Cartoons in the Arab World

So how does the typical man (and woman) in the Arab street absorb the ideas of the Nahda? Many do it via cartoons (many, of course, read much more than that)!

As in Western history, cartoons have played a role in political life in the Arab world, too, and I’m not just talking about Danish cartoons. Arab cartoonists also contribute to the political discourses of their countries and the Arab world generally. As a result, various Arab governments have censored Arab cartoons and harassed Arab cartoonists as they currently censor other political speech and harass other political actors. Much of the content of the cartoons is critical of cosy relationships between Arab governments and the US (especially in the Bush era) and suggests US hypocrisy in its foreign relations (along with Israeli interest in hegemony in Greater Palestine).

Abu Mahjoob is the pen name of a well known Palestinian cartoonist, Emad Hajjaj whose work (some in English) can be seen at: www.mahjoob.com and in the London based Al-Quds al-‘Arabi newspaper. Here’s a recent example of his work suggesting some dissatisfaction with the current US leadership’s ‘action’ on new Israeli settlements:

He also suggests that Arabs have effectively been the meat in the sandwich in the long-running hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US culminating but not ending in the invasion and effective looting of Iraq. Here’s a comment on the Danish cartoons controversy (in English):

Sorry, I don't have any pictures of Jesus with a bomb in his robe so you'll just have to imagine them.

That concludes my series on the Nahda. For the next several posts I will be discussing how all of the Muslim and other debates I have been referring to in all the earlier posts affect the West. I begin with the question are Muslims (or are Arabs) just simply evilly 'out to get the West'? In attempting to pull together the results of the debates that attempt to answer the question, I include both Western and Arab and Muslim debates. I begin with the Arab and Muslim debates to explore what they may reveal. The Western debates are essentially historical so I end this next series with discussion of the Ottoman legacy, oil and individual modern histories of Arab and Islamic Middle Eastern polities in order to arrive at a suggested final answer.

"Identity"

The upshot of all of the Nahda debate is that Arabs were debating and deciding upon their very identity and the various loyalties that they might owe. In discussing nationalism and other debates in the recent posts, I have indicated various potentially conflicting identities and loyalties that had become clear including local, regional, sectarian, tribal, state-based, Pan-Arab and pan-Islamic ones. How they might be reconciled and on what basis was obviously an important question for the Arab world.

The most widely considered conflict among the Arabs was that between the nation-states that had been formed in various circumstances and the ideas of pan-Arabism. A diversity of circumstances was recognised but also a common national feeling, language (at least among educated Arabs), culture and (for the most part) the common religion of Islam as a cultural substructure. Against that, I must consider two strong trends that were evident from at least the 1930s: that of a greater Syrian nationalism and Egyptian nationalism.

Syrian nationalism produced the Parti Populaire Syrien founded by Antun Sa’ada in 1932. Syria (as defined by the party) was viewed as a nation separable from the Arab nation with a long history (some of it pre-dating Islam) and common consciousness of its own. That nation essentially encompassed modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. The unity of these then and currently separate ‘nations’ was thus seen as natural in those circumstances. Independence, secularism and social and economic reforms were all central to the party platform initially. After 1945 the party adopted the view that Syrian political unity should be viewed as a stage on the path to a greater Arab unity. The relevance of this party’s political ideas has since waned significantly.

Egyptian nationalism was perhaps reignited in 1938 by the publication of Taha Hussayn’s The Future of Culture in Egypt. The essence of it appears to be that Egypt retains a separate identity from Arab identity as part of a broader Mediterranