into the picture, so to speak, and suggest an environmentalism that is not just human, urban and worldly, but also sacred and natural. If Awad’s mouse and cat image is placed alongside its antiquated original, the effect is one of how the earlier image is reborn. It is reborn through its present context that gives it contemporary meanings without replacing its potential original significance: rather, the old becomes new again. Similarly, Awad’s mural restores the colours of the original relief that is much faded. This makes it contemporary again as the vividly coloured version is closer to how it would have first appeared. What I am suggesting is that the past becomes present again and that we are able to appreciate how the antiquated would have been new and fresh in its own times. Moreover, Awad uses what

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may be termed an Egyptian colour palette.47 The colours (with a predominance of yellow, blue and red) can be found in Ancient Egyptian murals while this colour palette is used by modern and contemporary artists as an Egyptian one of any time, arguably reflective of a chromatism of sunshine, sky, desert and so on, as an English palette might be defined as more mutedly grey, green and brown. With Awad’s work, the past can be placed on the same level as the present as if they were co-creations from a similar outlook. Indeed, in the Ancient Egyptian murals and Awad’s work alike, Egyptians are repeatedly shown as standing in a side-by-side relation to each other. What I wish to suggest is that revolutionary aesthetics may have as their source what the Hegelian project, more broadly Western capitalism, serves to foreclose. There are a great many ways in which this source could be designated, however, in keeping with the terms of this essay, what is at stake is creativity as that which cannot be colonised or privately owned. That is, for creativity to function as such, it cannot enter into a closed circuit since its dynamics are receptive, reciprocal, mutually affirming. In ‘The Aesthetics of Revolution’, El Hamamsy and Soliman write: Old and young, male and female, rich and poor, Muslim, Christian or otherwise, Egyptians suddenly regained their sense of self-worth, of in fact being a nation with a long history of civilisation to which temple art and murals are a witness, a sense that the former regime has constantly suppressed, favouring its own image of a helpless non-productive people. Thus the mind-numbing commercial art of low aesthetic value that characterized particularly the past ten to fifteen years was replaced by a genuine, original, and meaningful kind of art that surprisingly was not produced by professionals. Rather, it was improvised and immediate, coming from and addressing the people.48 This revolutionary creativity may be said to erase a number of polarised distinctions. It erases the distinction between high and low culture, and, as argued in relation to Awad, between tradition and modernity. It may be added that the paradigms of progressive and backward, avant-garde and old-fashioned, also cease to hold. While much of the art in Tahrir Square was indeed improvised, this went hand in hand with the re-discovery of earlier revolutionary art, such as in the poetry of Ahmad Fuad Negm or the songs of Sayeed Darwish. What explains this is that the creative freedom of spirit that produced the earlier work is likely to be similar to the creative freedom of spirit that produces the new work. Ahmed Fuad Negm, writing before the revolution, states: ‘Egypt is like a candle submerged by the river. When the world is dark, Egypt comes out of the river and lights the world.’49 Negm’s above statement pertains to what I earlier referred to in terms of an ostensive poetics. While the Western avant-garde positions itself as anti-traditional and experimental, the Egyptian revolution brought a forgotten meaning of the avant-garde into focus again. In speaking of Negm’s ostensive poetics I mean that he implies that the Egyptian spirit can act like a beacon or a signpost (an advance notice in this sense). In this respect, Egyptian revolutionary art may be seen in terms of that which signifies a way forward. It does not specify a destination, in the manner of a utopian blueprint say, but instead indicates escape routes and means of keeping the ethic of collective liberation in motion. The way forward is shown not in teleological terms but as an intuitive process, one attuned to spiritual, material and social realities.

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Maha El Said, writing on the need for a revolutionary aesthetics, offers the following profound analysis: As long as the West continues to control information, scientific development, and production in general, all attempts at distinction or differentiation will remain copies or simulations of the real. . . . When poverty becomes a fact of life and freedom is oppressed, the simulacrum cannot hold. . . . Thus one is forced to seek the real in an attempt to change it. The Egyptian revolution of January 25, 2011, starting virtually and ending in the streets with the fall of dictatorship, to my mind, is a transformation from the hyper-real to the real, the end of the simulacrum of the postmodern condition into a new era that has yet to be named.50 The above critique of the simulacrum may be placed alongside Tala Asad’s observation that colonial anthropology constitutes the colonised as mere simulacra of the human. This is also a case of the need to overthrow the performative theatre of norms that Ossama Mohammed’s work accomplishes. In my earlier work, I have argued for the need to displace the hegemony of postmodernist performativity with a poetics of the real.51 This was with reference to anti-colonial struggles in sub-Saharan Africa and Palestine, while there are strong connections with liberation struggles across North Africa and the Middle East. I agree with both Dabashi and El Said that the overturning of the Hegelian and postmodern conditions necessitates the participatory working out of new epistemologies appropriate to geographical imaginaries outside of the West. It is with this in mind that the following conclusion to this essay is offered.

Translating the Arab Spring Many Western intellectuals, among others, have put themselves forward to present their interpretations of the Arab Spring. What is apparent is that some of these accounts are well-informed, for they draw widely on the work of Arab intellectuals, writers and the views of citizens, while other accounts are ungrounded and serve as exercises in the symbolic recuperation of hegemonic authority. Even the well-meaning readings of the Arab Spring serve to misrepresent it if the framework of analysis is top-down in terms of the transference of Western theories. I wish here to refer to Badiou’s analysis of the Arab uprisings, because while there is much that is pertinent in it and while there is a strong sympathy for the movement on his part, there is still an unexamined positioning in his work that pertains to the ingrained habits of Western discourse. In The Rebirth of History, Badiou writes: This is exactly what people in the popular rallies were saying and are still saying: we used not to exist, but now we exist . . . The inexistent has arisen. That is why we refer to uprising: people were lying down, submissive, they are getting up, picking themselves up, rising up . . . What has occurred is the restitution of the existence of the inexistent, conditional upon what I call an event.52 While it is possible to see Badiou’s point, the tone and terminology of his statement are problematic. To speak of the people as ‘inexistent’ implies an unconscious perspective.

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It would be more accurate to say their existence, which never disappeared as far as they were concerned, was being ignored by state elitism, while Western elites tend to behave, to this day, as if countries were only their political rulers. Thus, the people are treated as if they were inexistent (when they are certainly not) by those who elect not to see or hear them. Badiou perhaps fails to question the structural performativity of the as if. Secondly, it is potentially patronising to speak of the people as ‘submissive’ and ‘supine’. This is a common Orientalist trope and mirrors what El Hamamsy and Soliman above speak of in terms of the Egyptian governmental propaganda that serves to construct the people as ‘unproductive’. What Badiou is unaware of is that prior to the Arab Spring there is evidence of a great deal of dissidence and activism. In this essay, I have already referred to miriam cooke’s study of Syrian dissidence and to the many strikes and demonstrations in Egypt. The formation in 2004 of the Egyptian political party Kefaya, ‘Enough’, spells it out, while a book such as Khaled Al Kamissi’s Taxi53 shows how openly contemptuous Egyptians from all classes and backgrounds were of their government and how awake they were to their predicament. The people were actually exasperated with being treated as inexistent. Why does Badiou wish to presume that the people were inexistent and supine? Unwittingly, he is thus able to turn them into his anthropological object, the simulacrum of his prior theory. Consider the mode of his formulation: ‘This is exactly what people in the popular rallies were saying . . . what I call an event’. The people become illustrative of his theory, irrespective of what they were actually saying. Andrew Robinson maintains that Badiou’s theory of the Event is his best-known concept and the lynchpin of his theory. The term apparently refers to the excluded part of being-asbeing that appears out of nowhere, as a rip in being, and Robinson writes: ‘Sometimes Badiou portrays the Event as purely random – an effect of chance. The word he usually uses is hasardeux (haphazard)’ and ‘An Event cannot provide any binding justification for itself’.54 However, many Arab commentators maintain that the Arab uprisings are not inexplicable haphazard occurrences but ongoing processes (not random events) that carry forward histories of anti-colonial resistance.55 Badiou’s logic of the Event coincides with the Hegelian foreclosure of reality in the setting up of metaphysical polarities, to use Dabashi’s phrase. Although this foreclosed reality might be radically enigmatic or disturbing for some, for others it is their daily existences that they are themselves very able to vocalise. Badiou pays no attention whatsoever to the cultural expression of the Arab Spring, citing only a couple of poems by canonical European poets. Nonetheless, Badiou has long-standing credentials as a radical. The yet more Hegelian postmodernist philosopher Judith Butler in her reading of the Arab Spring, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly,56 reimposes on it the very logic of a performance of norms that Arab revolutionaries have acted to try and shake off, as examined above, in their intifada. Indeed, the continuity between the Palestinian struggle and the Arab Spring may be appreciated by this translation of the term intifada (‘shake-off’). It is noteworthy that two of the ground-breaking collections of essays that aim to present the Arab Spring, particularly the Egyptian revolution, from an Arab perspective are grounded in translation studies. I refer to Translating Egypt’s Revolution,57 edited by Samia Mehrez and Translating Dissent,58 edited by Mona Baker. What these works are highly conscious of is that the popular expression of resistance stands to be appropriated in the re-establishment of the conceptual and ideological hegemonies

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this expression challenges. In her contribution to the debate, Sarah Hawas writes: ‘I seek to examine the ways in which the Egyptian Revolution has been translated at the global level and therefore made intelligible to global capital.’59 She goes on to state: ‘By transliterating Enlightenment concepts into the present political moment in Egypt, reactionary discourse dispenses with any kind of material, class-based analysis rooted in the present, in favour of a series of abstractions’ (p. 279). In particular, Hawas addresses the manipulative ‘norm-making’ discourse of Western secularism, alongside Egyptian reactionary discourses that deploy a ‘fetishization of normalcy’ (pp. 290–1). In ‘Beyond the Spectacle’, Mona Baker, in introducing her collection of essays, states: Conscious of activists’ deep frustrations with the hijacking of their struggle by ‘expert’ academic and media figures who have little first-hand experience of the events they analyse – a theme that figures prominently in many of the essays of this volume – I have deliberately prioritized first-hand accounts of engaged activists irrespective of whether I agree with their view of translation, however defined and conceptualized.60 While it is thus necessary to attend to how activists are engaged in translating their experiences, both Baker and Hawas also emphasise the importance of transnational solidarities in the translation of revolutionary struggles. In her introduction to Arab cultural studies, Anastasia Valassopoulos quotes Tarek Sabry as follows: The Arab world is like the rest of the global south, subject to the dynamics of the globalist capitalist order and its hegemonic culture. Besides, in today’s globalised world we cannot afford to theorise or conceptualise an Arab cultural studies through the prism of the local alone.61 Valassopoulos goes on to trace the emergence of Arab cultural studies over the last few decades and referring to studies by Abu-Lughod, van Nieuwkerk and Armbrust, she observes: ‘The works did not attempt to co-opt popular artists solely into a Foucauldian framework where “popular” culture served to reflect on wider social paradigms at work. The artists were examined within their own context: the context of production’ (p. 107). What I see this implying in epistemological terms is that the challenge to global capitalist modes of knowledge requires an attention to popular consciousness itself as the alternative common ground. In The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture, Ayman El Desouky writes: With the urgencies of our present global realities, the task as I perceive it here is formally to seek to understand exactly how the people speak and what forms of knowledge they bring collectively and to realize that such a language and such a mode of knowing are indeed conceptually viable and no longer dispensable in our intellectual and professional vocabularies . . . We must be able to recognize and deploy such knowledge, as everyone agrees, but we cannot begin to perform the task if we remain still within the older intellectual and professional discourses and structures of representation and of domination.62

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I am much in agreement with El Desouky’s position and its further elaboration. What he does in his book is to examine signifying practices (as they pertain to amāra, an Egyptian term for ostensive tokens) that serve both to establish and reflect forms of connective agency and collective awareness. My earlier readings of revolutionary art works similarly attempt to examine how the signifying practices of these works serve to decolonise the popular and allow for collective consciousness. Thus, it emerges that many of us consider that the current liberationist challenge requires discovering or uncovering epistemologies that go beyond those that derive from a Western Enlightenment framework, and that these entail, at least in part, following through the earlier cultural studies strand of postcolonial studies by means of the new emergence of Arab cultural studies, accompanied by the necessity of translation studies, feminist studies, environmental studies, and so on. In fact, epistemologically speaking, what is at stake concerns also a questioning of the separatist divisions of academic specialisms when these serve to stake out ownership of their terrains. It seems to me that the above concerns decolonisation as a necessarily on-going process of liberation where the role of the intellectual is to avoid the colonial and neo-colonial dialectic of appropriative assimilation based on foreclosure. Instead, the participatory role of the intellectual becomes one of reception, acknowledgment and dissemination of those we seek to engage with as our fellow writers, thinkers, activists, citizens and artists. River do not flow away, wait for me to follow you.

Notes 1. Edward W. Said, ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, Critical Inquiry, 15:2 (1989), pp. 205–25; p. 207. 2. Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London: Zed Books, 2012), p. 51. Dabashi quotes from Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Prometheus Books, 1995). Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 3. See Caroline Rooney, ‘Sufi Springs: Air on an Oud String’, CounterText, 1:1 (2015), pp. 38–58. 4. Aimé Césaire ‘Discourse on Colonialism’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Harlow: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 172–80; p. 177. 5. Amícal Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, pp. 53–65; p. 53. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 6. The term ‘culturecide’ is used in the context of Israeli settler colonialism. See, for example, Chris Miller, War on Terror: Oxford Amnesty Lectures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 11. 7. Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, p. 61. 8. Said, ‘Representing the Colonized’, p. 224. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 9. See Caroline Rooney, Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (London: Routledge, 2007). 10. Frantz Fanon, ‘On National Culture’, trans. Constance Farringdon, in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, pp. 36–52; p. 51. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 11. See Leopold Senghor, ‘Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century’, in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, pp. 27–35.

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12. Dabashi, The Arab Spring, p. 115. 13. For a lengthier discussion of the cosmopolitanism of liberation movements, see Caroline Rooney, ‘Utopian Cosmopolitanism and the Conscious Pariah: Harare, Ramallah, Cairo’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 45 (2011), pp. 139–55. 14. Dabashi, The Arab Spring, p. 13. 15. See Rooney, ‘Sufi Springs’. 16. Hosni Mubarak, ‘Speech’, 10 February 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middleeast-12427091 (last accessed 26 June 2017), n.p. 17. Mu‘ammar Gaddafi, ‘Last Speech’, 17 April 2011, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/ Reports/Qaddafi/qaddafi.html (last accessed 26 June 2017), n.p. 18. miriam cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 20. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 19. See John R. Bradley, Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008) and Timothy Mitchell, ‘Dreamland’, in Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds), Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: The New Press, 2007), Chapter 1. 20. Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising, trans. G. M. Gosgarian (London: Saqi, 2013), p. 77. 21. See Lisa Weeden, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 22. See Herman Melville, ‘Benito Cereno’, in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). 23. See Mounira Soliman, ‘Artistic Interpretations in Downtown Cairo’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:4 (2011), pp. 391–403. 24. See Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2004). 25. See Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq (New York: First Feminist Press, 2005). 26. See Magdy El Shafee, Metro: A Story of Cairo, trans. Chip Rossetti (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). 27. See Dounia Georgeon, ‘Revolutionary Graffiti: Street Art and Revolution in Tunisia’, Wasafiri, 72 (2012), pp. 70–5. 28. See Ahmed Alaidy, Being Abbas el Abd, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006). 29. See Ahmed Towfiq, Utopia, trans. Chip Rossetti (New York: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, 2011). 30. See Ziad Famy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). 31. See Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman, ‘Introduction: Popular Culture – A Site of Resistance’, in Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman (eds), Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–16; pp. 2–4. 32. See Caroline Rooney, ‘In less than five years: Interview with Rehab Bassam’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 47:2 (2011), pp. 467–76. 33. See, for example, Amal Treacher Kabesh, Egyptian Revolutions: Conflict, Repetition and Identification (London: Rowan Littlefield, 2017), pp. 80–5. For Kabesh, this history of persistent resistance fails to reckon sufficiently with the repeated setbacks it has faced. 34. Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, p. 61. 35. Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud, Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline (London: Saqi Books, 2014), p. viii. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text.

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36. See Sahar Keraitim and Samia Mehrez, ‘Mulid al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution’, in Samia Mehrez (ed.), Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (Cairo: American University Press, 2012), pp. 25–68. 37. See Ossama Mohammed, ‘The Thieves’ Market’ in Halasa et al., Syria Speaks, pp. 17–26. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 38. See Dalia Mostafa (ed.), Women, Culture and the 2011 Revolution (London: Routledge, 2016). Contributors to this collection of essays debate the feminine and feminist aspects of the revolution from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the male protagonist of Omar Robert Hamilton’s novel The City Always Wins reflects on how Egyptian revolutionaries find themselves up against testosterone-fuelled territorialism, maintaining ‘it is men, always men who are the problem’. Omar Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), p. 141. 39. See Hassan El-Imam (dir.), Watch Out for Zouzou (Egypt: 1972). 40. See Nara Mohammed, ‘Syrian Intellectuals: Suzukis and Jet Planes’, 3 March 2014, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, https://lb.boell.org/en/2014/03/03/syrian-intellectuals-suzukis-and-jetplanes-conflict-intl-politics (last accessed 18 January 2018), n.p. 41. Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 306. 42. Mona Prince, Revolution is My Name: An Egyptian Woman’s Diary from Eighteen Days in Tahrir, trans. Samia Mehrez (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2014), p. 191. 43. Soraya Morayef, ‘Pharaonic Street Art: The Challenge of Translation’, in Mona Baker ed., Translating Dissent: Voices From and With the Egyptian Revolution (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 204. 44. Ahdaf Soueif spoke of this at ‘Utopian Realism Today’, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 2015. 45. Niveen Ghoneim, ‘Explaining Alaa Awad: The Man Behind the Paintbrush’, Cairo Scene, 10 December 2015, http://www.cairoscene.com/ArtsAndCulture/Explaining-Alaa-AwadThe-Man-Behind-The-Paintbrush (last accessed 18 January 2018), n.p. 46. Morayef, ‘Pharaonic Street Art’, p. 199. 47. In a workshop that I mounted in Cairo (March 2017) with Fekri Hassan as part of a NewtonMosharafa grant programme entitled ‘Egypt’s Living Heritage: Community Engagement in Re-Creating the Past’, the notion of an Egyptian colour palette was explored with Egyptian contemporary artists. 48. Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman, ‘The Aesthetics of Revolution: Popular Creativity and the Arab Spring’, in Hamamsy and Soliman, Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, pp. 246–60; p. 250. 49. Michael Slackman, ‘A Poet Whose Political Incorrectness is a Crime’, New York Times, 13 May 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/13/world/africa/13negm.html (last accessed 18 January 2018), n.p. 50. Maha El Said, ‘Alternating Images: Simulacra of Ideology in Egyptian Advertisements’, in Hamamsy and Soliman, Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa, pp. 211–30; p. 226. 51. See Rooney, Decolonising Gender. 52. Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012), p. 56. 53. See Khaled Al Khamissi, Taxi, trans. Jonathan Wright (Laverstock: Aflame, 2007). 54. Andrew Robinson, ‘Alain Badiou: The Event’, Ceasefire Magazine, 15 December 2014, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou-event/ (last accessed 18 January 2018), n.p. 55. See Samir Amin, The People’s Spring: The Future of the Arab Revolution (Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2012) and Amal Treacher Kabesh, Egyptian Revolutions: Conflict, Repetition and Identification (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017).

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56. See Judith Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 57. See Samia Mehrez (ed.), Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (Cairo: American University Press, 2012). 58. See Baker, Translating Dissent. 59. Sarah Hawas, ‘Global Translations and Translating the Global: Discursive Regimes of Revolt’, in Mehrez, Translating Egypt’s Revolution, pp. 277–306; p. 279. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 60. Mona Baker, ‘Beyond the Spectacle: Translation and Solidarity in Contemporary Protest Movements’, in Baker, Translating Dissent, pp. 1–18; p. 3. 61. Tarek Sabry, quoted in Anastasia Valassopoulos, ‘Introduction: Arab Cultural Studies’, Journal for Cultural Research, 16:2–3 (2012), pp. 105–15; p. 107. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 62. Ayman A. El-Desouky, The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture: Amāra and the 2011 Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), p. ix.

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Chapter 22 The Syrian Revolution, Art and the End of Ideology miriam cooke

I

n May 2013, Syrian graphic artist Sana Yazigi launched The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution. It is still going strong. A trilingual website, it archives intellectual and artistic responses to the Syrian revolution that endures since 2011 despite attempts to repress it. In the space of four short years, the site included over 26,000 expressive reactions to the harrowing events Syrians have experienced. In the mission statement, Yazigi writes of her astonishment to find so much creativity in the space of destruction: The revolution established a space for ingenuity that has astounded us, the Syrians, before even making its mark on the rest of the world, and we wonder, where had all this talent in satire, art, and innovation been? The outburst of the uprising against oppression and tyranny brought on a surge of these remarkable, latent energies, the spontaneous and the organized, in a way never before seen in all of Syria’s years marked by repression and injustice. . . . This project aims to archive all the intellectual and artistic expressions in the age of revolution; it is writing, recording, and collecting stories of the Syrian people, and those experiences through which they have regained meaning of their social, political and cultural lives. . . . The website also aims to enhance the impact of the artistic Syrian resistance, to reinforce its place in the revolution, to gather, archive and spread the messages it expresses, and to help create networks between its main actors and the outside world, whether they were individuals or groups. Here, the artist is considered a citizen before anything else, resisting with his art and standing by his people’s fight.1 Where had all this art and innovation been? It had been underground not daring to appear above ground for fear of being censored and destroyed. The revolution opened channels for these remarkable, latent energies to explode out into the open. In what has become the age of revolution, the explosion of artistic and cultural production must be collected, curated and archived so that these alternative forms of witness and testimonial serve as memory for future generations. Networking through online art and culture, Syrians are building a creative history that accuses both the tyrant Bashar Assad as well as an unresponsive international political community. This project insists on the cosmopolitanism of the artist-activist as national citizen and, importantly, a human being and not the ubiquitous refugee whose victimhood occupies international headlines. Drawing on anti-colonial resistance models that

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hark back to the 1930s and 1940s even as they struggle against contemporary internal neo-colonial pressures, these talented women and men show that it is still possible to dream, to love, to hope, and to create testimonies to the survival of the humanity of a people who refuse to be dehumanised. Syrian artist-activists scattered across the globe insist that what is most precious in our humanity, our creativity, cannot be erased. In this chapter, I argue that the growing body of Syrian revolutionary artworks and the artistactivists’ awareness of each other are drawing the borders around the habitus of the revolution in a transnational space that is incubating a new Syria. To understand the logic underlying the Syrian revolution, its ruthless repression, the mass movement of citizens it has precipitated and the creative movement it has produced, I will look back to Ottoman imperial, French mandate and Syrian national censorship practices.2 From the early sixteenth century, Syria had been a province of the Ottoman Empire. As the glorious Empire started to crumble during the nineteenth century, it tightened control over its numerous provinces.3 In Syria, the Ottomans imposed censorship of printed material, fearing the effect that dissident intellectuals might have on public opinion. In 1854, Mir’at al-Ahwal, the first non-official publication, came out in Aleppo. Within a year, the Ottomans had closed it down due to its criticism of their policies and practices. In 1857, consular representatives of foreign powers received a circular detailing what would not be tolerated in print. The vaguely worded list included criticism of government affairs and ‘focus on matters that were not of immediate concern to the sultanate but that could upset good relations between nations’.4 Failure to submit manuscripts to the press bureau risked the newspaper being suspended or confiscated and those deemed responsible punished (see p. 167). In 1865, Ottoman press laws called for the ‘inspection of newly printed books, pamphlets and newspapers’ (pp. 179–80). Sultan Abdulhamid was placing the cornerstone of a system that grosso modo survives today. Bookshops, cultural societies and printing presses were added to the purview of the press bureau censor, and writers and newspaper editors who defied the new conditions might be imprisoned. Many left for London, Paris, Cairo and Alexandria where they continued to critique the Ottoman system and society, often in publications they had brought with them from Syria. Thanks to the influx of these Syrians in Egypt, one hundred and fifty newspapers appeared in the eight years between 1892 and 1900 (see p. 164). In 1908, the Young Turk Revolt drew Ottoman attention away from the Syrian provinces and censorship eased, and during World War One, many local newspapers appeared. Ironically, in view of what was soon to transpire, many supported the French who opposed the Ottomans (see p. 176). In 1920, the victorious French drove the Ottomans out of Syria and imposed mandatory rule. Like their predecessors, they cracked down on potential dissidents, jailing or exiling suspected writers, artists and journalists. They ‘shut down newspapers, theaters, and cinemas, tightly controlled the only radio station, and imposed their authority over schools and universities’.5 The French remained in Syria for twenty-six years. Exhausted by World War Two, the French left Syria in 1946, the year the British separated Jordan from Palestine. Two years later, the British handed Palestine to the newly established Jewish state of Israel. Seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians fled their homes into neighbouring countries including Syria where they took refuge in United Nations Relief and Work Agency camps that have not yet been dismantled. Palestinians who remained became second-class citizens in their ancestral homeland.

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For many, the Palestinian crisis became emblematic of the condition of most Arab countries where the colonisers may have left but their influence remained in the form and practices of local leaderships that proved to be as corrupt and unjust as their colonial precursors. Independence movements and their failures raised the difficult question: How could the principled opponents of the European colonisers have failed to bring their people justice? From Iraq to Morocco, the Palestinian cause invigorated both socialist and nationalist secular agendas. The right of the Palestinians to their land, freedom and dignity symbolised the Arabs’ right to enjoy the fruits of revolutions that indigenous leaders had aborted. Poet Mahmud Darwish connected Palestinian expropriation with that of the Muslims and Jews in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Andalusia and then of Native Americans shortly thereafter. The lost land and identity had to be redeemed no matter how long the struggle and the sacrifices it exacted. Critical Egyptian, Algerian, Iraqi, Tunisian or Syrian intellectuals who resisted their corrupt regimes faced reprisal. Speaking truth to power risked prison and even execution. Consequently, time done in political prison came to constitute a badge of honour. Intellectuals – a term to be earned – provided moral signposts; their words shaped public opinion. The cultural production of Syrian intellectuals under Hafiz Assad gave hope to citizens whose spirits and aspirations his regime tried to crush.

The Assads’ Syria After the French left in 1946, their legacy lingered in the chaos that followed. Coup after coup brought a succession of presidents unable to deal with the sectarianism and other divisions that the French had fostered. In 1960, a secret organisation of Ba‘athist military officers, opposed to Syria’s 1958 union with Egypt, formed the Military Committee. Within three years they had staged a successful coup d’état and on 3 March 1963 they declared a ‘state of emergency’. The prime minister became the martial law governor accountable only to the President, and the minister of the interior became his deputy. The state was empowered to ‘arrest preventively . . . authorize investigations . . . delegate any person to perform these tasks’.6 According to Article 4 of the State of Emergency Law, the martial law governor could censor ‘newspapers, periodicals, drawings, printed matter, broadcasts and all means of communication, propaganda and publicity before issue; also their seizure, confiscation and suspension, the denial of their rights and the closure of the places in which they were printed’.7 The echoes from nineteenth-century Ottoman censorship laws and their French mimics rang loud. The symbolic importance of the press was demonstrated in 1969 when, just before taking over power, Hafiz Assad ‘sent his tanks into Damascus, straight to the newspaper offices of Al-Ba‘ath and Al-Thawra as well as to the Damascus broadcasting station. He removed their top editors and installed his loyalists’.8 A year later, Assad became President and he kept martial law that persists until today with the pretext that as long as the country is at war with Israel and remains under threat from local terrorists and international imperialism it is necessary. With time, Assad joined third world leaders in their opposition to the capitalist West. Theirs was a kind of post/colonial attack on those who longed to recolonise the world they had lost in the middle of the twentieth century. Under such circumstances, freedom of thought, expression and assembly had to be strangled. The moral authority of those who disregarded the censors expanded.

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The next step in consolidating power entailed monitoring the universities where several underground organisations and their publications were flourishing. In 1975, Hafiz Assad appointed his brother Rifaat, head of national security, as director of the Regional Command Bureau of Higher Education. Rifaat Assad’s panoptic system filled the campuses with security personnel, recruited informants from among the students and controlled what professors wrote and what they said in their classrooms. When some students rebelled in 1979, the system tightened and was made so visible that student activism plummeted (see pp. 131–4). The distance between rhetoric and reality began to widen under the new president. Talk of freedom and democracy could not conceal widespread censorship and incarceration. Assad’s 1973 constitution granted ‘every citizen the right to free and public expression of his or her opinion, and provides for the right to participation in political life. [Yet, there is] no law by which political parties can seek and obtain legal status’.9 Even the six tolerated parties did not have permission to sell their party papers. An anonymous lawyer reported having witnessed ‘trials where the only crime was reading the newspaper of an opposition political party and the sentence was fifteen years’ (pp. 10, 15). Writers, filmmakers and journalists had to beware of engaging in ‘politics, ideology, religion, society, and economics, and especially discussions of Syria or the Middle East. . . . The censors ban any book that refers to Alawis or to sectarian differences, excluding for this reason virtually all Western studies of contemporary Syria.’10 Any criticism of the President or the regime was criminalised as opposing ‘the goals of the Revolution’, pursuant to Article 3(e) of Legislative Decree no. 6 of 1/7/1965, or for ‘obstructing these goals through committing demonstrations, assemblies, or conducting disorderly acts, or inciting them’.11 Vetting of cultural production was extreme. While the Ministry of Culture supervised the dissemination of art, film, theatre and books, the Ministry of Information, guided by the Ba‘ath Party and the mukhabarat, or secret intelligence service, oversaw television, domestic and foreign presses and the distribution of printed matter.12 A censor who defected during the 1980s explained how censorship grew after the French: ‘With each new coup, censorship increased . . . By the time of the last coup, led by Hafiz al-Assad in 1970, the whole state structure was transformed into one large intelligence and censorship apparatus.’13 Editors and all in key media positions had to join the Ba‘ath Party. The ex-censor confirmed that nothing in Syria, from songs to scientific programmes to lectures by invited foreign scholars, and news, ‘evades the censor – even Friday sermons in the mosques have to be written down and presented to the Ministry of Religious Affairs for approval’.14 To compound the problem, there were few guidelines so that what was permitted one day might be forbidden the next (see p. 21). Censors who had allowed what was no longer permissible were also liable to punishment.15 Paranoia was in the air. Hafiz Assad, an Alawite from the rural North, feared the majority Sunni Muslims who had traditionally ruled Syria. Among them were the restive Muslim Brothers, especially those based in Hama. In 1982, the army razed the old city of Hama to the ground and killed tens of thousands in order to teach aspiring rebels a lesson they would not forget. The Hama massacre set the stage for over thirty years of draconian Assad repression and the atomisation of the Syrian population.

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To prove loyalty, citizens publicly paraded their love of the Assads. They pasted Assad images on office walls and car windows. Knowing that any form of dissent could be reported to the mukhabarat, no one talked about politics even in the privacy of their own homes. Fear of disappearance created an atmosphere of paranoia. When I was there in the mid-1990s, people told me in confidence that ‘al-hitan idan’, in other words, ‘the walls are ears’, not merely that they have ears. They told me these things because, as one friend explained, I was safe; I did not know to whom to report any treasonous slip in loyalty. Despite widespread terror of the regime, some did protest. Although many intellectuals left the country when the strain of silence overwhelmed them, some stayed. Knowing that critique of the system has meaning only when produced inside Syria where words have power because they court danger, some writers, filmmakers and artists produced coded oppositional work. The problem with much of this writing was its allusiveness. Accordingly, revolutionary messages remained locked except for the cognoscenti. Historical allegories remained historical. Interpretations and suggested contemporary parallels were disavowed. In his 1995 play Al-Ghoul, poet and playwright Mamduh ‘Adwan warned the tyrant Jamal Pasha, the architect of the Armenian genocide during World War One: You shall not escape us even while you sleep. Your victims’ vengeance will pursue you for blood . . . Even if you muzzle their complaints they will haunt you as ghosts . . . From now on we shall begin our great duty: This tyranny shall never recur.16 At a time when the mere whispering of dissent, let alone critique of the state and above all the President, risked prison or death, ‘Adwan empowered readers and theatre audiences to think the unthinkable: coercion is not normal; stolen dignity must be restored; liberty seized. But, of course, when I asked whether Jamal Pasha stood in for Hafiz Assad, ‘Adwan was – or pretended to be – outraged. Prison writers were the most circumspect and their writing the most opaque. However, when the keys to their codes opened up the occluded meanings one could tell how audacious their art was, how inspiring! These Hafiz-era public intellectuals felt driven to write, even though few believed that their works could do more than raise awareness of injustice. Little did they know that their works might some day pioneer a revolution that would finally break the wall of fear. Today, some are looking back to these men and women and discovering works that presaged a new revolutionary era. In June 2000, Hafiz Assad died and his son Bashar took over after authorising a constitutional amendment ‘to reduce the head of state’s minimum age from 40 to 34 (Bashar’s age) . . . The dictatorship passed smoothly from father to son. Otherwise put, the Eternal Leader would rule from the grave for another eleven years.’17 During the first year of his rule, Bashar let the Damascus Spring blossom. Unprecedented freedoms were allowed:18 muntadayat or intellectual fora cropped up all over the country and renowned cartoonist Ali Farzat received permission to publish ‘Syria’s first independent newspaper in almost forty years – the satirical weekly Al-Domari (the Lamplighter)’ (p. 15). Farzat threw caution to the winds as in an explicit depiction of a cell in Tadmor prison, the dreaded Kingdom of Death near the ancient site

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of Palmyra. Some interrogation tools are attached to the walls of a cell and others litter the floor. The prisoner, hand and foot amputated, hangs dying from straps, his blood drip dropping on to the floor. Meanwhile, his torturer having completed his assignment relaxes a bit and weeps at the tenderness of a television romance.19 Citizens began to speak out and meet to discuss politics and culture. The situation started to spin out of control, especially after the 2006 drought drove over two million Syrians into extreme poverty.20 Media censorship returned and political and cultural muntadayat were closed. The genie, however, was out of the bottle, even if the increasingly visible opposition was small and disunited. Thin cracks in the wall of fear the Assads had carefully erected over forty years widened.

Revolutionary Art In December 2010, the Arab Spring exploded from Tunisia and spread quickly to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria.21 In early March, some schoolboys from the southern city of Daraa, picking up the mood of the moment, scrawled slogans on a wall: ‘The people want the regime to fall’ and, addressing Bashar the ophthalmologist dictator, ‘It’s your turn, Doctor’. The boys were arrested and tortured. The popular response was immediate. Despite decades of prohibition on freedom of speech and assembly, Syrians flooded the streets to demand justice and the ousting of Bashar Assad. They organised Friday demonstrations that persist. Across the entire country, citizens chose Friday for their protests because the Friday communal midday prayer in mosques is the only time and place Syrians have official permission to assemble. On 25 May 2012, a Friday remembered for the brutal murder of the children of Houla, there were 939 demonstrations throughout the country.22 These demonstrations were regularly repressed. By summer of 2017, 500,000 had been killed – over half of them civilians. Nine million were internally displaced; countless numbers had been disappeared, many into Bashar Assad’s prisons, and 5 million refugees were wandering the world in search of safety. The more ferocious the repression – and it was and still is beyond belief vicious – the more people joined the opposition: ‘It is clear that peoples’ spirits have strengthened as they grow hopeful and unafraid of challenges.’23 They are living an extraordinary moment in history and for most there is no going back. Like other Arab Spring revolutionaries, they had launched an impossible revolution: ‘It is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom as the political way of life begins’, writes Hannah Arendt. Only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom can we speak of revolution.24 They wanted liberation from oppression and the formation of what Hannah Arendt calls a new body politic ‘which guarantees the space where freedom can appear’ (p. 125). Some citizens fought for this new order by demonstrating in the streets and exposing their bodies to lethal danger. Some painted, some wrote stories, some shot films and others sang. In the early days, songs were especially effective in mobilising mass

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protests and exciting revolutionary fervour. In Syria, two singers, Ibrahim Qashush and ‘Abd al-Basit Sarut, became emblems of the revolution. Qashush was murdered the day after he led a crowd in a rousing liturgy commanding Bashar to go; Sarut starred in Talal Derki’s Return to Homs, a 2014 documentary about his transition from soccer star to revolutionary champion whipping up the crowd through song and leading them into the heart of devastated Homs to fight regime forces. Moments of deep despair contrast with reckless heroism as Sarut reveals what regime forces have done to the city. In August 2011, caricaturist Ali Farzat’s licence to mock expired: he was kidnapped, beaten and left for dead in a deserted area near the Damascus airport. A brief spell in hospital was not enough to dampen his spirits. Undeterred, he returned to his drawing board. Using a photograph someone took of him lying in a hospital bed with both hands bandaged, he drew a caricature of himself with one of the bandaged fingers raised in defiance and contempt. Like so many of the artist-activists, he wants to show Bashar that his creativity cannot be stopped; his humanity cannot be crushed. Early in 2012, he penned a cartoon entitled ‘International Sympathy’ that mocks international hypocrisy at the terrible fate of the people. Representatives of world powers visit Syria to drop a few crocodile tears in the outstretched bowl of a member of the opposition. The ground around them is strewn with the newspapers that daily deliver the count of Syrian dead to a heedless world. This cartoon was one of the first items uploaded to the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution site. Theirs is an angry message to a world that betrayed them, and it contrasts with artist-activists’ transnational solidarity.

Art as Memory for the Future From March 2011, Syrians wrote, rapped, painted and filmed their rejection of the violence, and of the regime that perpetrated it. Their artworks document the atrocities for the future and reiterate their determination to maintain the momentum of a revolution that daily exacts its terrible price. Significantly, these works and their formerly isolated creators are forming communities in real and virtual sites. One of the first stops for fleeing artists was Art Residence Aley (ARA). In 2012, engineer and art benefactor Raghad Mardini restored an Ottoman stable in the hills overlooking Beirut. Leaving the rustic structure in place, she adapted the stable to the needs of artists in residence: a rudimentary bedroom, a large open kitchen-living-art work area and a beautiful garden for installations and performance art. Like Sana Yazigi who had been awestruck by the number, talent and revolutionary commitment of artists, many of them graduates of Syrian art academies, Mardini recognised the talent and also the urgent needs of Syrian artist refugees. She would pick them up from the border, take them to the residence, provide them with basic needs and leave them to recover and create for as long as two months. They would then move to Beirut, leaving one artwork at the residency. ARA has become a museum and gallery that exhibits artworks produced during the early days of the artists’ traumatic arrival in Lebanon. Their exquisite works assure Assad that he will never destroy the spirits, dignity and humanity of the Syrian citizens. Plastic artists have been successful in Syria and abroad. Their works tell the world that Syrians not only survive the ruthless repression, but also that their creativity

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plays a role in the survival of the revolution. The Syrian Ayyam Gallery has provided a physical space for refugee artists like the ones who took up residence at ARA. Soon after the outbreak of the revolution, Ayyam moved from its home in Damascus and relocated to Dubai, Beirut and London. In these international capitals, the galleries commission and promote the work of important Syrian refugees. One of their most prominent protégés is Tammam ‘Azzam, master of intericonic digital imagery. Photo-shopping images of European masterpieces on to found images of urban destruction, he produces digital works that insist on the survival of the human in inhuman circumstances. In this image, ‘Azzam has superimposed Matisse’s 1906 ‘Dancers’ cavorting wildly on the debris of someone’s recently shelled home. In their crazy wild dance, the naked red figures scream survival and defiance (see Figure 22.1). The number of revolutionary videos, sculptures, graffiti, banners and digital works produced in the past six years is beyond calculation. Creativity as memory for the future has become existentially necessary. At a time when the political world has turned its back on this humanitarian crisis, artists fill the vacuum and international art agencies that distribute their work give them transnational visibility. The brutality of Bashar Assad’s response to the demonstrations compounded by the intervention of international collaborators and then of Islamic State has been mind-numbing. Death is everywhere, trying to drown the revolution in its own

Figure 22.1 Tammam ‘Azzam, Syrian Museum: Matisse’s La Danse. © Tammam ‘Azzam

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blood. There are corpses to be buried, many in mass graves. Killed by barrel bombs, chemical gases, starvation, sectarian skirmishes and Islamist beheadings, Syrian bodies litter city streets unapproachable because of vigilant snipers. They line roadsides and pile high in morgues.25 This is the Edgar Allen Poe scenario that novelist Khalid Khalifa detailed in his 2016 Faulknerian Al-mawt ‘amal shaqq (Death is Hard Work). A father, or what is left of his decomposing body, is finally buried after a three-day journey that should have lasted a few hours. Readers are taken through a dark landscape strewn with corpses on a 400-kilometer road trip from Damascus to a village in the north. Militiamen and ill-intentioned foreigners man the innumerable checkpoints, acting as though the country was theirs. This is no ordinary trip. Three siblings risk life and freedom to bury the body of a father they had not much loved. He had died of natural causes in a country pervaded with death and no one cares. And, we wonder, why do they care? Despite misgivings and temptations to throw the putrefying body out of their microbus, they persevere. The dying man’s last wish was to be buried in his village near the Turkish border. Constantly stopped, their six-hour trip takes three days. Stage by agonising stage of the journey, we watch and smell the corpse decompose. It turns blue and swells and they ‘breathed their father’s death; it penetrated their skin and flowed in their blood’ (p. 114). At the last checkpoint where Islamic State men interrogate and imprison one of the sons for not knowing his Islam, his sister is struck with aphasia. Her terror is palpable. Worms have crawled out of cracks in the skin of the cadaver; they have covered the microbus window and seats and her frozen lap (see p. 142). When they do finally reach the village, the rotten remains of the body are washed, shrouded and buried. Why did burial in the kingdom of death matter? The corpse, Khalifa told me, represents the honour and dignity of the family. Regardless of who the dead were in life, their bodies must be properly buried. That means lost bodies must be found, washed, shrouded and then buried with all due rituals. People killed while fleeing violence in a panic or disappeared into prisons or buried under the rubble of a destroyed building present a challenge to the living. Where are their loved ones? If they can find them what shape will they be in? How can they honour them?26 Corpses hit international headlines on 7 February 2017 when Amnesty International published ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, its report on the fate of 13,000 prisoners held in Saydnaya prison between 2013 and 2015. It chronicled the arbitrary arrest, torture, and extrajudicial execution of prisoners in the terrifying prison of Saydnaya, located in a historical Christian town a few miles north of Damascus.27 Within a day of the report’s release, several creative responses were uploaded to the Creative Memory website. The artists must have set to work on their searing condemnations of the cruelty of the ruler the minute they heard the news. Daali, pseudonym for someone who calls her/himself an ‘Antiwar Artist’,28 circulated ‘The Godfather’. Recalling a film poster, it recycles an old theme: the continuing role of the late Assad in his son’s war against his own people. On the left, a stern Bashar stares at us, oblivious to the puppets hanging from strings. Beyond allusion to the actual hangings, this image evokes a revolutionary trope: the invisible puppeteer refers to the ghost of Hafiz Assad thought to control events in Syria from the grave. Indeed, his administration continued virtually unchanged when Bashar assumed office in 2000. Further, ‘The Godfather’ recalls an earlier moment in Syrian history when execution by hanging was common practice.29

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Like Tammam ‘Azzam’s intericonic digital works that overlay European masters on found images of recent destruction, Hani Abbas recycles Salvador Dali’s surreal 1951 ‘Christ of St. John of the Cross’ for the grimly real (see Figure 22.2). The crucifix hovers over and mirrors the Saydnaya prison architecture with the cells lightly marked along the prison wings that form the horizontal arms of the cross. Nailed to the floating cross, the Christ-like figure in a loincloth hangs high above the carceral complex. Turning back to the crucifixion that launched Christendom, Abbas’ spiritual rendition of the scapegoat during the dark night of the soul seems to promise salvation for the 13,000. Will this scapegoat also resurrect and denounce the traitors?30 Abu Yousef’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ depicts Bashar the Slaughterer with his cheeks full of the flesh of recently murdered prisoners. His mouth, propped open with prison bars, drips fresh blood from his lower lip. This explicit portrayal of the monstrous president belongs to a genre of revolutionary images insulting Bashar.31 This kind of black humour characterises much of the creativity coming out of Syria. Abed Naji’s ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ uses the UN Logo to ironic effect. He has replaced the olive branch wreath embracing the UN vision of the world centred on the North Pole with a hangman’s noose. The comments are in English for the international audience that Abed Naji seeks: ‘Saydnaya prison where the Syrian state is silently slaughtering its people. 13,000 people were killed in Saydnaya prison’ and ‘Keep calm’.32 These two words recall the British slogan produced on the eve of World

Figure 22.2 Hani Abbas, Sednaya Prison. © Hani Abbas

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War Two: ‘Keep calm and carry on’. The government wanted to calm the people’s nerves as news of attacks from Germany sent panic waves across the country. Within one day of its publication, these artist-activists gave us their anguished responses to the ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ report. Khalifa’s novel and these ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ artworks create the affect that shock photographs and videos lost early in the revolution. Even the thousands of gruesome images of corpses bearing the marks of torture and starvation that Caesar, ‘a defected military police photographer who recorded deaths in regime custody over a two-year period’33 and in January 2014 distributed around the world, lost their power when people refused to look at the return of the repressed from the Holocaust.

Revolutionary Habitus The Internet has facilitated the production and circulation of hundreds of thousands of these works that broadcast the catastrophe, many from places that the Assad regime has closed to international reporters. Several sites have been archiving some of this work, none more systematically and profusely than Sana Yazigi’s Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution. In an interview, Yazigi confirmed, These artists are adopting the revolution and dedicating their work to the revolution. [The artist] is not only doing the caricature because of the beauty of the work – no, he doesn’t care about the beauty – he cares about participating. This participation is very important and very new for a society that was forbidden from participating in any issue – social, economic, political.34 Formerly isolated Syrians are participating in a communal revolutionary project that is being transnationally distributed. Creative Memory archives visual and written memories that restore meaning to Syrians’ social, political and cultural lives. Resisting amnesia, the site creates and protects a memory for the future, so that the expressive works of Syrian revolutionary intellectuals do not disappear. Every day, new items are posted to at least one of its twenty categories: banners, murals, caricature, comics, drawings, paintings, graffiti, calligraphy, sculpture, design, stamps, photography, video, film, music, theatre, demonstrations, printed publications, online publications and radio. The number of exhibitions, festivals and events featuring Syrian revolutionary art is growing as a quick scan of the section promoting art events between 2013 and 2016 illustrates. In 2013, the site advertised about forty events related to Syrian art and performance; in 2014, that number almost doubled to seventy-six; in 2015, there were 112 events around the world, and in 2016 over 120 such events. The site brings together thousands of formerly atomised citizens as members of a virtual community.35 It is empowering to feel that we are presenting evidence (documents) of the people’s counter discourse to that of the regime. To resist amnesia and the erasure of our legitimate cause is a battle! It is very painful to work on remembering when forgetting seems necessary for survival. We are driven by indignation!36

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Indignation was the word that mobilised demonstrators from the beginning of the Arab Spring. A team of between ten and twelve employees daily surf the net looking for new material and correcting, completing, and updating old works according to the continuous progress/development of editorial policies concerning essentially what is a document and how to create it. There is considerable turnover in the site’s personnel since the indefatigable search for revolutionary art online is so urgent and often so painful that some have had to seek psychological help.37 In April 2016, Yazigi added a new category, ‘Interviews’, to the already packed site. It was her first attempt to expose the ‘unsaid critiques Syrians made of the actions/ creative works of other Syrians’.38 She wanted to initiate a conversation among the artist-activists who had until then remained more or less isolated. She insisted on honesty, challenging artist-activists to think carefully about their work and its role in the revolution. One of the most remarkable interviews was with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, aka ‘the Intellectual of the Revolution’. On 22 December 2016, she asked him about the kidnapping of his wife: ‘Why didn’t the cause of Samira al-Khalil, your wife, turn into a public cause among the revolution’s public, but remained relatively personal?’ Although Saleh had spoken out about his grief at his wife’s abduction by Islamic State, he was careful not to criticise the revolutionaries: Perhaps because of the gravity and terror of what surrounds us, and the multitude of personal and general problems. It might also be because many people do not want to lose the dream of the revolution, for if they bind themselves to the cause of Samira, Razan, Wael and Nazem, and condemn the kidnappers, they will feel as if they are questioning the revolution in which they have invested all their energy and passion.39 To question the revolution was tantamount to treason. But Yazigi was not buying such apologetics: Since the Revolution broke out we have had to pay such a high price that we must break taboos. We have lost everything and yet there is still more to lose. We must say what we have to say but without insults. No more hypocrisy. Enough of the angry, empty blablabla over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.40 Revolution and the art it has spawned should not be allowed to become an empty signifier, just so much ‘blablabla’. These interviews pushed revolutionary artists to acknowledge each other in a community of dignity and mutual respect. The site’s section entitled ‘Critique of Revolutionary Art’ published this eloquent refusal of shallow critique and empty flattery: Innovators involved in the revolution, whatever their contributions and however committed they may be, should in turn accept the critique addressing their work.

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They ought to avoid taking critique personally, and rid themselves of any delusions of grandeur and infallibility passed down from the age of tyranny. The revolution was launched in the name of freedom above all else. If freedom means releasing the creative spirit in the absence of censorship, then it also means employing the critical mind. The critical mind alone is capable of assessing and motivating creativity, as well as protecting it from the horrors of tyranny.41 Revolution demands honest creativity, critique and rejection of anything that smacks of the previous regime and its censorship economy. In October 2016, the Festival International des Arts de Bordeaux featured thirty pieces from the site; each one focused on hope. Several works of graffiti emblematised the people’s ability to seize back control of the streets: ‘One day we shall be what we want to be . . . The voyage has not yet begun and the path has not ended.’ Using the words of the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, ‘I am here. This is my trace. A moon will rise out of my darkness’, another graffitist drew blue letters on a white pockmarked wall. In this exhibition, these artist-activists were occupying a very special place together beyond their online association. The Festival signalled a vital stage in the life of the site, its artist-activists and its designer. Curating the physical show in Bordeaux put a decisive end to the anonymity she had chosen in order to highlight the work of the artist-activist on the site. In need of high definition images, Yazigi had to enter directly in contact with and reveal her identity to artists and intellectuals on the site. Would they be angry that their work had been posted without permission? Far from it, she told me: ‘They were very happy. They told me how much they appreciated the site and respected this effort to promote and document their art. It is crucial that their art be seen around the world.’42 A community of revolutionary artists began to coalesce and to recognise that their virtual co-existence had turned the site into a revolutionary habitus. Beyond informing the world and archiving revolutionary cultural production, the site may be creating new identities and subjectivities in common. Creative Memory has become an important platform for cultural, intellectual, ethical and also aesthetic activism. Associated with each other in ‘a place to become . . . a collective “becoming machine” . . . that produces a new kind of person’,43 their identities are changing. Through their new awareness of each other and of their creativity in common, artist-activists are entering a single space, a revolutionary habitus of creative signs. New knowledge of their collective presence on this communal site may change artist-activists’ perception of themselves. Making new meaning out of the chaos that others call civil war, the site draws attention to artist-activists’ role in responding to the revolution, archiving it, creating a revolutionary habitus for all participants and shaping a coherent sense of identity with political agency. Remarkably safe from regime control, Creative Memory provides a treasure house of cultural capital that allows participants and surfers to navigate the backstreets of the revolution. After four decades under the rule of the terrible Assad dynasty, Syrian artist-activists finally share spaces where they can converse openly – if sometimes indirectly – about matters of political concern within intellectual, cultural, ethical and aesthetic communities that foster resilience, trust and mutual respect.

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Recognising one revolutionary habitus opens a window onto others. Art Residence Aley, Ayyam Gallery and communities of Syrian refugee artists scattered around the world are negotiating new spaces of freedom and connection previously denied to them. They are discovering a revolutionary habitus whose new rules they have assimilated and automatically practice.

Conclusion Six years into the revolution, Creative Memory remains active, up to date with the constantly breaking news, and committed to the revolution as hope. Despite so much energy, resilience and creativity, the revolution floundered. There are many reasons. Activists talk of decades of atomisation and, almost enviously, about the Islamists who were united by ideology and able to organise collectively. In the beginning, demonstrators met without concern for creed or level of education or class: ‘We didn’t know what we were doing, but the experience made us think, discuss and learn. We worked hard to coordinate the slogans of the revolution across the country.’44 At a meeting of Syrian activists in Paris in the summer of 2015, I heard a recently arrived refugee say, ‘we had no experience in mobilizing action, no leadership and we had no unifying ideology’.45 But, of course, that is less than half the story. Had Bashar’s Shi‘ite allies Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah not supported him, he would not have survived the growing organisation of the opposition. Had Islamic State not taken advantage of the chaos, the people would not have had to fight on yet another front. Had Russia not always quietly but then in 2015 overtly supported the regime against its UN detractors, the people’s demands for freedom and release from Assad’s tyranny might have succeeded. But even without success, the revolution and its creative outpouring persist. Many have buried the Arab Spring and especially the Syrian Revolution, but these people’s movements need to be placed into the larger context of modern Arab intellectual history. Unlike the early twentieth-century independence struggle against the French colonisers that mobilised militants, this revolution has witnessed the surprising activism and resilience of normal people. Artist-activists, who have emerged out of the revolution as Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, celebrate the people’s revolutionary participation in solidarity with them. Wissam al-Jazairi has brilliantly represented the women’s defiance of the tanks and the fires raging around them (see Figure 22.3). No matter how hard the regime tries to kill its citizens they will not give up. They have seen too much, suffered too greatly not to dance on the flames and the rubble of destroyed homes to prove their unflagging adherence to the revolution. Defiantly dancing, revolutionaries refuse to be called victims; they refuse to return to silence and acquiescence. With this sculpture of a muscled man dancing on the edge of a barrel soaked with blood, Sari Kiwan, an Art Residence Aley fellow, announces that no amount of regime barrel bombs will stop the people from celebrating their revolution with dance (see Figure 22.4). Dance is a trope seen again and again in connection with the people’s extraordinary resilience and defiance. In December 2015, thirty-five collaborating artists from Kafranbel, a town that weekly produced revolutionary banners broadcast around the world, unveiled a spectacular twenty-four-metre, one-million-stone mosaic wall entitled ‘Revolution

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Figure 22.3 Wissam al-Jazairi, Women Dancing In Front of a Tank. © Wissam al-Jazairi

Figure 22.4 Sari Kiwan, Man Dancing on a Barrel Bomb. © Sari Kiwan

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Panorama’. Featuring the faces and stages of the revolution, these organic intellectuals documented the revolution from its beginnings in March 2011 until the end of 2015. In July 2017, Syrian expats in Manchester England put on a two-week festival to celebrate the work of Syrian artist-activist refugees who have not succumbed to pessimism and despair. Unlike the freedom fighters of the 1930s and 1940s who shared the single agenda of ousting the French from Syria, these revolutionaries are without leader, ideology or agenda. That is as it should be. The revolution, Wassim al-Adl asserts, was not about an ideology or a religion, and it wasn’t about grand political scheming, it was about normal people who stopped what they were doing to stand up for what they believed in, and they did that even though they were afraid and, in many cases, would lose their lives.46 At this pivotal moment in their nation’s history, Syrian writers, artists, filmmakers and digital media practitioners are expanding an enduring revolutionary momentum into a transnational terrain of committed cultural praxis. With the explosion of the Arab Spring, moral authority has been democratised. Social media and the Internet have played their role in all of the 2011 revolutions, nowhere more so than in Syria. Phone cameras, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter have provided the building blocks for an alternative public sphere . . . a space for incubating new kinds of political thinking, and political identity, that would be inadmissible in more established channels. . . . It enables genuinely popular political alternatives to emerge. . . . Instead of sealing people off into echo chambers, social media can serve as a steppingstone for movements that aspire to achieve mass appeal.47 At the head of such movements are the many artist-activists who are in touch with the people, who speak their language and who advocate for their rights. They are the new Syrian organic intellectuals who are members of human rights and citizenship training organisations like the ‘Syrian League for Citizenship’ (SL4C) and ‘Women Today’ in Beirut, ‘Rethink Rebuild’ and the ‘Syrian Legal Development Project’ (SLDP) in Manchester with branches in Gaziantep, Turkey, and inside Syria the ‘Afaq Academy’ that trains opposition fighters about international law, especially the Geneva Conventions. Laying the foundations for a new Syria, these NGOs prepare Syrians for a postAssad world. Above all, artist-activists have galvanised these new movements. Their words and art carry more weight today than the discourse of the old Marxists and leftist intellectuals. Those early spokespersons for the Arabs’ resistance to colonialism and imperialism had led the people through the maze of colonial legacies that lurked in the interstices of authoritarian regimes.48 Theatre, films, art and literature staged the creative hope of these organic intellectuals who have established connections to the people who empower them to speak, write, sing and paint. Their relentless creativity while witnessing wickedness has created the conditions for the emergence of a new relationship that Syrian intellectuals are forming with the people. Wissam al-Jazairi, Ibrahim Qashush, ‘Abd al-Basit Sarut, Sari Kiwan, Sana Yazigi and Tammam ‘Azzam

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have greater moral authority than the veteran poet Adonis who had long stood at the vanguard. When he did not denounce the Assad regime and come out in support of the revolution, he hammered the last nail in the coffin of the post/colonial Arab intellectual high on Mount Olympus. Graffitists, digital artists, sculptors, musicians and writers call not for ideological warfare but for loyalty to the revolution. They demand commitment to its goal of transforming a neo-colonial system into the Arendtian new body politic that guarantees the space where freedom can appear and will unite a country that for forty years had been atomised. These revolutionary organic intellectuals refuse the despair of so many who have given up on the revolution. Ideology is now the realm of Islamist groups whose destructive world view is failing to deliver on its promises. This may be the best outcome for a revolution without ideology: it leaves open a space for something new to emerge. This newness may be a different relationship to power – horizontal rather than vertical, alongside rather than directly oppositional, democratic rather than elitist, speaking for oneself and not for the people. No longer relying on elite others to articulate their grievances and fight for them, these organic intellectuals have assumed the burden of representation and action. They are calling for a burial à la Khalid Khalifa as a means to salvage Syrian honour and dignity, and to launch a new era when Syrians can return home and dance in the streets of Damascus.

Notes 1. ‘About Us’, The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, http://www.creativememory. org/?page_id=134 (last accessed 30 May 2017), n.p. 2. Information on these earlier censorship practices can be found in articles scattered throughout the Index on Censorship (see Index on Censorship, https://www.indexoncensorship.org/ (last accessed 30 May 2017), n.p.). 3. See Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Faber & Faber, 1991). 4. Caesar Farah, ‘Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Ottoman Syria and Egypt’, in William W. Haddad and William Ochsenwald (eds), Nationalism in a Non-National State: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 166. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 5. Human Rights Watch, Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Assad Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 110. 6. Human Rights Watch (Middle East), ‘Syria: The Price of Dissent’, 7:4 (1995), https://www. hrw.org/legacy/reports/1995/Syria.htm (last accessed 30 May 2017), n.p. 7. Anon., ‘Repression in Iraq and Syria’, Index on Censorship, 13:2 (1984), pp. 34–6. 8. Human Rights Watch, Syria Unmasked, p. 113. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 9. Human Rights Watch, ‘Syria: The Price of Dissent’, p. 3. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 10. Human Rights Watch, Syria Unmasked, pp. 123, 127. 11. Human Rights Watch, ‘Syria: The Price of Dissent’, p. 16. 12. Human Rights Watch, Syria Unmasked, pp. 109, 123. 13. Anon., ‘Testimony of an Ex-Censor’, Index on Censorship, 16:6 (1987), pp. 25–6. 14. Adib Sadiq [pseudonym], ‘The Road to Damascus is Plagued with Censors’, Index on Censorship, 19:2 (1990), pp. 20–1. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text.

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15. Human Rights Watch, Syria Unmasked, p. 124. 16. Cited in miriam cooke, Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 81, 90. 17. Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 15. 18. See Alan George, Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom (London: Zed Press, 2003). Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 19. See miriam cooke, Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience, and the Syrian Revolution (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 35. 20. Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami, Burning Country, p. 33. 21. See Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Post-colonialism (London: Zed Press, 2012). 22. See Ziad Majed, Syrie la revolution orpheline, trans. Fifi Abou Dib (Paris: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 2014), pp. 65, 72–3. 23. Lina al-Mohr, ‘Martyr’, The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, http://www. creativememory.org/?cat=60 (last accessed 1 July 2017), n.p. 24. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), pp. 33, 35; my emphasis. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 25. Khalid Khalifa, Al-mawt ‘amal shaqq (Death is Hard Work) (Beirut: Nawfal HachetteAntoine, 2016), p. 50. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 26. Conversation with Khalid Khalifa, Durham, 12 February 2016. 27. See ‘Syria: Secret campaign of mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison’, Amnesty International, 7 February 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/02/ syria-investigation-uncovers-governments-secret-campaign-of-mass-hangings-and-extermination-at-saydnaya-prison/ (last accessed 22 February 2017), n.p. 28. Daali writes that he is an ‘anonymous anti-war artist. I live somewhere on this planet, I don’t belong to a certain nationality because I don’t believe in geographical borders. I got the idea of this project when I saw how ignorant people are towards the wars happening around the world, and how they just watched and never reacted as if this doesn’t even concern them, just like they are just watching a movie or scenes being acted on television. All this is only because it is not happening in their countries, because the dead people are not their families, because the destroyed houses are not theirs, because the women raped are not their wives, simply because they are just not living there. It was necessary that I bring war into their lives through creating accurately and realistically high [sic] images using photo-montage. It was to help people see their own cities in a state of war and destruction, to help them imagine how bad it is and to make him [sic] feel it, hoping that these photos would help those people interact with what is going on of violations against humanity’ (‘About Daali’, Daali: Anonymous Antiwar Artist, http://daali.co/daali-anti-war-artist/ (last accessed 30 May 2017), n.p.). 29. Daali, ‘The Godfather’, http://www.creativememory.org/?p=153251 (last accessed 11 February 2017). See also cooke, Dissident Syria, p. 133. 30. Hani Abbas, ‘Sednaya Prison’, http://www.creativememory.org/?p=153077 (last accessed 8 February 2017). 31. Abu Yousef, ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, http://www.creativememory.org/wp-content/uploads /2017/02/2017-02-08-%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A8.jpg (last accessed 8 February 2017). For further discussion of this genre, see cooke, Dancing in Damascus, pp. 38–52. 32. Abed Naji, ‘Human Slaughterhouse’, http://www.creativememory.org/?p=153466 (last accessed 8 February 2017). 33. Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami, Burning Country, p. 147. 34. Melissa Zhang, ‘Interview with Sana Yazigi’, cited in Melissa Zhang’s final research paper for my course ‘Refugee Lives: Violence, Identity and Politics in the 21st Century Arab World’, Spring 2016, Duke University.

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35. Transnational funding from Beirut-based institutions, including the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Swiss and the Norwegian embassies and the French Institut Terre Solidaire, allowed the team to push ahead more quickly. 36. Correspondence with Sana Yazigi, email, 13 March 2017. 37. Sana Yazigi, Skype lecture to my class, ‘Refugee Lives: Violence, Identity and Politics in the 21st Century Arab World’, 22 March 2016, Duke University. 38. Correspondence with Sana Yazigi, email, 11 March 2017. 39. ‘Three questions to Yassin al-Haj Saleh following the publication of the book “Samira Khalil – Diaries of the Siege in Douma, 2013”’, The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, 22 December 2016, http://www.creativememory.org/?p=149134 (last accessed 8 February 2017), n.p. 40. Interview with Sana Yazigi, Skype, 4 January 2017. 41. ‘Critique of Revolutionary Art’, The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, http:// www.creativememory.org/?cat=4 (last accessed 5 July 2017), n.p. 42. Interview with Sana Yazigi, Skype, 4 January 2017. 43. Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (London: Melville House, 2015), pp. 129, 135. 44. Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami, Burning Country, p. 58. 45. Meeting with Souriya Houria, Paris, 3 July 2015. 46. Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami, Burning Country, p. 210. 47. Ben Tarnoff, ‘How social media saved socialism’, The Guardian, 12 July 2017, https:// www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jul/12/social-media-socialism-jeremy-corbyn-berniesanders (last accessed 12 July 2017), n.p. 48. See Zeina Halabi, The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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Chapter 23 Biopolitical Landscapes of the ‘Small Human’: Figuring the Child in the Contemporary Middle Eastern Refugee Crisis in Europe Anna Ball

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hey are of course frozen in a moment of crying, or quiet and glassy-eyed; caught, protean, on the shores of the Mediterranean, or standing amongst tents, dust in their hair. And beyond their labelling as ‘child’ or ‘young boy/girl’ (Figure 23.1), they are, in all likelihood, unnamed. We have come to know by now the stock representational positions that refugee children will have assumed by the time they reach our screens and pages, as figures emblematic of the abject suffering entailed in what has come

Figure 23.1 A young girl from Syria walks on the beach after reaching the shores of Lesbos, having crossed the Aegean Sea from Turkey, 2015. © UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis

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to be termed ‘the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East’. Yet the affective and apparently empathetic stance of such images belies the complex power play attached to representations of the refugee child – narratives that pose many questions about the political dynamics of contact, hospitality, empathy and alliance that surface through the traumatic encounter between vulnerable ‘Middle Eastern subject’1 and powerful European state. Apolitical and universal as the refugee child’s suffering may initially appear, it in fact assumes an extreme political potency when read against the backdrop of the post/colonial landscape2 – for as this chapter will suggest, refugee children are not only figures within, but also come to figure the fraught encounter between an increasingly embattled, fluid and tangible ‘Middle East’, and a contested Europe that, in its desire to maintain the order of post/colonial boundaries currently being undone by the flows of uncontainable bodies, is seeking to redraw the map on biopolitical terms. Thus by approaching ‘the contemporary refugee crisis’ afresh through the unexpected, overdetermined but frequently silenced figure of the child, this chapter presents a radical new interpretation of the ‘crisis’ as biopolitical fall-out to long-standing imperialist and Orientalist imagined geographies, while ultimately pushing beyond this terrain, towards an alternative discursive mode in which the playfully cerebral voice of the child comes to contest biopolitical categorisation altogether. As I shall suggest, this alternative discursive mode bears profound implications – not simply for the way that it permits us to perceive forms of political, ethical and cultural intolerance within the European response to ‘the refugee crisis’, but for the manner in which it invites us, as postcolonial scholars, to refuse hierarchised constructions of human bodies and subjects within the transnational post/colonial landscape. What, then, might it mean to read ‘the Middle Eastern refugee child’ as both biopolitical figure and as post/colonial subject, even narrator? This chapter enacts four moves designed to guide us towards an understanding of the refugee child’s unique significance within the post/colonial, biopolitical landscape. First, it maps out the distinctive post/colonial dynamics of a landscape thrown into crisis through the forms of intercultural contact instigated by the arrival of refugee bodies. Identifying the European response to this landscape as a biopolitical drive designed to reinforce long-standing colonial and imperialist divisions between Europe and the Middle East, it locates the figure of the refugee child as one of particular discursive significance. Second, it focuses on the figure of the drowned Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi/Alan Shenu, in order to reveal how the biopolitical and ultimately necropolitical are mobilised through the construction of the child as ‘exceptional’ within the fraught post/ colonial space of the Mediterranean crossing. Third, the chapter explores the ‘collaborative life-narrative’ of the disabled adolescent Syrian refugee Nujeen Mustafa, written in collaboration with the foreign correspondent Christina Lamb. Focusing on the ambiguous dynamics of narrative agency at stake within the text, the analysis reveals how the mediated voice of the child may simultaneously render transparent the mechanisms of the biopolitical landscape, while also affirming the authority of this system through the construction of the disabled child as ‘doubly deserving’ refugee. Pushing at the seams of this text, however, are moments where the adolescent voice disrupts the official narrative ascribed to Nujeen’s childhood. By reading these moments in a ‘childishly’ playful manner, the chapter ultimately seeks to identify an alternative discursive mode that might be understood as ‘the small human’. Here, in the fourth, final section of the chapter, we find powerful microcosmic challenges to the paternal/maternal rhetoric of the biopolitical, necropolitical and imperialist

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narratives that have determined the landscape of Middle Eastern refugee experience to date – and ultimately, we recover an understanding of the ways in which refugee subjects and bodies, beyond discourse and in their very smallness, matter.

Crisis in the Contact Zone: Refugee Biopolitics and the Post/ Colonial Middle Eastern Landscape The flow of contemporary refugee populations within and beyond the MENA region has tended to be viewed as disconnected from – indeed, as interloper within – the European landscape. Yet European discursive constructions of these population flows reveal much about their underlying post/colonial dynamics. Indeed, ‘the refugee crisis’ can be read not only as connected to, but as product of this landscape’s colonial heritage. Despite the cultural heterogeneity of populations currently seeking asylum in Europe,3 the contemporary ‘crisis’ has come to be equated primarily with the international flow of Syrian refugees, over five million of whom have fled Syria following the outbreak of conflict. Of these refugees, the vast majority reside within ‘the Middle East’, with some 3.2 million in Turkey, over a million in Lebanon and over 650,000 in Jordan.4 Applications for asylum in Europe remain, in contrast, relatively small: since 2011, there have been just over 970,000 applications (the majority of which are refused), and of these some 64 per cent of applicants have been to Germany and Sweden.5 Nevertheless, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has described the arrival of those seeking asylum at Europe’s borders ‘on a scale not seen since the end of the Second World War’ as ‘one of the continent’s [Europe’s] defining challenges of the early 21st century, with long-lasting implications for humanitarian practice [and] regional stability’.6 This comment is telling in that it presents the ‘crisis’ as an exceptional condition that is distressing and disruptive not so much for the humanitarian challenge it poses to refugees as to Europe itself, when brought into contact with those typically constructed as its antithetical ‘other’. In this we sense a separatist introspection that is indicative of what Lucy Mayblin identifies as the legacies of colonial thought reproduced within the European asylum system, manifested as ‘ideas of distinct, geographically located “races”, of human beings as hierarchy’.7 When read from a non-Eurocentric perspective, however, the ‘refugee crisis’ proves far from exceptional, or disconnected from Europe; rather, it can be located squarely within the remit of colonial interplay between the regions. The figure of the refugee is an achingly familiar one in the post/colonial Middle Eastern landscape. Said’s identification of the ‘helpless, miserable-looking refugee’8 as the enduring twentieth-century visual signifier of Palestine alerts us to the sense in which legacies of colonial and imperialist intervention have continually manifested themselves as flows of displaced bodies within and across the borders problematically instated under Sykes-Picot.9 While somewhat lacking in political specificity, Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of the ‘refugee crisis’ as a product of the ‘failed [postcolonial] state’ proves an instructive starting point: Most refugees come from ‘failed states’ . . . In all these instances, this disintegration of state power is not purely a local phenomenon but the result of international economics and politics; in such cases, as in Libya and Iraq, it is even a direct outcome of Western intervention . . . One should also note that the origins of the Middle

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Eastern ‘failed states’ are to be found in the arbitrary borders drawn after the First World War by the UK and France, which thereby created ‘artificial’ states. In uniting Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, ISIS is ultimately bringing together what was torn apart by the colonial masters.10 Here, Žižek paints in broad and polemical brushstrokes, but his reading nevertheless gestures to a more detailed and complex subtext of interconnectedness between longstanding legacies of empire and flows of refugees. Over the course of the twentieth century, for instance, over 750,000 refugees fled Palestine during the British-engineered establishment of the State of Israel and subsequent Nakba;11 some 800,000 exited Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, a conflict that sprung in part from the political legacies of French mandate;12 while the Gulf War, the partial product of disputed claims to Kuwaiti territory and resources as outlined by the UK Protectorate in 1922,13 led to the flight of over a million Iraqis into Iran, and 850,000 Yemenis fleeing Saudi Arabia for their homeland.14 In the twenty-first century, meanwhile, Western arms-length intervention in the contentiously defined ‘Greater Middle East’,15 a neo-Orientalist imagined geography tallying with perceived locales of ‘terrorist threat’, produced some 700,000 Afghan refugees in 2001 alone, following US- and UK-backed military intervention in Afghanistan,16 while ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ resulted in the displacement of some 4 million people within and beyond Iraq.17 Against this backdrop, Said’s comments in ‘Reflections on Exile’ resonate not only as a powerful summary of the twentieth century, but also as a foreshadowing of the next, when he writes that ‘our age – with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers – is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’.18 What Said does not articulate in this characteristically elegant assessment, though, is the quite brutal sense in which flows of displaced and refugee populations within and across the borders of the problematically defined ‘Middle East’ therefore testify to the enduring openness of colonial wounds, rubbed and ripped open afresh by contemporary imperialist intervention. Within this landscape, refugees stand both as the biopolitical fall-out to colonial and imperial legacies in the region, and as the victims of the violent ‘forward slash’ (‘/’) that perpetually separates the ‘colonial’ from the ‘post’. While contemporary Middle Eastern refugee populations can be read as the complex legacies of colonial power in the region, so can the distinctive nature of the recent European response be traced to an endemic and enduring Orientalist ideology that has emerged with renewed vigour in the wake of the attacks of 11 September, and subsequent imperialist intervention. While there has not been overt, policy based discrimination against Middle Eastern refugees within European asylum systems,19 a number of analysts have noted the methodological shift that has taken place in asylum responses since the attacks of 11 September, which coincides with the emergence of large refugee populations from the MENA region. Kristen Sarah Biehl, for instance, notes the European transition away from human rights-driven models outlined in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, towards a ‘security paradigm’ whereby immigration and refugee flows are progressively being viewed as a security threat to national welfare systems, cultural and national identities, and domestic peace and stability, which in turn has been used to justify fortified policing measures, restrictive immigration legislation, and the narrowing of state obligations towards refugees.20

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Beehner claims that this shift towards the securitisation of ‘nonstate actors such as displaced persons and refugees’ can be linked to a post-September 11th concern with ‘global terrorism and other criminal syndicates’.21 Arguably (and ironically), the increased number of Afghan and Iraqi refugees arriving at European borders following US- and UK-backed invasions in 2002 and 2003 served to reinforce the ideological alignment of terrorist threat, refugee and specifically Middle Eastern subject in post-9/11 European govern/mentalities.22 This association between Islamic terrorist threat and Middle Eastern refugee subject has been reignited with the mass arrival of Syrian refugees at Europe’s borders, and the Orientalist underpinnings of this association are clear not only from European media discourse,23 but also (as subsequent analysis in this section will demonstrate) from the renewed securitisation methods implemented at European borders specifically in response to the potential ‘threat’ of the Middle Eastern refugee body, which echo post-9/11 strategies. This complex cycle of imperialist intervention, refugee flow and perception of ‘terror threat’ must, as Angela Naimou notes, be read not simply as a manifestation of Orientalist attitude, but as a more profound ‘working-through’ of the colonial subconscious. In addition to the figure of the refugee reinvoking the classic Orientalist tenets of simultaneously alluring and threatening ‘other’, occupying as they do the conflicting positions of ‘fugitive’, ‘victim’ and ‘militant enem[y]’, poised for ‘Islamic invasion’,24 Naimou argues that their visible, tangible presence within European space holds up an uneasy mirror in which Europe is forced to confront ‘the not-quite-afterimages of unending wars elsewhere’ (p. 227), fought in order to ‘guarantee peace at home’ (p. 228). As a figure that forces Europe to confront the human cost of imperialist and neo-colonial policies, the Middle Eastern refugee therefore stages a traumatic ‘return of the repressed’ in the post/colonial landscape, presenting not simply a crisis of scale, nor of securitisation, but also of conscience. How, then, might Europe secure itself from these perceived crises of securitisation, identification and conscience? Since it is through the presence of bodies that the imagined and physical geographies of a secure post/colonial Europe are thrown into crisis, it is hardly surprising that the European response should be biopolitical in nature. For Agamben, this shift from the exercise of sovereign power through the ‘territorial state to state of population’25 is the quintessence of the biopolitical landscape – a topography identified first by Foucault, who mapped out the ways in which European governmentalities shifted profoundly in the eighteenth century towards ‘a technology of power centered on life’26 as a means to achieve ‘the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (p. 262). Within such a landscape, it is not simply that life is controlled; rather, biological existence itself is rendered political, and the technologisation and institutionalisation of bodies becomes a means to define and affirm sovereign power. A number of scholars have, by now, translated the extreme pertinence of Foucault’s and Agamben’s biopolitics into the context of contemporary refugee experience.27 In his insightful transposition of ‘refugee biopolitics’ into the postcolonial arena, David Farrier notes that the decision to award sanctuary is often one that directly concerns issues of life and death: fear of wrongful death is frequently what motivates asylum claims and, as the principle of non-refoulement makes clear, a decision to return them to their country of origin might involve placing the asylum seeker at fatal risk.28

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Thus the state’s capacity to award or deny sanctuary fits neatly within Agamben’s summary of biopolitics as the ‘management of life’29 – more specifically, the ‘apparatuses for organizing, assessing, and investing populations in terms of the biopolitical (in)capacities of life and death’.30 Indeed, the very production of the category of ‘refugee’, awarded to those ‘deserving’ of sanctuary according to the Refugee Status Determination system employed by European states (a system that, in seeking to determine the ‘plausibility’ of the asylum seeker’s claim, privileges bodily evidence – scars, wounds or disabilities – over more complex signifiers of need or vulnerability)31 can be read as a discursive manifestation of the biopolitical drive to ‘organize and assess’ what otherwise remains the messily illegible transitory subject.32 Less readily noted, however, is the correlation between renewed Orientalist and imperialist attitudes towards the post/colonial Middle East, and the emergence of the European biopolitical drive. In her compelling study of the biopolitical technologies adopted in a post-9/11 European context, Bhitaj Ajana notes how biometric technologies such as the Eurodac project, an EU-wide fingerprint technology database, and the UK Applicant Registration Card, a biometric identity card that manages movement and access to welfare, both assume forms of ‘function creep’ whereby technologies assume applications beyond their overt intentions, here forging a discursive as well as material connection between the asylum seeker and the criminal.33 In her reading of the post-9/11 arena, she argues that the ‘exceptional’ use of ‘control practices’ has become ‘the norm’ in its policing of refugee bodies (p. 592): a clear manifestation of Agamben’s theorisation of the ‘state of exception’ as the condition through which the sovereign is able to assert their totalising power through their ability to decide who is treated as ‘exceptional’ before otherwise incontrovertible systems, thus simultaneously ‘bind[ing] and . . . abandon[ing] the living being to law’.34 As Benjamin Muller notes, however, very particular kinds of body are produced as ‘exceptional’ within the post/colonial landscape, through ‘border controls that differentiate on the basis of race, class, economic need, “well-founded fears”, health, and a host of other (arguably arbitrary) categories between the legitimate and illegitimate’ that, while ostensibly ‘official’, in fact reflect cultural anxieties around the ‘refugee as a sick body, terrorist, threat to identity’.35 Thus a specifically refugee biopolitics serves to enforce the racial, cultural and psychological distinctions between European ‘self’ and Middle Eastern ‘other’ in a manner that ultimately affirms the familiar imagined geographies of ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’. The construction of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe as a ‘state of exception’ is starkly evident in the mechanisms that have been put in place to control the flow of bodies into the European ‘core’, while also ‘preserv[ing] the passport-free travel that most EU citizens enjoy under the Schengen Agreement’.36 This includes the anomalous closure of Macedonian, Slovenian, Austrian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Estonian and, tellingly, Greco-Turkish and Spanish-Moroccan borders (direct contact-zones between Europe and the Middle East/North Africa) in response to the arrival of large refugee populations at them,37 and the construction of immigration ‘Hot Spots’ in Greece and Italy designed to process the mass flow of bodies. Here, in fortified and heavily policed facilities, the new arrivals must register themselves through biopolitical mechanisms: any existing passports and papers must be inspected; fingerprints linked to the Eurodac system are taken; bodies, particularly of undocumented infants, are sometimes numbered in pen on skin; photographs are taken and temporary visas issued, ranging from 30 to 180 days in duration, depending on the nationality assigned to the refugee body.38 While

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Agamben’s formulation of biopolitics has sometimes been criticised for its apparent ahistorical abstraction,39 the Middle Eastern refugee subject therefore represents a powerful – if disturbing – manifestation of these concepts brought to (bare) life in/as a figure of the post/colonial landscape. Indeed, the aggressively biopolitical nature of these systems becomes particularly visible when contrasted with the alternative response strategies that have been displayed within the MENA region itself. Despite the comparatively more difficult economic situation of key refugee hosts such as Lebanon, and the significant pressures that the mass arrival of displaced Syrians have placed on social infrastructure, it is notable that both Lebanon and Jordan have facilitated the speedy mass resettlement of displaced populations within local community settings without immediate resort to formal asylum registration processes, and have focused their economic efforts on intercommunity support for both displaced and local populations, avoiding the dehumanising hierarchical segregation visible at Europe’s borders.40 Against this backdrop, the figure of the child surfaces as one of particular complexity and significance. If the European response to the Middle Eastern refugee population en masse has served to demonstrate their biopolitical dehumanisation, then the child represents what Ticktin describes as a ‘humanitarian exception’41 within the logic of biopolitics. In part – and for reasons that the following section of this chapter will clarify further – this is because the sheer scale of childhood refugeeism has rendered their suffering bodies extremely visible, and impossible for the European biopolitical order to ignore. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has described the Syrian conflict as having created ‘a children’s refugee crisis’,42 and there are currently some 2.3 million registered Syrian refugee children: around half of the registered Syrian refugee population,43 while the particularly vulnerable category of unaccompanied minors making the sea crossing to Italy doubled in 2016.44 Adults have also been arriving on a similar scale – but as De Graeve and Bex point out, children are read as ‘exceptionally vulnerable’,45 meaning a ‘focus on the suffering of bodies of abandoned minors removes the humanitarian response from the political sphere and converts it into a moral imperative to relieve suffering, a sheer matter of compassion’ (p. 503). This is possible because in contrast with the already politically inscribed body of the adult, the child, constituted ‘as a figure’,46 presents ‘a tabula rasa on which culture can be written’.47 Small wonder, then, that European visual and textual narratives have proliferated around the refugee child. By turning, now, to a selection of these narratives, this chapter asks: how are the biopolitical and post/colonial inscribed on the figure of the refugee child? How, therefore, does the child render these discourses supremely legible? And how, ultimately, might reading and voicing alternative versions of ‘the small human’ challenge these narratives? In order to reach this possibility, we must turn, first, to where the journey of the Middle Eastern refugee child begins, or ends: to the Mediterranean, as traumatically fluid site of bodily encounter between Middle East and Europe.

Seen and Not Heard: The Maternal State and the ‘Safe’ Refugee Child It is his smallness that we see first. A body, face-down in the sand, arms lying unnaturally straight, palms turned to the sky. Small feet, small shoes, small legs. A small boy, drowned in the Mediterranean, washed up on the shores of Turkey in a failed attempt to reach Greece. When the image of the three-year-old Syrian toddler ‘Aylan

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Kurdi’ was released on 1 September 2015, it rapidly assumed a status ‘beyond the “iconic”’,48 saturating global media and bringing about unprecedented shifts in the European response to refugees. Within hours, French President François Hollande had telephoned several European leaders to remind them of their ‘responsibilities’ toward refugees and to call for the formulation of a common EU policy.49 Two days later, Angela Merkel would commit to admitting several thousand refugees stranded in Hungary, which subsequently led to the establishment of a ‘humanitarian corridor’ between Northern Greece and Southern Bavaria.50 The image also galvanised public sympathies: it was reproduced as a giant mural by Turkish graffiti artists on the banks of the Main river in Frankfurt as an act of memorial and protest (see Figure 23.2), while the artist Ai Wei Wei controversially restaged it with his own body, as part of a series of works designed to call attention to the growing scale of the crisis, and his solidarity with refugees. The image has even been credited in the longer term with inciting a shift from the economically associated term ‘migrant crisis’ to the more sympathetic ‘refugee crisis’ in public discourse (p. 2). While images of refugees had, by 2015, circulated prolifically, it would seem it was the smallness of this refugee boy’s body – and, in its childhood innocence, the implied crime of his death – that would incite such a vast shift in the attitudes of ‘Fortress Europe’.51 How does the exceptional response to Kurdi’s death narrate something of the biopolitical? Several critics have, by now, noted that vast as the scale of response may have been, the narratives that proliferated around Kurdi’s body misread, even obscured, small details of great significance. The first is his name. While exceptionally transcending the

Figure 23.2 Oguz Sen and Justus Becker, mural of Aylan Kurdi/Alan Shenu, 2016. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)52

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generic marker of ‘child’, his naming as ‘Aylan Kurdi’ proved to be a mis-inscription, and a product of the administrative systems attached to the passage of the refugee body. The toddler’s surname was in fact ‘Shenu’, ‘Kurdi’ simply meaning ‘Kurd’: an ethnic determiner attached to him by the authorities in Turkey. ‘Aylan’, meanwhile, proved to be a mis-transliteration by Turkish authorities of ‘Alan’, a Kurdish name meaning ‘flag-bearer’: a testament to his family’s national pride, itself a bitter reminder of the schisms imposed on Kurdistan during the period of European mandate, which have endured into the present day.53 Thus, while the act of his naming ostensibly appeared to individualise Alan Shenu within the European media, it in fact came to testify to the dehumanising processes of renarration through which the refugee body must pass. So, too, has the seemingly universal pathos inspired by Alan also been read in subtly racialised terms. As Robert Fisk writes, ‘being . . . dressed like a little European boy, and being white rather than brown-skinned’ enabled him to be read as ‘“our” child’.54 It was perhaps, then, not the fact of a Middle Eastern refugee child’s death, but rather, of the child’s being ‘just like a European’, that engendered such affective outcry – and to those ‘like us’, the arms of a ‘maternal Europe’ must be opened. The ‘maternal’ response engendered by Alan Shenu’s death – a maternity identified by Syrian refugees themselves, who have come to refer to the German President, the most generous granter of asylum in Europe, as ‘Mama Merkel’55 – reveals a complex fluidity to European biopolitics, though one that can be accounted for through postcolonial interpretation. If the old tenet that children ‘should be seen and not heard’ now appears outdated, it still rings true in paternalist (or, in this context, maternalist) state constructions of the ‘deserving’ refugee as ‘a figure who is thought to “speak” to us in a particular way: wordlessly’,56 though their abject suffering should remain visibly legible. In this, they come to embody the familiar Spivakian figure of ‘the subaltern’: a figure voiceless not so much through their own physical muteness, as their lack of access to the discourses that represent them. This construction of the child as ultimate ‘subaltern’ fits neatly within the familiar ‘colonial rescue fantasy’ that has typically motivated much imperialist intervention in the contemporary Middle East. In the invasion of Afghanistan, for instance, it was the voiceless figure of the burqa-clad Afghan woman that Bush purported to ‘save’ by waging war with the Taliban. (In fact, this military intervention went on to produce an internally displaced population that was predominantly female.)57 In this context, a division emerged between the ‘deserving’ figure of the subaltern Afghan woman requiring rescue, versus the ‘threatening’ body of the terrorist Afghan male. It might be said that a similar division has been mapped onto Middle Eastern refugees at the shores of Europe, whereby the ‘safe’ and ‘deserving’ body of the child refugee stands in opposition to the ‘threatening’ and ‘undeserving’ refugee adult. Indeed, the narratives of suspicion and danger that have frequently been attached to the Middle Eastern adult refugee in the European press seem to support this hypothesis, and while emphasis has been placed on children’s cultural sameness, accounts of adult refugees strongly emphasise cultural difference, and hence ‘unbelonging’.58 Rather than the maternal response of European state actors to Alan Shenu’s death disrupting the biopolitical and post/colonial order, then, it can instead be read as a function of this very system, whereby refugee bodies come to be categorised and narrated onto terms conducive to the European state. In this, the biopolitics of compassion towards the refugee child comes to embody what Miriam Ticktin terms ‘armed love’:

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‘practices of the state, which may be benevolent and kind, but [which] may also include deportation, detention or violence’,59 as well as selective passivity or disengagement. As a state system of passive aggression, ‘armed love’ is strongly reminiscent of the Foucauldian understanding of biopolitics, developed in Society Must Be Defended, in which the biopolitical order is characterised as ‘the power to “make” live and “let” die’.60 Here, intervention is carefully counterbalanced with inertia; boundaries and mechanisms are imposed on the distribution of compassion. Indeed, in its moments of passive-aggressive disengagement – the limits that are placed on the maternal instincts of the state, we find the biopolitical tipping over into what Mbembe specifies as the ‘necropolitical’, wherein ‘politics [is] the work of death’ and ‘sovereignty . . . the right to kill’.61 In his essay, Mbembe asks provocatively: ‘under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?’ (p. 12). An answer to his question can be found in the Mediterranean, which can be read as a site of post/colonial necropolitics. As the primary site of transition between Libya and Italy, and between Turkey and Greece, the Mediterranean stands as a fluid boundary that must be negotiated by many Middle Eastern refugees seeking to reach Europe.62 In 2016, some 1 million people crossed its waters in rubber dinghies and plastic boats captained by smugglers or refugees themselves, and an average of fourteen people per day died during the crossing.63 Refugees in fear of their lives are forced to undertake this illegal crossing, given the absence of other official passages granted into Europe, and in summing up the most productive EU response to the crisis, the UNHCR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) identifies ‘an urgent need for States to increase pathways for admission, such as resettlement, private sponsorship, family reunification and student scholarship schemes . . . so they do not have to resort to dangerous journeys’ (Spindler, n.p.). Instead, however, the European response has been to implement ‘search-and-rescue-at-sea’ operations such as the Italian-led Mare Nostrum, and EUled Frontex scheme, which intervenes when vessels approaching European shores are in peril.64 While such schemes have saved thousands of lives, it is nevertheless possible to read the focus on this policy as necropolitical in nature. In interview, one Syrian refugee, Hanan al-Hasan, sums up this necropolitics with total clarity: All this killing, all this blood, I can’t believe it. The people can’t stay in Syria in this war. They try to come to Europe, and look what Europe is doing. They let them pay smugglers €5,000, €6,000, €10,000 and go by the sea and die. And after, when they arrive, they say ‘welcome’. Why? Why don’t you try and bring these people here safely? If you arrive, they say ‘welcome’; if you die in the sea, they say ‘never mind’. Why?65 Here, necropolitics is expressed as state inaction, whereby the failure to provide alternatives to the dangerous crossing effectively renders the possibility of European sanctuary a matter of maritime ‘natural selection’. In this, the European state conveniently defers the responsibility of designating the refugee as homo sacer – the ‘sacred man’ who can be sacrificed without legal consequence66 – to that ultimate necropolitical sovereign: the uncontrollable sea. The Mediterranean Sea can therefore be read as a necropolitical frontier and site of deferred sovereign authority, passively harnessed in the task of separating and controlling the flow of bodies from Middle East to Europe. As Mbembe notes, this necropolitical construction is inherently colonial in nature,

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reproducing as it does the mentality of the frontier as ‘inhabited by “savages”’ rendered distinct from the civilised world through ‘the fear that they behave like a part of nature, that they treat nature as their undisputed master’.67 Quoting Arendt, he reminds us that it is ultimately this assignation of the ‘savage other’ to ‘nature’ which meant that ‘when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they committed murder’ (p. 24). Here, we might read that assignation of the ‘savage’ to a more literal ‘natural’ realm – that of the Mediterranean as ‘the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization”’ (p. 24), and as site of ‘unwitting murder’. In this formulation, the Mediterranean can be connected to a much longer-standing landscape of colonial frontier-building, designed for purposes of self-protection and containment, and enforced through rigorous necropolitical strategies.68 How, then, does the doubled and over-inscribed figure of Aylan Kurdi/Alan Shenu enable us to read the biopolitical, post/colonial landscape of Middle Eastern refugee experience in (search of) Europe? Read as ‘Aylan Kurdi’ – a palimpsestic narrative construction of the ‘safe, deserving’ subaltern refugee ready to be welcomed into the arms of a maternal Europe – this small human reveals the passive-aggressive ‘armed love’ that underpins the functioning of refugee biopolitics. Read as ‘Alan Shenu’, however – the child obscured by these narratives – he also reveals the necropolitical frontiers that divide Europe from Middle East in the post/colonial landscape; frontiers at which the long-standing imperialist divisions between ‘safe’ and ‘threatening’, ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ bodies are reproduced and humans, in all their infinitely precious smallness, are left to be lost to the sea.

Thinking Children: Mediating Biopower in the ‘Collaborative Life Narrative’ Children have not only figured as voiceless, nameless subalterns in representations of the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe. Quite the contrary: in journalistic and literary accounts, their voices appear to be highly prized for their apparently ‘untainted, unbiased inquiry’, ‘natural sensitivity’ and ‘innocence’69: all qualities associated with the child narrator as a construct in postcolonial fiction more broadly. As Kate Douglas notes, these qualities have made the child’s voice particularly attractive to social justice campaigners ‘determined to give “a voice to the voiceless”’,70 and within the context of the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe, the ‘collaborative life narrative’ has emerged as a popular tool through which the child’s voice can be harnessed.71 While this medium, which ostensibly enables a child to tell their own story through various modes of collaboration with a more experienced adult author, can be read as a necessary response to the child’s limited access to language and resources and thus as an enabling tool, they also, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson remind us, result in texts that are ‘multiply mediated . . . and despite assurances of co-production, power relations between teller and recorder/editor are often asymmetrical’.72 Indeed, in its implication that life can be ‘written’ ‘collaboratively’, the genre implies a problematically biopolitical mediation of agency; one which ironically mirrors the techniques of collaborative testimonial production demanded of asylum seekers in many European asylum application systems.73 Within the context of the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee crisis, these narratives therefore come to offer multiple forms of

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insight – not simply into the traumatic experiences and extraordinary resilience of child refugees, but also into the ways in which childhood, refugeeism and need are figured for a European audience. Focusing particularly on the collaborative life-narrative Nujeen, by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb, the following analysis explores how Nujeen’s narrative is framed by Lamb in order to construct a deserving legitimacy that, while revealing the machinations of the biopolitical system, unwittingly affirms its authority. Competing with this dominant narrative, however, are moments at which Nujeen’s own observations and perceptions push against the coherence of the biopolitical narrative, including its construction of the ‘child’ as a category. It is in Nujeen’s moments of adolescent outburst and self-expression that we start to glimpse the subversive potential of ‘childishness’, as a playful mode of thought that has the potential to break the post/ colonial, biopolitical narrative. The collaborative life narrative Nujeen, by Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb, presents an account of childhood refugee experience that is exceptional in many senses. Originally published in 2016 with the sensationalist subtitle One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-torn Syria in a Wheelchair,74 the text recounts the precarious journeys undertaken by Nujeen, a Kurdish teenager living in Syria who was born with cerebral palsy, and who covered a total of 3,593 miles in her flight from Aleppo to Germany from 2012 to 2015, assisted only by her older sister, Nasreen. Co-written ‘with’ the prestigious Foreign Correspondent and author Christina Lamb75 in a vivacious, adolescent first tense reminiscent at times of Nujeen’s beloved American soap operas (through which, denied access to school in Aleppo, we learn that Nujeen taught herself English), the text also bears the hallmarks of Lamb’s experienced journalistic hand: the text opens with a careful act of foreshadowing, delivered through a dramatic Prologue; paragraph breaks foreground poignant observations while complex political background is seamlessly interwoven with Nujeen’s unique personal insights into her experiences as a refugee. While it is therefore difficult to ascertain the level of narrative mediation performed by Lamb, it is clear that Nujeen’s own voice has been moulded into a coherent and compelling narrative through a process of at least rewriting and editing, while her own voice has been supplemented with information that contextualises her experiences, rendering them politically resonant. In this, it is possible to argue that while Nujeen figures prominently as a narrative focus, she is also presented by Lamb as a powerfully empathetic figure that facilitates the narration of the refugee crisis more broadly. Indeed, it could be said that Nujeen’s exceptional identity as disabled child refugee also imbues her with a ‘doubly deserving’ status designed to forge a powerful empathy with readers across the political spectrum.76 In this way, Nujeen is presented both as exception, and as ‘everychild’, embodying all that is uncontestably legitimate and deserving ‘before the law’ of the asylum system. Nujeen’s presentation as ‘child refugee figurehead’ therefore inadvertently affirms the logic of ‘armed love’ that reaches out only to the most deserving, and within the content of Nujeen’s narrative itself, Mustafa/Lamb also present an unwitting, if uneasy alliance between refugee and biopolitical state in their account of Nujeen’s reception into the German asylum system. In this, they confirm Nevzat Soguk’s recognition that the very refugee or migrant body, which, while at first undermining . . . a state’s claim that it is in control of its proper territories/borders, at times also becomes a source of re/presentation for the state(ism) whereby the state(ism) poses itself as an ontological necessity.77

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We see this ‘ontological necessity’ of the state presented particularly through her ‘exceptional’ biopolitical status as ‘disabled child’ within the text, and thus as ‘doubly deserving’ subject of the German state healthcare system – a biotechnology that functions in symbiosis with the asylum system. At several points early in the text, Nujeen hints that her enthusiasm for flight to Europe stems not simply from her terror at the war-torn Syrian landscape, but also from the medical possibilities that this might facilitate for her. When her brother Shiar mentions the possibility of travel to Germany, Nujeen discloses that ‘when everyone was sleeping I borrowed Shiar’s laptop and Googled “Germany cures for cerebral palsy”’.78 Indeed, the measure of Nujeen’s achievement of what she terms ‘A Normal Life’ (the title of Part Three of the text) emerges in her absorption into the German medical system once she has been granted refugee status. Attending a physiotherapist via her school, she also receives an official diagnosis of ‘what I have wrong with me’ (Stage One tetra-spacicity) while her school also refers her to an opthalmologist and dentist. When Nujeen declares, ‘There’s a lot to be fixed!’ (p. 245), she therefore subtly affirms Foucault’s reading of ‘the privilege of hygiene and the function of medicine as [modes of] social control’,79 whereby the categorisation and treatment of the body as ‘sick’ or ‘disabled’ renders it the subject of state dependency. Indeed, it is telling that Foucault reads the state of childhood itself as a condition that comes to be medicalised within the biopolitical system, its ‘correct management’ a means to ‘codify relations between adults and children’, thus producing a tightly regulated social hierarchy between the ‘caring’ and ‘cared-for’ (p. 280). Read as a manifestation of refugee biopolitics, the state could be said to assume the role of ‘surrogate mother’ here. Yet as Nujeen’s narrative reveals, the tightly controlled structures of ‘care’ also strip the refugee body of its agency. Nujeen/Lamb vividly describe the medical technologies to which the refugee body is subjected, when Nujeen is finally received into Germany: Just as we had imagined about Germany, everything was very organized. We were directed to what they called Bearbeitungsstrasse or Processing Street in a sports hall. They gave us plastic bags for our phones and valuables, photographed us and checked us for contagious diseases like TB and scabies. I do understand the need to register everyone but, honestly, we’re not a disease or an epidemic. Still, I can’t complain because at least in Germany the door was open, unlike some other EU countries. (p. 217) The strong sense of ‘organization’ experienced by Nujeen gestures towards the biopolitical technologies at play here, and while she recognises the dehumanising effects of the processing system, her casual comment that she ‘can’t complain’ presents a potent signal of the denial of her narrative agency, whereby she is reduced to ‘subaltern’ body. Not only is the refugee body reduced to biopolitical object within this narrative; its construction as potential ‘disease’ and ‘threat’ to the ‘uncontaminated’ German landscape implies a racialised biopolitics that echoes the familiar Western association of ‘the Orient’ with ‘poverty, disease and underdevelopment’.80 Indeed, the presentation of Nujeen’s medical treatment as the condition of her assimilation into German ‘Normal Life’ is also suggestive of the ideological presentation of the ‘West’ as bearer of rational, salvational scientific knowledge, in contrast with the ‘Orient’ as realm of

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undeveloped ‘backwardness’, which ultimately ‘invite[s] the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other’ (p. 48). Nujeen’s implicit construction as duty of the European state – as disabled Syrian child refugee – therefore ultimately affirms its biopolitical and imperialist hierarchies, and casts it in the role of ‘strict post/colonial parent’, determined to set boundaries that may discipline and exclude, but do so in the service of ‘caring’ for the most ‘deserving’ children, providing a ‘correct’ upbringing according to standards imagined as specifically ‘Western’. If Lamb’s presentation of Nujeen as ‘doubly deserving’, ‘legitimate’ refugee serves to reproduce the narrative of the biopolitical state, there are also moments within the text at which the coherent narrative figuration of Nujeen is thrown into crisis, and her status as ‘tabula rasa on which culture can be inscribed’ is contested.81 These moments of narrative agency emerge through unexpected, discontinuous utterances that see Nujeen asserting her individual personality and ‘childish’ (though not necessarily immature) perception of the world. In these moments, we see her actively though inadvertently contesting the authority of the biopolitical narrative. Significantly, the first sense in which this occurs is through the ambiguity of Nujeen’s own bodily status. We learn that at the time of her crossing into Europe in 2015, she is aged sixteen, and thus an ‘adolescent’: a liminal state that pushes at the straightforward positionings of ‘carer’ and ‘cared-for’ within the biopolitical system. As De Graeve and Bex note, the refugee adolescent is often therefore read as threatening, and ‘cultural stereotypes of “non-White” adolescents, loitering around in groups on streets . . . and thought to be particularly prone to violent and criminal behaviours’ (p. 496) abound in Western media representation. Similarly, the agency demonstrated by the adolescent refugee in ‘initiating and shaping their migration’ (p. 496) disrupts their construction as passive ‘subaltern’ in need of rescue.82 Nujeen’s adolescent tendencies emerge infrequently over the course of the text, but it is possible to identify several instances where Nujeen’s adolescent voice resists her accommodation into the biopolitical state narrative. Like many adolescents, Nujeen sometimes privileges emotion over rationality, and one moment in the text serves to subvert the narrative of the ‘grateful, deserving refugee’ particularly effectively. Towards the start of the life narrative, we learn of her obsession with the melodramatic American soap opera, Days of Our Lives, which she picks up on satellite TV from her home in Aleppo. The series becomes an escapist mechanism, as well as a means to learn English – but Nujeen also develops a typically adolescent obsession with this drama, in particular with the fraught romantic relationship between EJ and Sami – to such an extent that when interviewed by an American journalist at the Hungarian border, she complains at the fact that her favourite character, EJ, has been killed off. In a surprising turn of events, she later learns that this information has been used in a feature expressing sympathy for Syrian refugees on the American TV show Last Week Tonight, and as a gesture of solidarity, the actors playing Sami and EJ produce a sketch directly referencing Nujeen, in which EJ is resurrected. Nujeen recalls the typically overblown dialogue: ‘Coming back from the dead is not hard’, [EJ] replied. ‘You know what’s hard – getting from Syria to Germany’. He talked a little about the migrant crisis. Then he said he had read about ‘this incredible sixteen-year old from Kobane called Nujeen Mustafa’ . . . Sami repeated my name like it was something wondrous. (p. 227)

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While initially elated at this clip, though, Nujeen describes a swift and complex shift in her adolescent emotions: The following morning I woke and felt as if something had been stolen from me. Days of Our Lives had been my own thing, it was private. Also the video clip wasn’t realistic – EJ and Sami would have had a fight. I would have liked that better than them talking about me. (p. 227) Here, Nujeen’s adolescent desire for privacy and defense of her individuality both push against her construction as ‘deserving refugee figurehead’. Privileging emotional over reasoned response, her refusal of submissive gratitude can be read as a subversively adolescent contestation of the paternalist adult interpretation of her desires: it seems that these well-meaning adults just don’t get her. Similarly, Nujeen later discloses that when settled in Germany, she is one of a dozen refugees invited to meet with the American Ambassador to the United Nations in Berlin. Here, she is again cast in the role of ‘legitimate refugee figurehead’, and is invited to present her story as affirmation of this narrative. Yet Nujeen’s brief account of the episode reveals her discomfort with the way in which the refugees are made to figure within this narrative: ‘everyone told their stories . . . and I wished I didn’t have to listen’, she relates, also disclosing that ‘Ambassadors don’t have much time and we didn’t get long to speak’ (p. 261). Instead of testifying to her abject misery and gratitude for state attention, Nujeen instead questions her construction as ‘exceptional figurehead’, and ‘subaltern Other’: ‘Everyone wants to speak to me because I am smiling . . . Am I like an alien?’ (p. 261), she asks the Ambassador when she finally meets her. Here, we sense Nujeen’s adolescent emotions bubbling beneath the surface: her sense of disaffection articulated as subtle narrative rebellion against the parental authority of the maternal state. Nujeen claims further authority over the narration of her identity, needs and desires as a ‘child’ through her resistance to the expectations placed on her at school that she should play and socialise with her peers. Nujeen explains that instead, she prefers to ‘play’ through learning. Indeed, throughout the narrative, we learn that Nujeen’s sense of curiosity and desire for stimulation has been expressed as a quest for knowledge, acquired through satellite TV and Internet: mentally accessible realms she has appropriated as a means to compensate for the physical limits imposed on her body. Nujeen’s technological autodidacticism can be read as resistant to the school-as-biotechnology, designed to enforce particular modes of knowledge and social behaviours through adult guidance. Interestingly, her alternative understanding of ‘play’ as a mode that does not have to be simply physical, but that can also be mental, bears parallels with Agamben’s observations regarding what he terms ‘studious play’ in State of Exception, when he writes: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. . . . This liberation is the task of study, or of play.83 Here, ‘play’ is articulated as a subversive means to appropriate law according to new, non-canonical uses. Crucially, play and study are presented as interchangeable here: the

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division between ‘adult’ and ‘childish’ modes of enquiry into the world are collapsed, and indeed, the childhood tendencies towards rule-breaking, emotion, experimentation, wonder, creativity and spontaneity are presented as essential responses to the totalising authority of the paternal/maternal sovereign state. Through her insistence on ‘studious play’, Nujeen resists the narrative of ‘correct’ childhood enforced through the school as biotechnological institution. Indeed, by insisting on the vital importance of the cerebral, Nujeen enacts a sharp if playful move against the post/colonial biopolitical narrative – for by privileging her mental agility and agency over her biological disability, she refuses both the biopolitical narrative of the ‘doubly deserving’, ‘doubly victimised’ disabled child refugee, and the post/colonial narrative of ‘subaltern Other’, cast as the subject of Western knowledge, and beneficiary of Western tutoring. Small, seemingly insignificant moments of the text therefore reveal Nujeen’s ‘childish’ resistance to her narrative figuration according to the post/colonial biopolitical narrative of the ‘refugee child’. Here, then, we see ‘childishness’ removed from its derogatory, paternalist association with immaturity, and instead validated as a powerfully emotive cerebral mode that bears the potential to contest the sovereign ‘law’. It is with playful studiousness, then, that we might turn away, at last, from the figure of the ‘refugee child’, and towards, instead, the playfully constructed idea of ‘the small human’.

Unreasonable Conclusions: ‘The Small Human’ The ‘Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe’ has been represented primarily as a crisis of scale, the numbers of Middle Eastern inhabitants reaching out to Europe in need of sanctuary unprecedented in modern history. Yet as this chapter has argued, the crisis is also one of post/colonial conscience – for the flows of refugees now reaching Europe operate as spectres of colonial and imperialist intervention, and while these refugees bear disconcertingly human faces, so are their racialised bodies also indelibly inscribed with the Orientalist assumptions that have long been used to justify the construction of divisive physical as well as imaginative geographies. This chapter’s radical proposition is that this crisis of conscience has led to the employment of biopolitical strategies at the borders of Europe: mechanisms that, while appearing to present ethically (and politically) affirmative possibilities of ‘care’, also categorise and regulate human lives in ways that implicitly exclude, reject and render illegitimate, thereby tipping over into the territory of the necropolitical, and reinforcing the post/colonial sovereignty of threatened geopolitical boundaries through the errant mobile body itself. As image, concept and category, the ‘Middle Eastern refugee child’ emerges as figurehead of this post/colonial, biopolitical landscape, par excellence. In their apparent immaturity, lack of access to narrative agency and dependency, their childish bodies are figured as apolitical, therefore innocent, deserving and legitimate, as well as ripe for political inscription (starkly evident in the renaming and media frenzy to which the Kurdish toddler Alan Shenu was subjected after his death). Through the exceptional legibility of their suffering, they prove the rule of the biopolitical system’s necessity: a manifestation of European paternalism/maternalism that, in its reception of the Middle Eastern ‘Other’, operates through a mode of ‘armed love’ that authorises biopolitical technologies and institutions, and affirms the sovereignty of the European state. Thus, if the flows of errant refugee bodies reaching Europe represent an implicit threat to the post/colonial landscape, the child represents and renders transparent the biopolitical mechanisms that are employed to reinforce physical and

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ideological boundaries between Europe and the Middle East, and thus to reproduce the familiar structures of the colonial/imperial landscape. This chapter has sought to instigate new ways of perceiving and critiquing the intersection of the biopolitical with the post/colonial landscape. Yet one of the major challenges that we experience in this task is dealing with this landscape’s usage of a language of seeming empathy and affect. Here, Nujeen Mustafa’s ‘collaborative life-narrative’ with Christina Lamb is deeply revealing of how even expressions of apparent solidarity with the refugee child, which recognise the oppressive and traumatic nature of the post/colonial biopolitical landscape, may also ultimately operate in its service, precisely through the figuration of the child as deserving victim and thus legitimate beneficiary of the system. The language of ‘care’ employed within this system could be seen to imply that it is unsympathetic, unreasonable, even, to question the state’s commitment to the child. As Mbembe reminds us, however, within the necropolitical system, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason. . . . The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.84 The language of reason, then, becomes an articulation of sovereignty, and it is no accident that it is through Nujeen’s moments of unreasonable, emotive, individual adolescence that we find such a powerful contestation of the language of biopolitical state sovereignty. As an ambiguously and fluidly self-defined ‘child’, Nujeen demonstrates the capacity to think differently from the biopolitical post/colonial sovereign – and in this, she reveals that we have much to learn from ‘the small human’. ‘The small human’ certainly originates with children themselves, though it extends far beyond them. As a starting-point, this chapter demonstrated that children demand our serious attention within the postcolonial Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe because they reveal the trauma and injustice of the post/colonial landscape, and we find their suffering perpetuated by the biopolitical drives that govern it. This becomes evident when we start to regard the child not as ‘figure’ within the crisis, but as an individual who, in their non-symbolic human existence, is significant because they are small, not a category, or sovereign, and in this, the term ‘human’ usurps the term ‘child’ as a signifier of powerful connectivity, rather than of biopolitical difference. Indeed, it is tempting to draw parallels between my conceptualisation of ‘the small human’ and Judith Butler’s formulation of ‘precarious life’, through which she seeks to recognise ‘the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense’.85 Only by apprehending the precarity of human life in our present age, Butler argues, can we ‘reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique . . . [and] understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent’ in a way that ultimately leads to new modes of ‘sensate democracy’ and cross-cultural solidarity in the service of frail human precarity (p. 151). While ‘the small human’ also invites this renewed critical apprehension of and solidarity with precarious humanity, though, it does not premise that precarity upon notions of children’s distinctive vulnerability, nor of frailty. In place of this mature paternal/maternal rationality, ‘the small human’ instead invites us to reject sovereign modes of reason, and learn to think not simply about children, as objects of scrutiny, but instead, like them. Over the course of

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this chapter, I have suggested that ‘the small human’ can be read as a ‘childish’ mode of thought that radically contests the ‘rational’ post/colonial, biopolitical strategies of the sovereign state – not least because in reimagining ‘the small human’ as a primarily cerebral condition, it undoes the categorisation of ‘the child’ as a biopolitical category, and urges us to refuse the privileging of body over mind – the underlying strategy of the post/colonial, biopolitical state. Indeed, while it proves essential to build empathy and solidarity with the experiences of children, we have seen that the production of this sympathy as an ‘exceptional’ condition perpetuates prejudicial, biopolitical modes of exclusion that ultimately reproduce the long-standing divisions of the post/colonial landscape. Thus ‘the small human’, while precarious, is not synonymous with victimhood; rather, it holds a transgressive potential applicable to all humans. Relatable to Agamben’s theorisation of ‘studious play’, ‘the small human’ embraces children’s broader creative approach to the world, as they encounter it for the first time, and thus reshape it on their own terms. Unregulated by presuppositions, laws or limits, they are unafraid to break rules, create mess, privilege emotion, think illogically, tantrum, refuse, imagine, and in their imaginative creativity, this has tangibly liberating implications for the way the world emerges at their hands: boxes are turned into castles, apples into planets. Let us, then, as scholars of the post/colonial ‘Middle East’, also approach our subject as ‘small humans’ – playing studiously, and studying playfully, thinking around borders and boundaries, laws and categories in childishly creative ways that make a mess of their authority and conjure fresh uses for them. The playful scholarly afterlife of this chapter therefore invites us to imagine new uses for categories such as ‘Middle East’, ‘Europe’, ‘post/colonial’, ‘refugee’, in which the small human is not a sub-category to be cast as exceptional, but a mode of creative rethinking. Perhaps, by adopting the mindset of ‘the small human’, the violent forward-slash that perpetually separates the ‘post’ from the ‘colonial’ might come to be playfully reimagined according to an entirely new use – no longer as the division between traumatic past and forever delayed futurity, nor between refugee and non-refugee, Middle Eastern and European, illegitimate and legitimate body – but instead, as a ladder propped against a wall; a gate opening; a border flying to the sky.

Notes 1. The term ‘Middle Eastern subject’ is placed in scare quotes here to denote the problematic blanket categorisation of refugee individuals from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Turkey, Iran and Palestine as ‘Middle Eastern’. However, this term has been employed prolifically in European discourse on the current ‘refugee crisis’, and as such, upholds Western imaginaries of the ‘region’. Its usage throughout this essay therefore recognises its construction as one of European discursive homogenisation. 2. I employ the schismatic term ‘post/colonial’ (rather than postcolonial) throughout this essay in order to indicate the simultaneity of colonial structures/legacies and postcolonial desires/realities that operate in continual and self-negating interplay within this context. 3. The top ten nationalities applying for EU asylum in 2015 were refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Albania, Iran, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Ukraine. Eurostat, ‘Figure 2: Countries of Citizenship for (Non-EU) Asylum Seekers, 2015–2016’, http:// ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_statistics (last accessed 25 October 2017).

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4. UNHCR, ‘Syria Emergency’, UNHCR, October 2017, http://www.unhcr.org/uk/syriaemergency.html (last accessed 26 October 2017), n.p. 5. UNHCR, ‘Europe: Syrian Asylum Applications’, UNHCR Data Portal, 2017, http://data. unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/asylum.php (last accessed 26 October 2017), n.p. 6. UNHCR, ‘The Sea Route to Europe: The Mediterranean Passage in the Age of Refugees’, UNHCR, July 2015, www.unhcr.org/5592bd059.html (last accessed 11 April 2017), p. 19, 2. 7. Mayblin looks specifically at the British asylum system. Lucy Mayblin, Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 1–2. 8. Edward W. Said, with photographs by Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 4. 9. See James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 10. Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles With the Neighbours (London: Penguin, 2017), pp. 46–7. For a more detailed analysis of the contemporary Syrian conflict as post/colonial manifestation, see Chapter 22 by miriam cooke within this volume. 11. This is the figure cited by Masalha; the numbers are contested, and have been placed much higher. Nur Masalha, The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed, 2012), p. 2. 12. A number of scholars have traced the origins of the Lebanese Civil War to the construction of Lebanese nationalism and the political system of Confessionalism during the French Mandate, which laid the grounds for later sectarian conflict. See Michael Johnson, All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 4. Refugee population cited in Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth Pollack, Things Fall Apart: Containing the Spillover from an Iraqi Civil War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), p. 139. 13. See Joe Stork and Ann Lesch, ‘Background to the Crisis: Why War?’, Middle East Report, 167 (1990), pp. 11–18. 14. See UNHCR, ‘Chronology: 1991 Gulf War Crisis’, Public Information Section: UNHCR 2003, http://www.unhcr.org/uk/subsites/iraqcrisis/3e798c2d4/chronology-1991-gulf-warcrisis.html (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. 15. The term ‘Greater Middle East’ was coined by the Bush presidency, and is a powerful indicator of the ways in which definitions of ‘the Middle East’ alter in relation to perceived notions of threat. See Dar al Hayat, ‘US Working Paper for G-8 Sherpas: G-8 Greater Middle East Partnership’, al Hayat, 15 March 2004, https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Acrobat/AlHayat%20Article.pdf (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. 16. Hiram Ruiz and Margaret Emery, ‘Afghanistan’s Refugee Crisis’, Middle East Research and Information Project, 24 September 2001, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero092401 (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. 17. UNHCR, ‘Operations: Iraq’, UNHCR, April 2017, http://reporting.unhcr.org/node/2547 (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. 18. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 174. 19. It is, however, possible to identify distinct national bias exercised within the processing systems themselves. In 2015, for instance, Syrian families arriving on Lesbos were processed via faster, cleaner systems than lone male Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan refugees, thus revealing endemic assumptions around ‘safer’ and ‘more worthy’ refugee identities within the region. John Domokos and Patrick Kingsley, ‘Chaos on Greek islands as refugee system favours Syrians’, The Guardian, 21 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/

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20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

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33.

34. 35. 36.

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nov/21/chaos-greek-islands-three-tier-refugee-registration-system-syria-lesbos (last accessed 26 October 2017), n.p. Kristen Sarah Biehl, ‘Governing Through Uncertainty: Experiences of Being a Refugee in Turkey as a Country for Temporary Asylum’, Social Analysis, 59:1 (2015), pp. 57–75; pp. 65–6. Lionel Beehner, ‘Are Syria’s Do-It-Yourself Refugees Outliers or Examples of a New Norm?’, Journal of International Affairs, 68:2 (2015), pp. 157–75; p. 162. Western ‘arms-length’ intervention in the contentiously defined ‘Greater Middle East’ produced some 700,000 Afghan refugees in 2001 alone, while ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in 2003 resulted in the displacement of some 4 million people within and beyond Iraq. See Hiram Ruiz and Margaret Emery, ‘Afghanistan’s Refugee Crisis’, Middle East Research and Information Project, 24 September 2001, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero092401 (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. and UNHCR, ‘Operations: Iraq’, UNHCR, April 2017, http:// reporting.unhcr.org/node/2547 (last accessed 11 April 2017), n.p. See for instance Joseph Curtis, ‘Some of the refugees from Syria’s civil war are “definitely” terrorists, claims President Assad’, Daily Mail Online, 9 February 2017, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/-4209710/Some-refugees-Syria-definitely-terrorists.html (last accessed 26 October 2017), n.p. Angela Naimou, ‘Double Vision: Refugee Crises and the Afterimages of Endless War’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 43:1 (2016), pp. 226–33; p. 226. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 131. Michel Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 258–72; p. 266. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. See for instance Benjamin Muller, ‘Globalization, Security, Paradox: Towards a Refugee Biopolitics’, Refuge, 22:2 (2004), pp. 49–57; p. 52. David Farrier, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 38. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. xx. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, ‘Introduction: Beyond Biopolitics: The Governance of Life and Death’, in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse (eds), Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 1–18; p. 4. See Douglas McDonald, ‘Simply Impossible: Plausibility assessment in refugee status determination’, Alternative Law Journal, 39:4 (2014), pp. 241–5 and David Rhys Jones and Sally Verity Smith, ‘Medical Evidence in Asylum and Human Rights Appeals’, International Journal of Refugee Law, 16:3 (2004), pp. 381–410. Note that I use the term ‘refugee’ throughout this chapter in order to denote my view that all those who make the life-threatening decision to flee their homes are legitimately entitled to sanctuary, regardless of the official ‘plausibility’ of their narrative. Btihaj Ajana, ‘Asylum, Identity Management and Biometric Control’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 26:4 (2013), pp. 576–95. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 2. Muller, ‘Globalization, Security, Paradox’, p. 52. Daniel Trilling, ‘What to Do with the People Who Do Make It Across?’, London Review of Books, 37:19 (2015), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37n19/daniel-trilling/what-to-do-with-thepeople-who-do-make-it-across (last accessed 12 April 2017), n.p.

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37. Patrick Kingsley, ‘Balkan countries shut borders as attention turns to new refugee routes’, The Guardian, 9 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/balkansrefugee-route-closed-say-european-leaders (last accessed 4 May 2017), n.p. 38. ‘What Happens After Refugees Arrive in Greece’, The Economist, 5 February 2016, http:// www.economist.com/news/europe/21690142-economist-visits-only-operational-hotspotcountry-what-happens-after-refugees (last accessed 6 April 2017), n.p. 39. See, for example, Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 40. It is important, however, not to idealise the situation for refugees in Lebanon and Jordan as both contexts face significant financial and social challenges. See Musa Schteiwi, Jonathan Walsh and Christina Klassen, ‘Coping With the Crisis: A Review of the Response to Syrian Refugees in Jordan’, Centre for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan, 2014, http://jcss.org/ Photos/635520970736179906.pdf (last accessed 27 October 2017), n.p.; Zeinab Cherri, Pedro Arcos Gonzalez and Rafael Castro Delgado, ‘The Lebanese-Syrian Crisis: Impact of Influx of Syrian Refugees to an Already Weak State’, Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, 9 (2016), pp. 165–72. 41. M. I. Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 5. 42. D. Mosbergen, ‘1 Million Children Have Fled War-Torn Syria’, cited in Linda T. Parsons, ‘Storytelling in Global Children’s Literature: Its Role in the Lives of Displaced Child Characters’, Journal of Children’s Literature, 42:2 (2016), pp. 19–27; p. 19. 43. UNICEF, ‘Syria Crisis: February 2017 Humanitarian Results’, UNICEF, February 2017, http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/UNICEF%20Syria%20Crisis%20 Situation%20Report-%20Feb%202017.pdf (last accessed 12 April 2017), n.p. 44. ‘Children on the Move: September 2016 Child Refugee Crisis Appeal’, Save the Children, September 2016, http://www.savethechildren.org/atf/cf/%7B9def2ebe-10ae-432c-9bd0df91d2eba74a%7D/REFUGEE_CRISIS_SEPT16_FACTSEET.PDF (last accessed 6 April 2017), n.p. 45. Katrien De Graeve and Christof Bex, ‘Imageries of Family and Nation: A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Adoption and Care for Unaccompanied Minors in Belgium’, Childhood, 23:4 (2016), pp. 492–505; p. 502. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 46. C. Castañeda, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 3. 47. De Graeve and Bex, ‘Imageries of Family and Nation’, p. 494. 48. Robert Fisk, ‘Alan Kurdi symbolised an army of dead children. We ignore them at our peril’, The Independent, 1 September 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-yearon-from-alan-kurdi-we-continue-to-ignore-the-facts-in-front-of-us-and-we-ignore-themat-our-a7220111.html (last accessed 13 April 2017), n.p. 49. ‘French President calls Erdogan over images of drowned Syrian boy, calls for common EU policy’, Daily Sabah, 3 September 2015, https://www.dailysabah.com/diplomacy/2015/09/03/ french-president-calls-erdogan-over-images-of-drowned-syrian-boy-calls-for-common-eurefugee-policy (last accessed 13 April 2017), n.p. 50. Carolyn Pedwell, ‘Mediated Habits: Images, Networked Affect and Social Change’, Subjectivity, 10:2 (2017), http://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41286-017-0025-y (last accessed 13 April 2017), pp. 1–23; p. 2. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 51. While originally stemming from the context of the Second World War, the term is today pejoratively applied to the immigration constraints imposed by Europe. See Trilling, ‘What to Do with the People’. 52. This mural of Alan smiling and surrounding by teddies was produced after a previous mural of his drowned body was daubed with the tellingly biopolitical slogan ‘Borders Save

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53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

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Lives’. Note that I choose not to reproduce the image of Aylan/Alan’s drowned body that was widely circulated in the media, on the grounds that to do so would be to perpetuate the dehumanising symbolic abstraction of his death. Instead, this mural – which celebrates his living, childish identity – appears to me a more powerful indication of the subversive potential of ‘the small human’ that, as I argue in the final section of this chapter, is to be found in children’s playfulness, resilience and disregard for adult authority. For further on Alan Shenu, see Rami Khouri, ‘What’s in the name of a dead Syrian child?’, Al Jazeera, 4 September 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/whats-in-thename-of-a-dead-syrian-child.html (last accessed 13 April 2017), n.p. Fisk, ‘Alan Kurdi symbolised an army’. Philip Oltermann, ‘“Mama Merkel”: the compassionate mother of Syrian refugees’, The Guardian, 1 September 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2015/sep/01/ mama-merkel-the-compassionate-mother-of-syrian-refugees (last accessed 13 April 2017), n.p. Liisa H. Malkki, ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11:3 (1996), pp. 377–404; p. 390. See R. Khanna, ‘Taking a stand for Afghanistan: Women and the Left’, Signs, 28:1 (2002), pp. 464–5. See for example Max Hastings, ‘As the first plane-load of Syrian refugees arrive, Max Hastings reveals the deadly threat of Britain’s enemy within’, Daily Mail, 16 November 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3319873/As-plane-loads-Syrian-refugeesarrive-MAX-HASTINGS-reveals-deadly-threat-Britain-s-enemy-within.html (last accessed 4 May 2017), n.p. Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 184. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 241. Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–40; p. 16. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. UNHCR, ‘The Middle East and North Africa, Global Appeal – Update, 2018, http:// reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/ga2017/pdf/13_MENA_Summary.pdf (last accessed 31 March 2017), p. 74. William Spindler, ‘Mediterranean Sea: 100 reported dead yesterday, bringing year total to 5,000’, UNHCR, 23 December 2016, http://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/ briefing/2016/12/585ce804105/mediterranean-sea-100-people-reported-dead-yesterdaybringing-year-total.html (last accessed 14 April 2017), n.p. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. UNHCR, ‘The Sea Route to Europe’, p. 8. Hanan al-Hasan, quoted in Charlotte McDonald-Gibson, Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis (London: Portobello, 2016), epigraph. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 8. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 24. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. For further discussion of the colonial frontier as necropolitical mechanism, see ibid. p. 24. Meenakshi Bharat, The Ultimate Colony: The Child in Postcolonial Fiction (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2003), p. 12. Kate Douglas, ‘Lost and Found: the Life Narratives of Child Asylum Seekers’, Life Writing, 3:1 (2006), pp. 41–59; p. 47. See for example Gulwali Passarlay, with Nadene Ghouri, The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee (London: Atlantic, 2015) and Fabio Geda, In the Sea There are Crocodiles: The Story of Enaiatollah Akbari (London: Harvill Secker, 2011). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 191.

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73. For further discussion of the problematic role of testimonial as a mode of asylum seekers’ self-narration, see Agnes Wooley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 74. Nujeen Mustafa with Christina Lamb, Nujeen: One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-torn Syria in a Wheelchair (London: William Collins, 2016). The text was later reissued with the title The Girl from Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape from War to Freedom (2017). 75. Lamb has worked as foreign correspondent throughout the Middle East, notably Afghanistan. She has previously produced a collaborative life-narrative with the Afghan teenager Malala Yousafzai (see www.christinalamb.net (last accessed 21 April 2017)). In interview, Lamb reveals that she met Mustafa at the Hungarian-Serbian border during an assignment on the day it was closed. See the Harper Broadcast, ‘Christina Lamb on Nujeen Mustafa’s incredible journey from war-torn Syria in a wheelchair’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qYuQnadrg70 (last accessed 21 April 2017). 76. It is interesting to note that the figure of the ‘disabled child’ as the bearer of ‘exceptional’ qualities surfaces as a recurring trope in postcolonial fiction more broadly. See Clare Barker, Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 77. Nevat Soguk, ‘Transnational/Transborder Bodies: Resistance, Accommodation, and Exile in Refugee and Migrant Movements on the US-Mexican Border’, in Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 285–325; p. 294. 78. Mustafa, Nujeen, p. 110. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 79. Michel Foucault, ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, pp. 273–90; p. 282. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 80. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 348. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 81. De Graeve and Bex, ‘Imageries of Family and Nation’, p. 494. Page references for citations from this text will henceforth be provided in the main text. 82. The biopolitical anxieties around the ambiguous adolescent refugee body are keenly evident in Jack Straw’s call for the testing of adolescents’ teeth in order to determine their status as ‘child’ where it is in dispute – due to the absence of birth records, for example. See Tom Powell, ‘Jack Straw backs calls for age tests on refugee children from the Calais Jungle camp’, Evening Standard, 20 October 2016, http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/ jack-straw-former-home-secretary-backs-calls-for-age-tests-on-migrant-children-a3373871. html (last accessed 28 April 2017), n.p. 83. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 64. I am indebted to Philip Leonard for pointing out Agamben’s reference to ‘play’ within this text. 84. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 13. Emphasis added. 85. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 151.

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Afterword: Critical Companionships, Urgent Affiliations Anna Ball and Karim Mattar

W

hat does it mean to be a scholar of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’? As this volume has demonstrated, it means, in part, to belong to a resilient but often unrecognised community of scholars who have long been operating – sometimes in dialogue, sometimes discreetly – across disciplines, languages, historical periods, cultural contexts, modes of expression and critical paradigms. Collectively, these scholars have moved according to the broadly shared goal of offering critical insight into the richly varied social, cultural and political articulations that circulate around the complex legacies and recurrences of colonial and imperial power within a region whose nations and cultures have found themselves, for better or worse, placed in implicit dialogue. That much of this scholarly work has taken place on the disciplinary margins, without the explicit validation of the predominantly Anglophone postcolonial academy and sometimes facing tangible opposition, is testament to the resolve of those who choose to work within the field. By giving name to this discourse, then, this volume – the first to present ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ as an interdisciplinary sub-field in its own right – has sought to produce an empowering critical position that simultaneously nurtures heterogeneity, incites debate and offers scholarly solidarity. When thinking about the distinctive scholarly formation that emerges from this understanding of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ not as a geographically defined region but as a site of scholarly debate, it is perhaps no accident that we find an earlier echo of this model in the work of Edward Said: a figure whose own interdisciplinary and critical resistance to ‘membership’ within the field of the canonical ‘postcolonial’ in many ways presents him as an exemplar of the more nuanced and heterogeneous range of positionalities encompassed by ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ as a discursive formation.1 For Said, the concept of ‘affiliation’ described the plethora of cultural, social and political connections assumed by texts and individuals alike: fluidly and flexibly produced bonds that tie us to real-world realities. Similarly, it is possible to characterise ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ as a discursive field produced through the alterable and ever-proliferating networks of cultural, social and political affiliations shared by scholars operating within/across it. Yet these scholarly affiliations are marked by more than simply critical companionship. Rather, they bear the deeply politicised and material hallmarks of Said’s understanding of affiliation, which, as he reminds us, presents ‘the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force on the other’2 as inextricably bound to one another, and thus marks their shared scholarly endeavours as a matter

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of responsibility, and of urgency. Indeed, the ‘worldly’ context that frames the production of this essay collection itself presents a stark indication of its inherent timeliness. As we write (in December 2017), the ‘ghosts of empire’3 identified by Rashid Khalidi continue to haunt a number of nations within the region, notably Syria and Iraq as sites of ongoing conflict and violence, but have made a fresh appearance in the context of US-Israeli/Palestinian relations. In a quite spectacular manifestation of imperialist repetition, current US President Donald Trump has this month declared his intention to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem, in a move that not only sparks renewed antagonism between Israel and Palestine, but also seems intent on derailing diplomatic relations between the US and key Arab regional players.4 In a telling triangulation of history, this event falls in the same year as both the one-hundreth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the seventieth anniversary of the 1948 Nakba. With this sense of colonial connectedness in mind, the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi has responded not simply with condemnation, but with a direct appeal for what might be termed ‘postcolonial’ solidarity in the face of such careless use of power: Former European powers, including Britain, now claim they are aware of their colonial legacy, and condemn centuries of enslavement and the savage exploitation of Africa and Asia. So European leaders should first name the relentless process they installed in our country, and stand with us so we can unite to defeat it.5 Here, Nabulsi calls for discursive recognition of coloniality within the context of the Middle East – not simply by those within the region, who have long recognised it as such, but by all those implicated in what this volume identifies as the complex ‘post/ colonial’ geographies of former colonial and imperial powers. Nabulsi’s call for post/ colonial self-recognition is rightfully urgent, and reminds us of the real-world consequences of our identification and commitment as postcolonial scholars – particularly those operating from varied positions within the global ‘North’. Within this volume – notably within the editors’ Introduction, and in chapters by Karim Mattar, Salah Hassan, Anna Bernard and Anastasia Valassopoulos – we have also enacted Nabulsi’s call for self-recognition by ‘naming’ Palestine, in the words of Anna Bernard, as ‘the quintessential site of contemporary colonialism’.6 Yet the act of tracing colonialism’s complex legacies throughout the region also constitutes a radical act of recognition and solidarity in itself, and thus extends beyond the essays focused specifically on Palestine. In this, it is possible to suggest that present-day Palestine alerts us to the wider construction of what Barbara Harlow termed the ‘new geographies of struggle’ in operation across ‘the postcolonial Middle East’. These geographies are, for Harlow, defined by ‘struggle . . . for popular liberation and truth in the telling [which] engages new political commitments . . . and new territories of critical enquiry’.7 It is wholly appropriate that this trope should find its afterlife within this volume – for Harlow was herself slated to contribute an essay to this collection, entitled ‘UNSC 242 (1967) and the Colonial Present: Negotiating the “Right of Return” in Palestinian Fiction’ – but was prevented from doing so by her tragic death in January 2017. That a spirit of resistive urgency and a commitment to ‘truth in the telling’ therefore emerges out of the volume’s collective work is fitting testimony to Harlow’s own inspiring legacy within the field. What, then, are the core insights that we might glean from this investigation of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’, as both imagined geography and discursive field?

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A key observation is the simultaneously tenuous and resilient nature of ‘the Middle East’ as construct. In regional terms, ‘the Middle East’ undoubtedly emerges as a fiction bearing colonial authorship, and its limiting, binarised and exclusionary nature as an imagined geography is both brought into focus and subjected to extensive critique within a number of chapters – notably those by Juan Cole and Stephen Morton in Part I. While far from exhaustive, the varied historical and geographical contexts covered within the volume – which range from nineteenth-century Euro-Orientalist discourses of ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’ (Ella Shohat), to the twenty-first-century Iranian ‘blogosphere’ (Laetitia Nanquette) – also expose a plethora of diverse cultural identities and expressive modes that radically contest any notion of a bounded regionality. Indeed, as Anna Ball’s essay suggests, refugee and migrant population flows, and their accompanying ethical challenges to Orientalist imaginaries, are increasingly challenging the very possibility of exclusionary ‘Western’ self-differentiation from an identifiable ‘Middle East’. And yet – it remains clear that the construct of ‘the Middle East’ continues to hold political, journalistic, scholarly and cultural currency, and this, along with its recurring identification as a (shifting and subjective) site of Western colonial and imperial intervention, means it becomes a resistive mode of identification, as well as a vehicle for vital dialogue and critique. We see this in the way that a broadly and fluidly defined working mode of ‘the postcolonial’ reveals multiple forms of intersection, interaction and parallelism in cross-regional contexts – in practices of resistance and protest, as they reverberate across nations in chapters by Bernard, Caroline Rooney and miriam cooke; in manifestations of state and non-state-sponsored terrorism, as evidenced in chapters by S. Hassan, Sadia Abbas and Ikram Masmoudi; and, as the author Ahdaf Soueif indicates in her interview, in many of the underpinning incentives that drive creative production within contexts of political urgency and struggle. It is also clear that many of these dialogues are not simply cross-cultural or cross-regional, but also historical. As Morton’s analysis of colonial violence as both specific to British rule in Egypt and as an enduring after-effect within the ‘postcolonial’ era suggests,8 the ‘postcolonial’ – or, indeed, ‘post/colonial’ – ‘Middle East’ is perhaps characterised above all by deep-rooted, connected and non-chronological temporalities of the colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial in simultaneous operation, spanning geographical locales. These dialogic temporalities are not simply characterised by recurring cycles of external military intervention, however. They also emerge through the evolving struggles over identity politics that have come to forge such a productive strand of cultural debate – whether in relation to national, cultural and ideological/theological identifications (as evident in chapters by Shohat, Erdağ Göknar, Réda Bensmaïa, Abbas and Tahia Abdel Nasser); modes of gendered and sexual identification (as explored in chapters by Marilyn Booth, Valassopoulos and Lindsey Moore); or, most recently, around the politics of life itself, as represented in discourses of the biopolitical (explored in chapters by Masmoudi and Ball). Here, then, we see that ‘the Middle East’ also comes to assume a meaningful postcolonial existence as a self-generated, self-aware discursive construct that emerges from its former colonial origins. Given the volume’s exploration of a field notorious for its own self-scrutiny, it is hardly surprising that a major strand of discussion within this volume has demonstrated a preoccupation with the nature of ‘the postcolonial’ itself. Here, Said’s own notoriously ambivalent identification with postcolonial discourse (explored in Mattar’s chapter within this

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volume) predicts some of the anxieties and complexities that underpin cross-disciplinary working between postcolonial and Middle Eastern studies. Indeed, in chapters by Cole and Shohat, it becomes apparent that despite the ready applicability of familiar ‘postcolonial’ tropes such as the ‘subaltern’ and ‘Orientalism’ to Middle Eastern cultural contexts, these also require significant reworking and refining in order to operate in meaningful ways. Rather than succumbing to what Waïl Hassan identifies as the apocalyptic ‘mortuary rhetoric’ typical of self-reflexive postcolonial critique,9 however, these disciplinary encounters instead emerge as an enabling condition with radically decolonising possibilities for the scholarly institution itself. As Hassan puts it, considered postcolonial engagement with the ‘Middle East’ requires Middle East studies, [and] also Comparative Literature and postcolonial studies, to be re-centered and re-configured. It requires overcoming inertia, unlearning persistent habits of mind that divide the world between the West and the Rest, and restructuring programs and curricula. As for Arabic literary studies, it is no longer a question of ‘importing’ concepts, ‘applying’ new theories, or ‘inserting’ Arabic literature into pre-existing norms, but of critical rethinking that results from the confrontation of Arabic studies with those formations.10 It is possible to add to Hassan’s observations here that a further act of ‘unlearning’ must also take place within the analysis of cultural modes that are not simply textual but also filmic, artistic, graphic, digital, and indeed lived – for as this volume has demonstrated, these too articulate modes of post/coloniality, while asking challenging questions about how we read and communicate across languages and forms. In scholarly and discursive terms, then, the implications of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ are profound, and invite us not simply to turn to an expanded range of cultural contexts and outputs from across the disciplines, but to scrutinise the very positionalities of those inquiries with a view, ultimately, to contesting the modes of epistemic violence endemic to the academic institution itself. With this spirit of interrogative positivity in mind, it is important to acknowledge some of the hurdles and untapped potentialities that we encountered during the compilation of this volume. Perhaps due to the very nature of the ‘postcolonial’ as a critical approach dedicated to addressing forms of injustice, it is possible to discern a tendency among scholars working at the forefront of the field to focus on contexts in ‘crisis’ or fighting against highly visible articulations of colonial and/or imperial activity. This volume has not sought an exhaustive survey of geographical contexts – but it is interesting to reflect that there remains the potential for further investigation of less readily visible sites of postcolonial complexity, with a view to establishing a more comprehensive picture of colonial and imperial legacies across the region. Here, for instance, Hamid Dabashi’s recent reflections on the ‘Imperial Threads’ exhibition in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar gesture towards some of the richly complex artistic and cultural interactions between Muslim, Ottoman and Mughal empires that have complex postcolonial stories to tell – as, indeed, does their curation within the context of a Gulf nation.11 In conceptual terms, too, there is a wider post/colonial narrative to be forged around religious discourse. This volume goes some way towards initiating such discussions: Abbas’s finely observed chapter for this volume articulates many of the ways in which misappropriations of Islam come to be articulated through the mechanisms of a spectacular, image-obsessed global

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capitalism, while Shohat’s exceptional chapter explores and challenges the problematically binarised construction of Jewish and Muslim figures, in Christian and other discourses.12 There are also, however, alternative versions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism within the region that remain to be articulated. While a number of edited collections have sought to instigate conversations on the subject of Islam and the postcolonial, it is notable that few of these investigations locate their analyses within the specific contexts of ‘Middle Eastern’ nations.13 It would be of particular interest to encounter analyses of this intersection emerging from within institutions located in such nations themselves – which, while sought for this volume, we were unable to identify – perhaps as a result of our own positionalities as scholars based in the UK and the US, bearing our own assumptions about the disciplinary locations in which such work might be sought, and indeed what is recognisable as ‘postcolonial’ discourse. These same institutional positionalities – along with the publication of this volume in an Anglophone book series – have also resulted in an inevitable leaning towards the discussion of multilingual work in English translation, though one which also reflects a much wider postcolonial trend – as analysed (and countered) by Moore in her own vital intervention on this subject, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations.14 While we have also actively sought to source contributions from scholars working within the region, it must also be recognised that our own institutional locations and indeed scholarly commitments within the UK and US have also encouraged us to represent the range of essential scholarship that has emerged from within the global ‘North’. It would be interesting, however, to see how alternative versions of this volume might emerge from different institutional and regional positionalities, and we hope that scholars working within ‘the Middle East’ might engage one another, and their transnational contexts, in this task of forging competing narratives of the postcolonial. A challenge that we continue to face in our work as postcolonialists, then, is how to incite multi-linguistic, cross-regional dialogue that undoes Anglophone and Western privilege, while continuing to encourage vital self-reflexive engagement among students working in these contexts. Moore presents one productive model for this in her own chapter, where she advocates collaborative translation and investigation across cultural and linguistic positionalities. This surely has the potential to be extended in international, interdisciplinary scholarly practice, though it may also involve unlearning our own scholarly authority in the process – even forsaking the traditionally individualistic working practices that have dominated the Humanities. If these challenges result in unavoidable aporias then it must also be noted that many new horizons become visible as we look to the future of scholarship on ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ beyond this volume. Over the past decade or so, the ever-fluidly defined field of the postcolonial has made a decisive turn towards newly critical understandings of the global, with a particular focus on the ‘Anthropocene’: a conceptualisation of planetary conditions as fundamentally (and often negatively) shaped by human beings.15 Perhaps particularly relevant here is the exciting sub-field of postcolonial work that has emerged on ‘petrostudies’ and ‘petrofiction’, which, in the words of Imre Szeman, seeks to draw much needed attention to one of the key conditions of possibility of human social activity: a raw input – energy – whose significance and value are almost always passed over, even by those who insist on the importance of modes and forms of production for thinking about culture and literature.16

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The potential for this work to elucidate the post/colonial function of one of the most precious and prolific resources within the ‘Middle East’ is tremendous; indeed, recent scholarly work by Amitav Ghosh, Peter Hitchcock and Rob Nixon has tested the concept in relation to work by Abdelrahman Munif.17 There is surely much scope for post/ colonial scholarship on the ‘Middle East’ to turn its sights more deeply towards cultural articulations of the Anthropocene. Here, then, it is heartening to note the forthcoming publication of Hannah Boast’s analysis of ‘hydropolitics’ and ‘hydrofiction’ within the context of Palestinian and Israeli writing,18 and it will be interesting to see what other facets of the ecocritical might also reveal powerful post/colonial narratives. It is perhaps fitting that as we begin to look beyond our familiar discursive boundaries, we should engage in processes of turning both inwards and outwards, with a (re)turn to questions of the simultaneously elemental and planetary. As a work committed to mobilising the best potentialities of postcolonial discourse, this volume has sought to incite dialogue, exchange and debate across regions, nations, institutions, disciplines, genres and languages, and in doing so, has identified ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ as a discursive territory that stretches far beyond, and indeed contests the very construction of, a bounded geographic locale. While this discussion has been necessitated by and thus has emerged out of the most noxious of political conditions, critical engagement with ‘the postcolonial Middle East’ must today be recognised as a site of recuperative potentiality from which we, as scholars across the disciplines, can ‘speak truth to power’. As the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us in words from her poem ‘Jerusalem’ – which might also be read as a vital counter-refrain to this year’s regressive political engagements with the region, and indeed as powerful ministration to those of us seeking to counter such sentiments through informed and creative scholarly practice: ‘it’s late, but everything comes next’.19 So it is that the very complexity and heterogeneity of our companionships as scholars of ‘the postcolonial Middle East’, as well as our shared goals, will continue to yield freshly urgent and newly meaningful affiliations between text and world.

Notes 1. See the Introduction and Chapter 2 of this volume for further discussion of Said’s contribution to and relationship with ‘the postcolonial’ and ‘Middle East’. 2. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 119. 3. The term is Rashid Khalidi’s, who charts a highly pertinent account of enduring imperial activity in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 4. Alexandra Wilts, ‘Donald Trump set to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocate US embassy’, The Independent, 6 December 2017, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ americas/us-politics/trump-jerusalem-israel-embassy-us-move-palestine-abbas-presidentlatest-news-updates-a8093361.html (last accessed 3 January 2018), n.p. 5. Karma Nabulsi, ‘In Jerusalem we have the latest chapter in a century of colonialism’, The Guardian, 12 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/12/ jerusalem-chapter-century-colonialism-donald-trump-intervention-palestine (last accessed 20 December 2017), n.p. 6. See Anna Bernard, this volume, p. 276.

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7. Barbara Harlow, After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (London: Verso, 1996), p. 177. 8. See Stephen Morton, this volume, pp. 160–82. 9. See Waïl S. Hassan, this volume, pp. 43–56. 10. See Waïl S. Hassan, this volume, p. 54. 11. Hamid Dabashi, ‘What are the Saudis afraid of?’, Al Jazeera, 17 December 2017, http:// www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/saudis-afraid-171217082544270.html (last accessed 4 January 2018), n.p. 12. See Sadia Abbas and Ella Shohat, this volume, pp. 000–000, 000–000. 13. See, for instance, Esra Mirze Santesso and James McClung (eds), Islam and Postcolonial Discourse: Purity and Hybridity (London: Routledge, 2017). Works such as Sadia Abbas, At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) and Jaafar Aksikakas, Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World (New York: Peter Lang, 2009) have made important in-roads in this field. 14. Lindsey Moore, Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 4. 15. Here, the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty has been foundational. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Enquiry, 35:2 (2009), pp. 197–222. 16. Imre Szeman, ‘Literature and Energy Futures’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 126:2 (2011), pp. 323–5. 17. See Amitav Ghosh, Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Peter Hitchcock, ‘Oil in an American Imaginary’, New Formations, 69 (2010), pp. 81–97; and Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 18. Hannah Boast, Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 19. Naomi Shihab Nye, ‘Jerusalem’, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/54296/jerusalem-56d2347ab7a20 (last accessed 27 January 2017), n.p.

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Index

Note: page numbers in bold indicate illustration Abbas, Mahmoud, 268 ‘Abbasid era, as ‘Golden Age’, 108–9 Abouelnaga, Shereen, 331 Women in Revolutionary Egypt, 315–16 Abrahamian, Ervand, 88, 90 Abu Lughod, Ibrahim, 263, 271n14 Achcar, Gilbert The People Want, 412 activism cultural, 439, 440 feminist, 14, 185, 186, 191, 196, 202, 325 humanitarian, 275–7, 280–1, 283, 284, 287–8 nationalist, 83, 84, 92 pro-Palestinian, 77, 275–6, 277–8, 287, 288 Shehadeh, Raja and, 279–82 Soueif, Ahdaf and, 11, 57, 59 women’s anti-colonial, 309, 314, 315, 318–22, 325–6 see also Arab Feminism; artist-activists, Syrian ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi (Haqqi), 13, 161, 175–80 allegorical reading of, 176 El-Gabalawy’s translation of, 175 framing of Denshawai incident, 176, 178 ‘law of force’ in, 176–7 maiden figure in, 176 realism in, 175, 178 Adorno, Theodor, 36 ‘Adwan, Mamduh Al-Ghoul, 431 Afghanistan, 6, 15, 384 refugees, 449, 463n3 ‘saving’ women in, 454

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Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 460, 463 ‘bare life’, 19, 362, 378, 381 homo sacer, 362, 373, 374, 377–8, 381, 455 ‘management of life’, 450–1 ‘state of exception’, 175, 177, 378, 451–2, 456 ‘studious play’, 460, 463 Ahmad, Aijaz, 24, 30, 232 critique of Said, 25–7, 30, 39n5 ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of “Otherness”’, 241, 250n4, 250n8 Ai, Wei Wei (Ai Wei Wei), 453 Ajana, Bhitaj, 451 Akhmatova, Anna, 70 Algeria Armane, Djamila, 320 colonisation of, 143, 150, 330 Family Code in, 320, 327n22 Jews in, 150–1 women registering as war veterans, 17, 319–21 women’s role in revolution, 17, 319–21 see also Camus; Djaout, Tahar; Helie-Lucas, Marie-Aimée; L’Invention du désert (Djaout) allegory, 176 ‘third-world’ literature and, 241–2, 250n6, 250n7 Amīn, Qāsim Emancipation of Women, 187 Amireh, Amal ‘prioritisation paradigm’, 312 American academy

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index anti-Arab sentiment in, 76–7 campus activism, 77 controversies regarding Palestine in, 4–5, 22n8, 40n17, 276, 289n21 mainstreaming of Arabic literature in, 48 Amnesty International, 435 Anderson, Benedict, 98; see also imagined communities anglophone academy place of postcolonialism in, 3, 10, 23–42 place of Palestine in, 276 anglophone Arab autobiography, 19, 349–61 contesting false narratives, 351–2, 359–60 cross-cultural mediation, 349–50 relationship between identity and representation in, 350–1, 352, 353 ‘return narratives’, 349, 351 as ‘transnational’ not ‘diasporic’, 350–1 see also Matar, Hisham; Said, Najla anti-colonial resistance Arab women and, 17, 309–28 epistemologies of, 423 popular culture and, 19–20, 407–26 Syrian artist-activists and, 427–8 see also The Map of Love (Soueif) Antoon, Sinan, 67–79, 329 anti-Arab sentiment in US, 76–7 Baghdad, 67, 71–3 The Baghdad Blues, 71, 75 BDS movement, 77 Boulus, Sargon, 75 The Corpse Washer, 70, 71, 75, 76 Darwish, affinity with, 74–5 dictatorship, living under, 70–1 exilic consciousness of, 68–9 Fihris, 72 al-Hajjaj, Ibn, 77–8 I‘jaam, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76 Iraqi literature, contemporary, 73–4 ‘Necropolis’, 72 nostalgia, danger of, 72–3 post-colonial prism, value of, 78–9 pre-modern Arab culture, 78 Saadi, Youssef, 75 self-translation, 76 writing as resistance, 72 writing in Arabic, 75–6 Ya Maryam, 76 Apter, Emily ‘translation zone’, 100 Arab Feminism, 17, 309–28 Arab Feminisms (Makdisi, Bayoumi and Rida Sidawa), 313–14, 325

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515

Arab women’s movements, 326 Feminist Postcolonial Theory (Lewis and Mills), 310–11 founding myths of, 313–14 intellectualism in, 314–19 as intersectional, 310 need for ideational change in MENA, 313 Opening the Gates (Badran and cooke eds), 310, 314, 325 ‘Post-structuralist Theory and Women in the Middle East’ (Lazreg), 312–13, 318–19, 325 ‘prioritisation paradigm’, 312, 327n22 Western feminism and, 314 women’s movements, 326 see also The Homeland (Na’na); women’s anti-colonial activity Arab Spring, 6, 19–20 African anticolonial struggles and, 407–11, 414 The Arab Spring (Dabashi), 407–8, 410–11 Badiou’s analysis of, 420–1 as intifada, 421 misrepresentations of, 420–3 popular culture and, 407–26 in Syria, 432–3, 440–2 translation studies and, 421–2 Arabic literary studies, 11, 47 Comparative Literature and, 47, 48, 51 Eurocentrism of, 49–50, 51 Latin America and, 52 limitations of, 53–4 North America and, 52–4 North-North paradigm, 51, 53, 54 North-South paradigm, 51, 53, 54 Orientalism and, 48, 54, 77–8 Palestinian literature and, 47–8 postcolonial studies and, 48, 50–1, 472 South-South paradigm, 51, 52, 53 see also world literature Arabic literature multilingual approaches to, 331 ‘Otherness’ and, 331 translation and, 100, 329 as ‘world literature’, 99–100 see also Arabic literary studies; Classical Arabic literature ‘Arab-Jew’ figure, 13, 118–59 ambivalent position of, 121, 127, 150, 152–4 Arab nationalism and, 145, 154 ‘Arab-versus-Jew’ narrative and, 118, 120, 130, 133, 135, 145, 149, 152, 154, 159n70

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516

index

‘Arab-Jew’ figure (cont.) bifurcation of, 120–1, 134, 135, 140, 149, 150–1, 153–4 Christianity and, 118, 133, 135, 136–7, 148, 149 classification as ‘Semite’, 119–20, 126, 152, 154 colonial conquest and, 118–19, 121, 127, 133, 143–4, 145, 149–50, 152, 153 colonial ‘rescue’ fantasies and, 121, 134–7, 144, 148 Crusaders and, 118, 123–4 de-Orientalisation and, 121, 138–40, 148, 153 double colonisation of, 121, 150–1, 152 Enlightenment and, 121, 136–8, 140, 149–50, 152 Israel/Palestine conflict and, 152 Judeo-Muslim culture, 141–2, 144, 150 ‘minorities’ discourse and, 148–50, 153 in Orientalist discourse, 119–20, 121, 126, 127–30, 133–4, 149–50, 152, 154 in Orientalist visual culture, 127–40, 141–3 Reconquista and, 118, 136–7, 145 see also Disraeli, Benjamin; Dehodencq, Alfred; Hatchouel, Solica; Jews; Sayagh, Saïd; Tancred (Disraeli); Zionism Arafat, Yasser, 16 Carter’s tribute (New York Times), 267 embodying Palestinian nation, 254, 255, 259 legacy of, 259 leadership of, 266–7 representing ‘radical hope’, 255, 256–7, 269 Said’s criticism of, 253–4, 259 tomb of, 266 vilified in US, 267 see also Palestine Liberation Organisation, sumūd Arendt, Hannah, 36, 456 ‘new body politic’, 432, 443 Arenfeldt, Pernille Mapping Arab Women’s Movements, 326 art allegory in Western, 176 dissident, 412, 416–19 Egyptian revolution and, 413, 417–19, 423 Judeo-Muslim culture and, 141 mimetic, 141–2 murals, 417–19, 453 see also artist-activists (Syrian), graffiti

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artist-activists, Syrian Abbas, Hani, 436 ‘Adwan, Mamduh, 431 Art Residence Aley (ARA), 433 al-Assads and, 435–6 ‘Azzam, Tammam, 434, 442 Daali, 435, 444n28 dance as revolutionary trope, 440 Farzat, Ali, 431–2, 433 ‘Human Slaughterhouse’ report (Amnesty), responses to, 435–7 al-Jazairi, Wissam, 440, 441, 442 Kiwan, Sari, 440, 441 loyalty to revolution, 443 Manchester Festival (2017), 442 Mardini, Raghad, 433 Naji, Abed, 436 as organic intellectuals, 442–3 prison writers, 431 Qashush, Ibrahim, 433 ‘Revolution Panorama’ mosaic, 440–2 Sarut, ‘Abd al-Basit, 433 singers as, 433 social media, role of, 442 Syrian Ayyam Gallery, 434 as transnational community, 428, 433 Yousef, Abu, 436 see also Khalifa, Khalid; The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (Yazigi); Yazigi, Sana Asad, Talal, 407–8, 409, 420 Ashcroft, Bill, 11, 24, 31, 40n15 critique of Said, 29–30 The Empire Writes Back, 4, 29 ‘Representation and Liberation’ (Ashcroft), 29–30, 31 al-Assad, Bashar, 427 ‘Damascus Spring’, 431–2 demonstrations against, 432 depicted as ‘Bashar the Slaughterer’, 436 al-Assad, Hafiz censorship under, 429–30 cult of, 413, 417 Hama massacre, 430 portrayed as puppeteer, 435 repressing dissent, 431 al Aswany, Alaa, 178–9, 413 authoritarianism, 329, 412 Awad, Alaa, 417–19 Badiou, Alain, 297 The Century, 302 The Rebirth of History, 420–2

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index Badran, Margot, 208n6 Opening the Gates (Badran and cooke eds), 310, 314, 325 Baer, Gabriel, 87 Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt, 88–9 Bagge Laustsen, Carsten, 369 Baghdad ‘Abode of Peace’/‘Abode of War’ duality, 368–9 colonial mission of US in, 370 division into Green and Red zones, 365–8 lawlessness of, 367, 368, 369–70 A Thousand and One Nights and, 369–70 see also Antoon, Sinan; Baghdad Marlboro (Wālī); The Green Zone (Nūrī) Baghdad Marlboro (Wālī), 19, 363, 368 emigration of narrator, 373, 380–1 as Kafkaesque, 379 narrator as war deserter, 380–1 sectarian war, portrayal of, 371–2 ubiquity of death in, 380–1 Ball, Anna, 315, 343n12 Barker, Mona Translating Dissent, 421–2 Barakat, Hoda, 333–4, 335, 336 Batatu, Hanna The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, 89–90 Bauman, Zygmunt, 364 Bedouin as subaltern, 12, 90 Beinin, Joel Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, 93 Workers on the Nile (Beinin and Lockman eds), 91–2 Beirut, 184, 189, 206, 284, 354, 445n35 Art Residence Aley (ARA), 433 Beirut-centric literati, 333 Darwish in, 75, 267 Genet in, 254 Lisān al-ḥāl, 192, 193, 198, 202–6, 207 PLO withdrawal from, 34, 271n16, 276, 286 Syrian Ayyam Gallery, 434 Syrian NGOs in, 442 West Beirut, 332 see also Sabra and Shatila massacre Benjamin, Walter, 38 ‘history of the oppressed’, 161, 167, 177 Berbers, 13, 134, 144, 145, 150, 159n62

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517

Bernard, Anna, 4, 28 Berger, John ‘A Place of Weeping’, 268 ‘undefeated despair’, 255, 256, 259–61, 266 Bex, Christof, 459 Bhabha, Homi K., 24, 25 critique of Said, 27–8, 30 misreading of Said and Palestine, 28, 30 praise of Fanon, 311 tension between pedagogical and performative, 245, 247 Biehl, Kristen Sarah, 449–50 blogs, literary (in Iran) ‘blogspeak’, 394, 396 censorship, 385–89, 391, 396, 398, 399, 400, 402n14, 402n22 conservatism in, 390–1 Cyberutopians, 385 dāstānak (very short story), 392–3 decline of, 388–9 democratisation of, 394–5 diaspora bloggers, 394, 399 digital orientalism, 385, 391–2, 396, 398 digital publishing, 397 elitism of, 388, 395 evolution of, 384, 387 female bloggers, 388 innovations in, 392–4 Kakaei, Abdol Jabbar, 390–1 Khābgard (Sleepwalker), 389–91, 395, 397 multi-dimensional character of, 385, 392 Shokrolahi, Reza, 390, 395–6 use of Persian, 384, 399 vulgarity debate in, 395–6 Boast, Hannah, 474 Boehmer, Elleke, 5–6, 209n23 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS), 275 as antidote to despair, 64, 270n8 controversy around, 77 as filling political vacuum, 255 Israeli response to, 77, 255 Brennan, Timothy, 25, 102, 107 British Empire civilising mission of (in Egypt), 161, 166–7, 172–3, 179, 180 ‘lawful’ violence of (in Egypt), 160–1, 165–7, 171–2, 174–5, 179–80 see also Palestine Brown, Bill, 226 Brown, Nathan, 92, 93, 179

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518

index

Bush, George W., 267, 454 ‘War on Terror’, 331, 349, 369, 371, 373 Butler, Judith, 345n71 Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 421 ‘precarious life’, 462 queer desire, 339–40 translation, 341–2 Cabral, Amícal, 20, 407 ‘National Liberation and Culture’, 409, 414 Cachia, Pierre, 13 Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, 97, 12 Cairo, 89 Ben Ezra synagogue, 151 cosmopolitanism of, 413 Couvreur’s Cairo lectures, 183–6 Tahrir Square, 59, 414, 417, 419 Watch Out for Zouzou (El-Imam), 416 see also Soueif, Ahdaf Camus, Albert, 354 capitalism colonial, 84, 85, 86, 163 global, 16–17, 293, 303, 305, 473 ‘print capitalism’, 98 resistance to, 88 censorship ‘Damascus Spring’, 431–2 in Iran, 385–9, 391, 396, 398, 399, 400, 402n14, 402n22 in Syria, 411–12, 428–31 self-censorship (of Syrians), 431 Césaire, Aimé, 20, 407, 409, 410 children (as refugees), 20 adolescent, 459–60, 468n82 ‘armed love’ and, 454–5, 456, 461 as biopolitical figures, 447, 458, 459, 461, 462–3 ‘childishness’ and, 447, 457, 459–61, 463 ‘collaborative life narratives’ of, 456–7, 462 constructed as ‘exceptional’, 452, 460, 463 disabled, as ‘doubly deserving’, 447, 457, 458, 459, 461, 468n76 Kurdi, Aylan /Alan Shenu, 447, 452–6, 461 Mustafa, Nujeen, 457–61 narrative agency of, 457, 459–60, 461, 462 representations of, 20, 446–8, 461 as ‘the small human’, 447, 452, 461–3, 466n52

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‘studious play’ and, 460–1, 463 as ‘subaltern’, 454, 456, 458, 459, 460, 461 Classical Arabic literature Ḥusayn’s interpretation of, 107–9 European influences in, 109 as multilingual and cosmopolitan, 109 Clinton, Bill, 254, 267 close reading, 332 Cole, Juan, 4, 40n17 colonial discourse internalisation of, 79 Said’s theory of, 23, 24, 29–30 women and, 187, 310–11 colonial violence, 74 in Egypt, 13, 137, 160–82 of France and Spain, 137 see also Denshawai incident (Egypt) colonialism contemporary, 276, 470 debt, 162 end of ‘postcolonial theory’ and, 45 foreclosing culture creativity, 407–11 in India, 84–5 informal, 86–7 Soueif on, 63 see also anti-colonial resistance; colonial violence Comparative Literature, 11 in America, 51, 56n38 and Arabic Studies, 47–8 paradigms of comparison, 51, 54 reconfiguring, 54, 472 Spivak’s obituary for, 43 contrapuntalism, 11, 23, 24, 30, 31, 32, 36, 68 cooke, miriam Dissident Syria, 411–12 Opening the Gates (Badran and cooke eds), 310, 314, 325 cosmopolitanism, 42n35 of Classical Arabic literature, 109 cosmopolitan worldliness, 410–11, 413, 424n3 of literary world, 100, 101–2, 117n60 Ottoman, 219, 220, 231–2, 233, 234 Said’s, 25, 36, 39n5, 42n35 of Syrian artist-activists, 427–8 see also Cairo; Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā Couvreur, Adolphine Cairo lectures, 183–5, 207, 207n3, 208n11 Couvreur’s féminisme, 184–5, 189, 207, 208n8 see also feminism

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index Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (Yazigi) as archive, 427 as communal project, 437, 439 Darwish, Mahmoud, 429, 439 at Festival International des Arts de Bordeaux, 439 funding, 445n35 interviews with artist-activists, 438–9 mission statement, 427 promoting art events, 437 rejecting shallow critique, 438–9 as revolutionary habitus, 437–40 as space of freedom, 439 toll on employees, 438 see also artist-activists, Syrian Cromer (Earl of), Evelyn Baring, 161, 169, 172 colonial order as machine, 163–5 Modern Egypt, 162–7, 169, 170–1, 172–3 Cronin, Stephanie Subalterns and Social Protest, 94, 96n28 Crusades, 119, 123, 133 cultural activism, 414–20; see also Soueif, Ahdaf; artist-activists, Syrian Dabashi, Hamid, 232, 472 The Arab Spring, 407–8, 410, 411, 420, 421 Dabiq, 16 aesthetics of, 296 ‘Erasing the Legacy of a Ruined Nation’, 296–7 images in, 296, 297, 298 as recruitment tool, 298–9, 299 ‘Soldiers of Terror’, 300 see also Daesh (Islamic State) Daesh (Islamic State), 16–17, 440 American violence and, 304–5 attacking ancient cities, 293, 295, 296–7, 298, 300–1, 305 desire for spectacle, 293, 294, 296, 297, 299–300, 302 ‘gangster pidgin’ of, 296 iconoclasm of, 294, 308n37 influenced by Hollywood, 294, 297, 307n15 Nineveh, 293, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301 nationalism and, 300–1 obsession with transparency, 294–5 Palmyra, 293, 300–1 ‘passion for the Real’ of, 299–300, 302–3 postmodern aesthetics of, 296, 300 as product of modernity, 295, 303 recruitment videos, 299, 300–1

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shirk (idolatry), 297, 298–9, 301, 306 as ‘state’ entity, 305–6 support in US, 300 use of Quran and Hadith, 296, 297, 300 ‘What ISIS Really Wants’ (Wood), 301–2 see also Dabiq; Timbuktu (Sissako) Danner, Mark ‘Iraq: The War of the Imagination’, 381 Darwish, Mahmoud ‘A Place of Weeping’ (Berger), 268 death of, 254, 255, 256, 267–9 ‘Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading’, 265–6 embodying Palestinian nation, 255, 259 eulogies for, 268 grave of, 267 ‘The Hoopoe’, 260, 272n29 as inspiration for Antoon, 74–5 ‘On Mahmoud Darwish’ (Said), 267 as Palestinian national poet, 74–5 representing ‘radical hope’, 255, 256–7, 269 wilderness as metaphor, 260–1 Days of Our Lives, 459–60 decolonisation, 309 as fraught process, 310, 311 of knowledge, 79, 423 ongoing need for, 330 women’s engagement in, 309–22 De Graeve, Katrien, 459 Dehodencq, Alfred L’exécution de la Juive (The execution of the Jewess), 130, 131, 133–5, 138–9, 143, 149 Portrait de Sol Hatchuel, 138–9, 138 democratisation as continuation of war, 369 of online communities (in Iran), 394–6 Denshawai incident (Egypt), 160–9, 171–80 Mubarak’s regime, parallels with, 178–9 despair at Darwish’s death, 268 of Palestinians, 16, 253, 256, 259, 268–9, 273n36 resisting, 270n8, 271n20, 442, 443 at Said’s death, 263, 265 of Shehadeh, 281 undefeated, 255, 256, 259–61, 266 Derrida, Jacques, 180, 329 eulogy for Levinas, 262–3, 273n36 Devji, Faisal, 294–5, 306n9 diaspora, as problematic term, 350–1

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520

index

dictatorship as neo-colonial, 412 see also al-Assad, Bashar; al-Assad, Hafiz; Antoon, Sinan; Gaddafi, Muammar; Hussein, Saddam Diken, Bulent, 369 dispossession in colonial Egypt, 161, 178 of the Palestinian people, 33–5, 48, 152, 258, 278, 350 Disraeli, Benjamin, 122–6 Orientalist novels of, 122–6, 156n26 revisiting Sephardi/Moorish history, 125, 126 Romanticism of, 122, 125–6 see also Tancred (Disraeli) dissidence, 115, 413 of Matar’s father, 356, 358 prior to Arab Spring, 421 suppressed in Syria, 428 ‘theatre of normality’ and, 411 see also miriam cooke; Pamuk, Orhan Djaout, Tahar, 15–16, 251n10 assassination of, 244 see also L’Invention du désert (Djaout) documentaries About Baghdad, 67, 76 Declaration of World War (PFLP and JRA), 317 Return to Homs (Derki), 433 Doostdar, Alireza, 395–6, 398 Douglas, Kate, 456 Egypt colonial violence in, 13, 160–82 Mūsā’s woman-centric history of Egypt, 188–9 popular culture in, 413–14, 417–20, 423 see also British Empire; Denshawai incident; Egyptian Revolution; The Map of Love (Soueif); Soueif, Ahdaf Egyptian Renaissance, 97, 98 Egyptian Revolution (2011), 425n38 reclaiming Ancient Egyptian heritage, 417–19 revolutionary aesthetics of, 419–20 street art of, 417–19 Tahrir Square, 59, 414, 417, 419 ‘translating’, 421–2 see also Soueif, Ahdaf El-Desouky, Ayman The Intellectual and the People in Egyptian Literature and Culture, 422–3

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epistemic violence, 410, 472 in Pamuk’s novels, 215, 221, 228 translation as, 168, 329 Étienne, Bruno, 379 eulogies, 16, 254, 256, 261–2 for Arafat, 266–7 for Darwish, 267–8 for Levinas (Derrida), 262–3 for Said, 263–6 see also obituaries Eurocentrism, 11, 50 Arab, 48, 51, 79 of Comparative Literature, 51 conceptual limitations of, 302–3 Eurocentric discourse, 119 of ‘the postcolonial’, 400 teleology of ‘the East’ and, 125, 126 of term ‘the Middle East’, 79 of Zionist project, 120, 121, 150, 151, 153, 159n70 see also Ḥusayn Europe as fantasyland, 302–3 gender politics in, 183–5, 190–201, 203, 205, 207 history of, redefining, 108 refugee ‘crisis’ in, 118, 446–8, 449–68 scapegoating of Islam in, 135–7 as symbol, 190 see also Ḥusayn; refugees exile, 19, 35–6, 357 Antoon on, 69 internal, 333 Palestinian, 34–5, 38, 350 see also Said, Edward Fanon, Frantz, 3, 368, 407, 414, 418 Négritude, 410 Said on, 409–10 White Skin, Black Masks, 311 The Wretched of the Earth, 365, 411 Faqir, Fadia, 333–4 Farsi see Persian Fassin, Didier, 280–1 Farzat, Ali, 431–2, 433 feminist polemics, 14, 183–212 British suffrage and, 192–3, 194–6, 198, 202–5, 206 Chicago World Exposition and, 202 colonial mimicry and, 189, 198, 200–1 ‘East’/‘West’ binary and, 183–4, 186, 199 Europe and, 185–6, 187–8, 191–3, 199, 201, 207 Fawwāz, Zaynab, 14, 189, 191–207

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index gender difference, 194–5, 201 Kūrānī, Hannā Kasbānī, 14, 189, 192–207 Lisān al-ḥāl, 192, 202–7 nationalism and, 186–7, 188, 196 see also Arab Feminism fiction, 65 flash, 392–3 Finkelstein, Norman, 4, 40n17 Fisk, Robert, 454 Foucault, Michel, 458 biopolitics and, 450, 458 concept of power/knowledge, 27–8 performativity of power, 416 Society Must Be Defended, 455 France assimilation of Jews in, 150–1 colonisation of Maghreb, 133, 134, 137, 143–5, 148–51 ‘minority protection’ discourse of, 148–50, 153, 330 see also Nahda; terrorism francophone literature, 4, 7, 242–52 Ganim, John M., 101, 108 Gaza, 34, 38, 253, 258, 260, 269, 272n22, 288, 312, 349, 355 gender, 14, 15, 17 colonial politics and, 183, 186, 187–9 Couvreur’s gender-justice agenda, 183–5 ‘the nation’ and, 91, 187–9 Genet, Jean, 16, 277–8, 282–8 Un captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love), 277, 283–7 criticism of PLO, 286–7 Marcuse and, 285–6 love for fedayeen, 285–6 ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’ (Four Hours in Shatila), 277, 283–4 revolutionary solidarity of, 277, 282–7, 288 self-doubt of, 286 see also solidarity Gaddafi, Muammar, 151, 360, 411 Abu Salim massacre, 356, 357, 358–9 Gana, Nouri, 330–1 Gikandi, Simon, 44–5, 46, 47, 50 globalisation, 3, 17, 35, 295 Daesh as product of, 301, 302, 303, 304, 306n9 Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies, 318 Mapping Women’s Movements, 326

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graffiti, 6, 20, 413, 434 Aylan Kurdi/Alan Shenu and, 453 Egyptian revolution and, 60 Syrian artist-activists and, 439, 443 see also art Gramsci, Antonio, 83, 261, 272n31, 440 The Green Zone (Nūrī), 19, 363, 364, 368–71, 373–9, 381 Ibrāhīm, suicide of, 374–9 Ibrāhīm as homo sacer, 373–4, 377–9 Ibrāhīm as terrorist, 376–7, 379 Green Zone in, 363, 364, 365–8, 378 Red Zone in, 367–9, 372 Tal al-Yāqūt visit, 375 A Thousand and One Nights and, 369–70 treatment of Iraqi translators, 364, 367, 374 Zīrān dance, 375–6 Griffith, Gareth, 4, 29 Guevara, Che, 316 Guha, Ranajit ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, 83–4, 85, 86, 87, 93 Gulf region Gulf War, 72, 371, 449 Nabaṭī poetry, 51 overlooked by scholars, 472 sponsorship of literary prizes, 73 Hadeed, Khalil, 337–8, 340, 345n60, 345n69, 345n71 al-Hajjaj, Ibn, 68, 77–8 Hall, Stuart, 350–1, 352, 353, 413 Halasa, Malu, 414 Halman, Talat, 225 Hamamsy, Walid El, 419, 421 Haqqi, Mahmud Tahir see ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi Harlow, Barbara, 48, 278, 289n24, 357 ‘new geographies of struggle’, 470 Resistance Literature, 5, 22n9, 47–8 Harmanșah, Ömür, 295 Hassan, Waïl S., 4, 8, 168, 170, 331 Hatchouel, Solica (Sol), 130–3 L’autre juive: Lalla Soulika, la tsadika (The Other Jewish Woman) (Sayagh), 145–6 Dehodencq’s portrait of, 138, 143 Enlightenment portrayals of, 135–7 as gendered allegory, 146 grave as site of pilgrimage for Muslims and Jews, 132–3, 157n37 as Jewish Jeanne-d’Arc, 132, 144 as ‘The Righteous Soul’, 131 tombstone, bifurcated inscription on, 146–8, 159n64

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522

index

Hawas, Sarah, 422 Hayot, Eric, 101 Hebrew (language), 76, 120 inscription on tomb of Sol Hachuel, 146–8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich foreclosure of reality, 412, 419, 421 inferior civilisations as ‘outside of History’, 119 philosophy of history, 48, 408, 409, 419–20 Helie-Lucas, Marie-Aimée, 309, 319–20, 321, 327n22 historic sites erasure of in Saudi Arabia, 294 see also Daesh (Islamic State) Hobsbawm, Eric, 88 Hollande, François, 453 The Homeland (Na’na), 315–19 as ‘feminist’, 315–16, 318–19 intellectualism in, 316–18, 319 Khaled, Leila and, 315, 317 Hurricane Sandy, 293 Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā, 97–117 Alwān, 102, 110–11 as author function, 98–9 cosmopolitanism of, 99–102, 106–11, 117n60 education, views on, 102, 104–7 Egyptian identity and, 106–7, 112 Europe and, 106–9, 112 impact on Egypt, 99 Mediterranean influences on, 100, 102–3, 105, 106–7, 112 multilingualism and, 100–2, 105, 106–7, 110, 112 Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fī Miṣr, 102–6, 110, 111 Nahda and, 97, 98–9, 100–2, 112, 114n30 nationalism of, 99, 100, 102–6, 109 Orientalism of, 99, 101, 102, 107–9, 110, 111–12 as public intellectual, 97, 98–9 world literature and, 99–102, 111 see also Cachia, Pierre; Classical Arabic literature; Europe; nationalism Hussein, Saddam, 70, 72, 362, 366, 379, 380 hybridity Bhabha and, 27–8, 30 diaspora identities and, 351 image/text, 222 as postcolonial paradigm, 4, 23, 24, 28, 30

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identity Arab-American, 352–3, 354, 356 Palestinian, 32, 34, 64, 74, 254, 351, 356 as production, 351–2 queer, 340–1 Turkish, 213–14, 223, 232–3 identity politics, 13, 471 Arabic literature and, 99, 100–1, 330, 342, 351 Cabral and, 414 in Lebanon, 330–1 see also Ḥusayn, Ṭāha ideology American Dream, 302 Ba‘athist, 69, 72 Cold War, 302 colonial, 49 dehumanising, 32 ‘end of Islamic ideology’, 410 Islamist, 440, 443 nationalist, 36 revolutionary, 316, 440, 442 Wahhabi, 294 see also Orientalism idolatry (shirk), 418 Daesh and, 296–7, 298–9, 301, 306 imagined communities diasporic and resident national, 399 Iran as, 386, 387 literary-cultural sphere as, 15 immigration, 35, 449, 451 imperialism, 4, 7, 9, 12, 45, 54, 71 foreclosing collective consciousness, 407, 409–11 Middle East, impact on, 12 ‘Middle East’ (as a category) and, 3–4 Middle East Studies and, 53 ‘minorities’ discourse of, 148–50, 153 ‘the postcolonial’ and, 47 see also neo-imperialism intellectualism, 17, 313, 314–18 intellectuals organic, 20, 416, 440, 442–3 public, 60, 67, 68–9, 97, 98, 431 ‘Suzuki’ (in Syria), 416 L’Invention du désert (Djaout), 15–16, 241–52 desert in, 242, 245, 246–8, 249–50 Islam in Algeria, 243 as national allegory, 15–16, 242–5, 247, 249–50 and Osiris legend, 251n19 recovering Algerian history, 251n19 Tarkovsky’s Stalker and, 247–8, 249

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index Tehouda, 249 tension between pedagogical and performative in, 245–6 title, meaning of, 249 Toumert, Ibn, 243, 244, 246, 252n27 as uncertain territory, 245–7, 252n29 Iran as imagined community, 386, 387 as literary nation, 387 as ‘postcolonial’, 384, 385, 401n2 revolts in, 86, 88 Revolution (1978–9), 45, 354 Tobacco Revolt in, 88 translation in, 384 see also blogs, literary (in Iran); Iran-Iraq War; Iranian literature Iranian literature, 386, 388, 392, 395, 397, 398; see also blogs, literary (in Iran) Iran-Iraq War, 69, 71, 391, 392 war deserter figure, 380–1 Iraq, 19, 362–82 Communist Party of, 90 emigration of Iraqi writers, 73 Nineveh (attacks on), 293, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301 post-war violence in, 19, 67, 72–3, 362, 380–1, 470 US-led invasion and occupation of, 6, 18, 19, 362–4, 366, 367 ‘war on terror’, 19, 362, 369, 371, 373 see also Antoon, Sinan; Baghdad Iraqi literature since 2003, 73–4 state-sanctioned war literature, 69, 71 see also Antoon, Sinan; Baghdad Marlboro (Wālī); The Green Zone (Nūrī) Islam, 472–3 in Algeria, 243 in East and West Africa, 52 invisibility of (in postcolonial discourse), 45–6 Islamophobia, 18, 70, 77, 301 media coverage of, 302 see also ‘Arab-Jew’ figure Islamic fundamentalism, 7, 326, 369, 378–9, 410–11; see also Daesh; jihadism; Timbuktu (Sissako) Islamic Revival, 16, 18 Israel, 16 as binational state, 37–8 Gaza and, 38 impunity of, 253 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), 38, 259

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settlements, 30, 38, 152, 253, 269, 269n2, 270n12 support in US, 253, 271n18 war against BDS, 77 see also Israel/Palestine conflict; Jerusalem; Sabra and Shatila massacre Israel/Palestine conflict, 6, 13 ‘dialogue’ and, 64 ethno-nationalist underpinnings of, 38, 154 one-state solution, 270n7, 270n12 Oslo Accords, 30, 34, 253–4, 255, 261 two-state solution, 16, 37, 255, 270n12 see also ‘Arab-Jew’ figure; Genet, Jean; Israel; Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); Said, Edward; Shehadeh, Raja; sumūd Istanbul demonstrations in 1876, 86 Gezi Park protests, 293 see also Pamuk, Orhan Jaheen, Salah, 417 Jameson, Frederic, 15, 176 ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, 241–2, 243–4, 247, 250n8 see also Third World Literature Jayyusi, May, 378 Jerusalem, 16, 31 East Jerusalem, 253, 255, 258, 260, 269n2, 355 ‘Jerusalem’ (Shihab Nye), 474 US recognition as capital, 253, 470 Jews ‘de-Semitisation’ of, 120 Maghrebi, 130, 132–3, 134, 138, 140, 143–4, 146, 150, 151, 153 mission civilisatrice of, 151 violence towards, 130, 135, 145, 158n6 see also Algeria; ‘Arab-Jew’ figure; France; Spain; Zionism jihadism, 17, 293, 295–6, 303, 369, 377 Islamic Jihad (Palestine), 260 see also Daesh; Timbuktu (Sissako) journalism, 60–1, 98 Judaism, 119, 124, 142–3, 147; see also ‘Arab-Jew’ figure; Jews; Zionism Judy, R. A., 16, 303, 305, 306n9 Kafka, 379 In the Penal Colony, 163–5 Al Kamissi, Khaled Taxi, 421

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524 Kanafani, Ghassan, 22n9, 34, 47–8 Men in the Sun, 258 Kateb, Yacine, 246, 250n6 Keddie, Nikki, 86, 88, 91 Keraitim, Sahar ‘Mulid al-Tahrir: Semiotics of a Revolution’, 414 Khaled, Leila, 309–10, 315, 317 Khalidi, Rashid, 470 Khalifa, Khalid Death is Hard Work, 435, 437 Khalil, Osamah Palestinian Politics After Arafat, 259 Knafo Setton, Ruth, 132–3, 138 labour as anti-colonial resistance, 17, 313–14, 316–22, 325–6 forced (in Egypt), 167, 172–3, 174, 180 histories of (in Egypt), 91–3 migrant, 258 women’s, 199, 313–14, 316–22, 325–6 Lamb, Christina Nujeen, 457–61, 462 Last Week Tonight, 459 Lazarus, Neil, 5, 25 Lazreg, Marnia ‘Post-structuralist Theory and Women in the Middle East: Going in Circles’, 312–13, 318–19, 325 Lear, Jonathan Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 257, 271n20 Lebanese literature, 19, 331, 333, 343n18 women’s writing, 333 see also Barakat, Hoda; The Stone of Laughter (Barakat) Lebanon, 14 Civil War, 330–1, 332–3, 342, 349, 353, 354, 449, 464n12 Israeli invasion of, 37, 331 PLO withdrawal from, 34, 271n16, 276, 286 as ‘postcolonial’, 330 refugees in, 260, 275, 448, 452 see also Beirut liberation, 17, 288, 326, 330, 407 discourses, 313, 323, 324 as intellectual mission, 32, 57, 58 national, 312, 409–10 ‘Representation and Liberation’ (Ashcroft), 29 see also Marcuse

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index liberation movements, 47, 313, 424n13 contradictory principles of, 311 as inegalitarian, 311–12, 327n22 Genet and, 277, 283, 285, 286–7 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 309–10, 315, 317 see also Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) liberation struggles, 47, 276, 418 African, 407 in Algeria, 319–22 colonisation of, 411–12 as inegalitarian, 311–12, 320–1, 326, 327n22 Palestinian, 276, 279, 280, 281, 287, 288, 315, 322 see also Egyptian Revolution liberation theorists, 20, 407, 410; see also Cabral, Amícal; Césaire, Aimé; Fanon, Frantz; Senghor, Leopold Libya, 19, 351–2; see also Gaddafi, Muammar; Matar, Hisham life-writing, 19, 351–2; see also anglophone Arab autobiography Lockman, Zachary, 4 Workers on the Nile (Beinin and Lockman eds), 91–2 Loomba, Ania Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Loomba et al. eds), 5 Lynx Qualey, Marcia, 329 McFadden, Patricia ‘Women and National Liberation Movements’, 311–12, 321 Maghreb, 16, 137, 303 French domination of, 143–4, 145, 149 history of, 245, 248, 249 writing from, 242 see also Judaism Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 3–4, 161 Mahfouz, Naguib, 49, 71, 329 The Map of Love (Soueif), 167–74, 180 anti-colonial nationalism in, 167, 171, 172 British occupation of Egypt in, 161, 169–70, 171–4 Denshawai incident in, 161, 169, 171–2, 173, 174 Egypt’s national debt and, 161–3, 173–4, 180 elitist perspectives in, 161, 167, 169–70, 174 narrative technique of, 167

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index technologies of writing and, 168–9 translation in, 168–9 Marcuse, Herbert ‘Essay on Liberation’, 285–6 Marrouchi, Mustapha, 265 Marxism, 83–4, 89, 122, 317 Anglo-Marxists, 88, 94 cultural, 90 Marx, Karl, 83, 122, 245 postcolonial criticism and, 25, 27, 43 Tamil Tigers, 379 see also Subaltern Studies School Massad, Joseph, 5, 22n13, 41n28 anti-Semitism accusation, 4, 40n17 Desiring Arabs, 329–30, 340, 343n9 eulogy for Said, 265 Matar, Hisham, 19, 349, 356–60 Anatomy of a Disappearance, 357 father’s disappearance, 356, 358 In the Country of Men, 356, 357 Jaballa Matar (father), 356, 358 Pulitzer Prize, 356, 361n17 recovering Libya’s history, 358–9, 360 relationship with father, 357, 359 relationship with Libya, 357–8 repression under Gaddafi, 356–9 The Return, 349, 356–8, 360 Mattar, Karim, 351–2 Mayblin, Lucy, 448 Mbembe, Achille, 16, 303, 305, 306n9, 455, 462 Mehrez, Samia Translating Egypt’s Revolution, 414, 421–2 Memmi, Albert, 242, 317 Merkel, Angela, 453 as ‘Mama Merkel’, 454 ‘Middle East’ (as construct), 7, 8, 18, 463, 471 as emblem of violence and unreason, 295 etymology of term, 161 ‘Greater Middle East’, 4, 21n4, 449, 465n22 as problematic construct, 3–4, 79 as resistive mode of identification, 471 Middle East Studies, 4, 8, 11, 12, 22n20 Comparative Literature and, 48, 54 postcolonialism and, 45–6, 48, 53, 54, 472 Said and, 37 see also ‘postcolonial Middle East’ minorities (ethnic and religious), 13, 46, 53, 150 colonial ‘minorities-rescue’ discourse, 121, 144, 147, 148, 149–50, 153 as fifth column, 132, 144–5

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Mitchell, Timothy, 163, 168 Mohammed, Ossama ‘The Thieves’ Market’, 414–17 Morayef, Soraya, 417–18 Morocco, 143, 242 Judeo-Muslim culture of, 130–3, 145–6 Muslim Moroccans, 131–3 see also Hatchouel, Solica (Sol) Morton, Stephen, 5–6, 13 Mubarak, Hosni fall of, 417 as ‘father’ of nation, 411 regime of, 161, 178–9, 412 Mufti, Aamir, 157n42 ‘Auerbach in Istanbul’, 36 Forget English, 111, 168 Muller, Benjamin, 451 multiculturalism, 408, 410 multilingualism, 100, 101–2; see also Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā Munif, Abdulrahman, 69, 474, 457–61, 462 music, popular, 20 in Egypt (prior to Revolution), 413, 417 in Timbuktu (Sisssako), 303 in Watch Out for Zouzou (El-Imam), 416 see also artist-activists, Syrian Mustafa, Nujeen life-narrative of, 20, 447 My Name is Red (Pamuk), 14, 213, 215, 216, 217–32, 233–4 absent text in, 218, 219–20, 221 as allegory, 233 berzah perspective in, 230–1 blasphemy in, 217, 218–19, 221–2, 223 dissident modes in, 218 meddah figure in, 225–6 Mir’aj scene in, 230 narrative strategies in, 218, 220, 229, 231 novelising the image in, 224–5, 228 objects as symbols in, 226–8 as recouping Ottoman cosmopolitanism, 220, 232, 234 religious and secular authority (din ü devlet) in, 215, 218–19, 221–2, 223, 232–3 synchronic aspect of, 218, 219–20 as transnational, 229, 232, 233 ‘third pen’ synthesis in, 229 ‘two pens’ theory in, 221–2, 223–4, 228–9 see also Pamuk, Orhan Nabulsi, Karma, 470 Nahda (Arab cultural renaissance), 12, 13, 48 French influence on, 97–8 see also Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā

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526 Naimou, Angela, 450 Na’na, Hamida see The Homeland (Na’na) Naqqash, Samir, 75–6 nationalism, 36 Arabic literature and, 329, 330, 331 anti-imperial, 12, 140 Egyptian, 92, 93, 161, 418 as prelude to totalitarianism, 411–12 Turkish Republican, 231–2 women and, 187–8, 319–22 see also Arab-Jew figure; Daesh (Islamic State); Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā; The Map of Love (Soueif); Zionism Negm, Ahmed Fuad, 419 neocolonialism, 411–12 ‘theatre of normality’ and, 413–14, 420 neo-imperialism, 5, 6, 9, 18 neoliberalism, 302–3, 412 neo-Orientalism, 19 Judeo-Muslim relations and, 118 framing Middle East post-9/11, 13, 20, 160, 331, 449 Nineveh see Iraq Nūrī, Shākir see The Green Zone (Nūrī) obituaries for Ibrahim Abu Lughod (Said), 263 for Said (Bhabha), 28 see also eulogies occupation of Afghanistan, 6, 38 of Egypt, 13, 104, 160–82, 183, 187, 189–90 of Iraq, 6, 19, 38, 69–73, 362–82 Israeli, 6, 16, 30, 34, 38, 58, 74, 253–4, 255–6, 260–1, 265, 268, 270n13, 277, 278–81, 288, 355 of Lebanon, 330 occupier/occupied dialectic, 363, 423 Omareen, Zaher, 414 Orientalism, 12, 13, 14, 472 British colonial government in Egypt and, 165 digital, 385, 391–2, 396, 398 Hegelian, 408–9, 420 images of Arabs and, 331, 354 world literature and, 97–117 see also Arabic literary studies; ‘Arab-Jew’ figure; Orientalism (Said); Pamuk, Orhan, postOrientalism; Said, Edward Orientalism (Said) critiques of, 25–7, 29–30 ‘The personal dimension’ in, 32

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index Orsini, Francesca ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’, 100 Ottoman Empire, 126 censorship in, 428 fall of, 152, 173 women in, 186, 189, 194 see also cosmopolitanism; My Name is Red (Pamuk); Pamuk, Orhan; Turkey Owen, Roger, 161–2 Palestine, 16, 19, 253–6, 257–61, 263, 268–9, 275–7, 448, 449, 470 British mandate in, end of, 428–9 Declaration of Independence (1988), 269 as emblem of Arab condition, 429 Israeli violence, effects of, 38, 259–60 Nakba (al-naqba), 34, 41n18, 152, 257–8, 265, 268 nationalist iconography of, 260 neglect in postcolonial scholarship, 4–5, 23, 24, 25, 29–30, 276 Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), 58, 61, 64 period of ‘radical hopefulness’, 255, 269 US discourse on, change in, 77 see also American academy; Arafat, Yasser; Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS); Darwish, Mahmoud; Israel/Palestine conflict; Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO); Palestinian literature; Palestinians; postcolonial studies; Said, Edward; Said, Najla; solidarity; United Nations (UN) Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), 254, 256, 275 Darwish and, 254, 257, 259, 269, 271n16 fedayeen, 260, 270, 280, 285–6, 287 Israel and, 38, 253 Said and, 30, 31, 254, 257, 259, 269 sumūd and, 255, 260, 278 see also Arafat, Yasser; Genet, Jean Palestinian literature exilic culture of, 34–5 scholarship on, 47–8, 276 see also Darwish, Mahmoud; Kanafani, Ghassan; Palestine; Palestinians; Said, Najla; Shehadeh, Raja Palestinians, 16, 287 cultural identity of, 64 representations of, 29, 32, 33, 275, 276–7, 279, 282, 288n7, 448

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index undefeated despair of, 255–6, 259–61, 266, 269 see also Darwish, Mahmoud; Genet, Jean; The Homeland (Na’na); Khaled, Leila, Palestine; Shehadeh, Raja; solidarity; sumūd (steadfastness) Palmyra see Daesh Pamuk, Orhan, 14 ‘archival mode’ of, 213, 215, 219–20, 221, 228–9, 234 author-figures of, 216–17, 231 blasphemy and, 217 dissident modes of writing of, 218, 222, 229, 233 as global author, 218 Istanbul and, 71, 232 literary innovations of, 215, 232 literary modernity (Turkish) and, 214, 215, 222, 230, 233, 235n21 Orientalism and, 214, 232, 233–4 Ottoman Decline Paradigm and, 214–15, 221 Ottoman legacy and, 213–15, 217, 219, 220, 231, 232, 233–4 secular modernity and, 213, 215, 217, 219, 220–1, 222, 233 textual production themes of, 213, 216–17, 219–20, 222, 229 Turkishness and, 213–14, 233 The White Castle, 213, 215, 217 writer manqué trope, 216, 223 see also My Name is Red (Pamuk); postOrientalism Pape, Robert, 379 Persian, 109, 384, 394, 399 poetry, 60 modern Arabic, 48, 52 pre-modern Arabic, 77–8 Romantic, 46, 126 sukhf, 77–8 see also Darwish, Mahmoud; Gulf Region politics of language Antoon and, 75–6 ‘postcolonial Middle East’, 3–21, 463, 467–74 and Ahdaf Soueif, 58 and diaspora, 350 as disciplinary dialogue, 45–8, 53–4 Lebanon’s status within, 330 Palestine’s place within, 276 as postcolonial space, 140 and refugee populations, 448–9 as region, 3–5, 65, 161, 448–9 and Said, 31–9 and Sinan Antoon, 68, 79

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and subalternity, 83–95 see also ‘post/colonial Modernity’; postcolonial studies; Middle East Studies; ‘Middle East’ (as construct) ‘post/colonial modernity’, 8–10, 12, 15, 18, 21, 22n20, 78–9 postcolonial studies, 3–22, 23–4, 186, 331, 413 Anglocentrism of, 24, 30 criticism of, 25, 27, 43 Holy Trinity of, 27 Islam and, 45–6 Middle East and, 23, 24, 30, 37, 38–9 Nakba and, 31 new genealogy for, 23–4, 31–7, 39, 472 Otherness and, 46 Palestine and, 4–5, 23, 24, 28, 29–30, 31, 37, 38, 276–7 Said and, 23–42 status of, 23–4 see also postcolonialism; postcolonial theory postcolonial theory, 78–9 Anglocentrism of, 44 Arabic studies and, 43–56 ‘death’ of, 44–5 as ‘peace dividend’, 44 see also postcolonialism; postcolonial studies postcolonialism as academic field, 45 as period of literary history, 46 as political project, 5–6, 47 as problematic term, 5–6 as reinforcing logic of empire, 50 as umbrella label, 5–6, 46 see also anglophone academy; Middle East Studies; postcolonialism; postcolonial studies postOrientalism, 232–3 Prince, Mona Revolution is My Name, 417 print culture as ‘public sphere’, 98, 102, 110 fostering innovation, 101, 103 see also censorship propaganda, 412 Ba‘athist, 78 Egyptian governmental, 417, 421 protests, 86 Egypt and, 61, 413–14 Egyptian Revolution and, 59, 61 subalternity and, 86, 88, 90, 91–2 see also Turkey

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528 publishing on demand, 397 online v. print, 389, 397 queerness, 329–46; see also Butler Judith; sexuality; The Stone of Laughter (Barakat) Rabin, Yitzhak, 254 Raymond, André Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 87, 89 refugees artists in solidarity with, 453 biopolitical response of Europe to, 450–2 Mediterranean and, 455–6 necropolitics and, 455–6, 461, 462 Orientalist ideology and, 449–50, 451, 458–9, 461 as product of ‘failed states’, 448–9, 461 refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe, 446–57, 458–9, 461–3 treated as ‘exceptional’, 20, 452–63 religion gender and, 195, 311 Ḥusayn’s views of, 105–6, 112 Lebanese civil war and, 330–1 peasant revolts and, 89 postcolonial scholarship and, 472–3 ‘security’ as, 369 see also ‘Arab-Jew’ figure; Islam; Jews; Judaism resistance cultural, 412, 414, 427–8, 429, 431 ‘paradoxical colonisation’ of, 407, 411–12, 416–17, 423 writing as, 59, 60–1, 71–3 see also anti-colonial resistance revolution popular culture and, 407–26 revolutionary aesthetics, 407–20 revolutionary discourse, 20 Rijke, Alexandra, 278–9 Robbins, Bruce, 36, 42n35 Rosetta Stone, 108 Sabra and Shatila massacre, 275, 271n16 Said, Edward, 23–42 After the Last Sky, 28, 33–5, 41n28, 275, 278 break with Arafat, 254 Covering Islam, 45 Culture and Imperialism, 23, 31–2, 35 death of, 254

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index disavowal of ‘Postcolonial Studies’, 23, 24 embodying Palestinian nation, 254, 255, 259 exilic consciousness of, 11, 23, 24, 26, 30–4, 68 humanism of, 23, 25, 26–7, 36, 37 misreading and misappropriation of, 23, 24, 25–30 Nakba and, 31, 33, 34–5, 38 ‘On Mahmoud Darwish’, 267 one-state solution and, 38 optimism of, 261 Oslo Accords, rejection of, 38, 254, 261 Palestinian identity of, 26, 28, 31, 34 as Palestinian intellectual, 31, 33, 36, 40n17 on Palestinian resistance, 28, 29–30 The Question of Palestine, 37 ‘Reflections on Exile’, 26, 35–6, 449 Reflections on Exile, 35 Representations of the Intellectual, 35, 68 ‘Representing the Colonized’, 407, 408–10 representing ‘radical hope’, 255, 256–7, 269 see also Ahmad, Aijaz; Ashcroft, Bill; Bhabha, Homi; contrapuntalism; Darwish, Mahmoud; eulogies; obituaries; Orientalism; Orientalism (Said) Said, Najla, 352 accepting Arab identity, 354, 355 L’Étranger (Camus) and, 354 influence of Edward Said (father), 352, 353–4 Looking for Palestine, 352, 353, 355, 356, 360 multi-faceted identity of, 352, 353, 355–6 as ‘Other’ in US, 352–3, 354 Palestine, 352 sense of being ‘Palestinian’, 356 September 11 attacks (2001), 355 visiting Palestine, 354–5 Salaita, Stephen, 4, 40n17, 289n21 Salama, Mohammad, 174 Saleh, Yassin al-Haj, 438 Salih, Tayeb, 49–51 Season of Migration to the North, 49–50 Salti, Rasha ‘A Letter to a Friend’, 264 Sanbar, Elias, 279, 280 Saudi Arabia Al-Baqi Cemetery, 294 destruction of historic sites in, 294 Wahhabism, 97, 294

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index Sayagh, Saïd L’autre juive: Lalla Soulika, la tsadika (The Other Jewish Woman), 145–6 Schulze, Reinhard, 92, 93 secular humanism see Said, Edward secularism in Pamuk’s writing, 214, 217, 221, 222, 226, 231, 232 of postcolonial critics, 45–6 Said’s, 36 security ‘security paradigm’, 449–50 US politics of (in Iraq), 369–73 Seigneurie, Ken, 339 Senghor, Leopold, 317, 410, 418 September 11 attacks (2001) (effects of), 4, 331 on Arabs and Muslims, 58, 218, 349, 353, 355 on postcolonial theory, 6, 43, 44 securitisation, 449–50, 451 settler-colonialism in the US, 77, 79, 202 sexuality, 15, 17, 329–30, 332–46 as ‘taboo’ in Arabic literature, 329 see also Butler, Judith; queerness; The Stone of Laughter (Barakat) Shaw, George Bernard, 160 Shehadeh, Raja, 16, 277–82 Al-Haq, 278, 281, 290n45 demoralisation of, 281 nightmares of, 280 self-doubt of, 279–80 The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank, 277, 278–82 The West Bank and the Rule of Law, 281 use of love, 16, 277–8, 282, 287 see also sumūd (steadfastness) Shlaim, Avi, 37 Shohat, Ella, 5, 8 Sissako, Abderrahmane Bamako, 330 see also Timbuktu (Sissako) Smith, Sidonie, 456 social justice, 65, 456 social media in Iran, 385, 387, 388–9, 393 as revolutionary tool, 19, 442, 385, 401 Soguk, Nevzat, 457 solidarity of artist-activists, Syrian, 433, 440 humanitarian, 275–6, 277, 279–81, 283, 287–8 liberationist, 277, 282–7, 288

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as love, 277–8, 282–8 metropolitan, 276–7, 286 with Palestine, 16, 64, 66n14, 254, 255, 256, 275–92 ‘politics of justice’, 287 ‘postcolonial’, 470 with refugees, 453, 459, 462–3 within the academy, 77, 469 women’s, 17, 197, 199, 318 see also Jean Genet; Raja Shehadeh Soliman, Mounira, 419, 421 Soueif, Ahdaf, 57–66 Cairo, 57, 59–60 childhood, 57, 63 critical studies of, 65n2 cultural activism of, 57, 58, 59, 60–1, 64–5 cultural dialogue, value of, 64 Egyptian Revolution, 58–9, 61 Fatma Moussa Mahmoud (mother), 58, 61, 63 In the Eye of the Sun, 57 journalism of, 59, 60–1 The Map of Love, 58, 61, 62 Mezzaterra, 57, 58 political consciousness of, 63 Said, Edward, 63–4 Sandpiper, 58 This Is Not a Border, 58 writing in Arabic, 60 writing process, 61, 62 see also Palestine Spain Muslim rule in, 46, 52 persecution of Jews in, 136–7, 158n45 see also Disraeli, Benjamin Spencer, Robert, 36, 280 state formation, 115 stereotypes adolescent refugees and, 459 of Arab/Muslim ‘other’, 19, 32, 349, 352–3, 353 of ‘Muslim home’, 202 Orientalist, 101, 165, 168, 177 The Stone of Laughter (Barakat), 17, 329–48 as feminist, 336 gender and, 333, 334–8, 339, 340 laughter in, 337 masculinity and, 332, 336, 338, 340 melancholy and, 339–40 narrator figure in, 335, 338, 340 paratextual framing of, 334–6, 340 queerness and, 17, 329–30, 335, 338–40, 342

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530

index

The Stone of Laughter (cont.) as ‘taboo-busting’, 329 translation and, 329–30, 332, 338–42 women in, 336–7 see also Barakat, Hoda; Lebanon; Lebanese literature Subaltern Studies School, 12–13, 83–96 divergences between India and the Middle East, 85–7 elitism of, 84–5, 87, 94 Foucault, Michel and, 84 impact in the Middle East, 85 Marxism and, 83–4, 87–8, 90, 92 origins of, 83 nation-making and, 84, 94, 95 Subaltern Studies, 83, 94 see also Guha, Ranajit; subalternity subalternity authority and, 93 in Egypt, 88–9, 91–2 in Iran, 88 in Iraq, 89–90 in Middle East and North Africa, 94 mosaic theory of Arab societies and, 90, 91 outdated assumptions about, 94 women and, 90–1 see also Abrahamian, Ervand; Baer, Gabriel; Batatu, Hanna; Beinin, Joel; Brown, Nathan; Cronin, Stephanie; Keddie, Nikki; Raymond, André; Schulze, Reinhard; Tucker, Judith Sudan, writers, 51 sumūd (steadfastness), 278–82 as combat, 280 legal practice as, 281 as politics of defiance, 279 writing as, 281 see also Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Syria as ‘country of corpses’, 434–5 coup d’état (1963) and state of emergency in, 429 Palmyra, 293, 300–1 Saydnaya prison, 435, 436 Tadmor, prison (‘Kingdom of Death’), 431–2 see also artist-activists, Syrian; al-Assad, Bashar; al-Assad, Hafiz; censorship; Mohammed, Ossama Syrian revolution Adonis’s refusal to support, 443 Daraa protests, 432

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failure of, 440 repression of demonstrations, 432, 434–5 see also al-Assad, Bashar; artist-activists, Syrian; The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (Yazigi) al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rifā‘a, 49, 98, 104, 108, 111 Tancred (Disraeli) Christianity in, 125 Jewish-Arabs in, 122–5 technology biopolitical, 451, 458–9,461 colonial technologies of power, 163–4, 168 of power centred on life (Foucault), 450 school-as-biotechnology, 460–1 smartphones, 389 technologies of verism, 141 transnational, 19, 371 terrorism, 429, 471 attacks in France, 118, 303 refugees and, 450, 451, 454 religious, 377 Said and, 28, 30, 264, 275 suicide-bombing, 378–9 ‘terrorist threat’, 449–50 war against, 366, 369, 370, 373 see also Daesh; September 11 attacks (2001) terrorists Arabs portrayed as, 353, 354, 355 Arafat portrayed as, 267 Iraqis seen as, 367, 370, 375, 377 Palestinians portrayed as, 33, 275 raids against (in Iraq), 364, 368 see also Green Zone (Nūrī) Ticktin, Miriam, 452 ‘armed love’, 454–5 Tiffin, Helen, 4, 29 Tillinghast, Muriel ‘Women and National Liberation Movements’, 311–12, 321 Third World Literature Ahmad, Aijaz and, 25, 27 language choice and, 242 as national allegory, 241–2, 244–5 third-world writers, 243–4, 249 writing difference, 249 see also L’Invention du désert (Djaout); Jameson, Fredric Timbuktu (Sissako), 17, 303–5 aesthetics of, 303–4 as anti-war parable, 304 banned in Paris suburb, 303 jihadists as slavemasters, 304–5

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index Tlatli, Moufida The Silences of the Palace, 322–5 translation, 11, 17, 329, 332, 340–2 as co-production, 342 epistemic violence of, 329 as trope in The Map of Love, 167–8 untranslatability, 100, 331, 340 transnational literature, 350–2, 356, 360 transnationalism, 35, 385 Tripp, Charles The Power and the People, 416, 417 Trump, Donald moving embassy to Jerusalem, 253, 470 Trumpism, 77 Tucker, Judith Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt, 90–1 Tunisia, 410, 413, 432; see also Tlatli, Moufida Turkey, 14, 87, 232 dubious ‘development’ in, 293 postOrientalism and, 232–3 see also children (as refugees); Istanbul; Pamuk, Orhan Turkish literature, 223, 231; see also Pamuk, Orhan United Nations (UN), 31, 42n38, 269, 270n13 High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 448, 452, 455 status of Palestine at, 254 Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), 288n7, 428 United States anti-Arab sentiment in, 77, 118, 353, 355 hostility towards Palestine in, 32, 77 Israel and, 253 (mis)representation of Arabs in, 32, 352–3, 354 see also American academy; occupation; Trump, Donald Valassopoulos, Anastasia, 17, 327n15, 422 van Teeffelen, Toine, 278–9 veil Dehodencq’s paintings and, 138–9 ‘double-layered’ (Faqir), 334 Fawwāz, Zaynab and, 202 as symbol, 310–11 ‘veiled ones’ (Baghdad Marlboro), 371–2 ‘Veiled Protectorate’ (in Egypt), 162, 171, 179, 180

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531

violence against Palestinians, 256, 271n15 civil, 330, 331, 338, 342 in Iraq, 19, 67, 72, 79, 362, 363, 366, 367–8, 369–75, 379, 381 Israeli, 259, 263, 278 in Libya, 356, 357 of majority/minority identifications, 13 Middle East framed as space of, 160, 295, 329, 330 revolutionary, 285, 432 sexual, 331, 332 state, 414, 433 of the state of exception, 175, 177, 378, 451–2, 456 see also colonial violence; Daesh; Dabiq; epistemic violence; Jews; terrorism Wālī, Najm see Baghdad Marlboro walls as ‘ears’ (in Syria), 431 US occupation of Iraq and, 365–8, 378, 379, 380 warfare, 38, 73 ideological, 443 privatisation of, 299, 362 ‘War on Terror’, 19, 331, 349, 369, 371, 373 Watson, Julia, 456 Wedeen, Lisa Ambiguities of Domination, 413, 417 Wenzel, Jennifer, 44 women’s anti-colonial activity, 17, 309–28 in Algeria, 319–22 equality and, 311–12, 315, 318, 319, 326 Khaled, Leila, 309–10, 315, 317 nationalist cause and, 309, 310, 311–15, 318, 319–22, 325, 326 in Palestine, 315, 321–2 registering as veterans (Algeria), 314, 319–21 see also Abouelnaga, Shereen; Arab Feminism; Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan; Helie-Lucas, Marie-Aimée; The Homeland (Na’na); labour women’s rights, 194, 205, 208n5 as central to other struggles, 315–16 liberation movements and, 311–14, 319, 327n22 see also Arab Feminism; feminism; women’s anti-colonial activity worldliness cosmopolitan, 410 of Ḥusayn’s writing, 100, 111

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532 world literature, 100 Arabic literary studies and, 51, 99–100 multilingualism of, 100–2 concept of ‘nation’ in, 101–2 see also; Arabic literature; Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā; Orientalism Wood, Graeme ‘What ISIS Really Wants’, 301–2 Wood, Michael, 261, 264 writer-intellectuals, 10 Antoon, Sinan as, 68 Soueif, Ahdaf as, 57, 58–9, 60–1, 65 Yazigi, Sana, 427, 437–9, 442; see also The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution (Yazigi)

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index Young, Robert, 25, 39n5 ‘politics of invisibility’, 45–6 ‘Postcolonial Remains’, 45–7 Youssef, Saadi, 75 Zionism, 148, 150, 152, 156n24, 159n69 Dreyfus affair (1894), 138 ethno-nationalist narrative of, 154 Levinas’s Zionism, 262–3 and Native America, 257 redeeming the ‘Diaspora Jew’, 120 Said and, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33–4, 120 use of term ‘diaspora’, 351 Žižek, Slavoj, 297, 448–9 ‘passion for the Real’, 299 Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 302–3

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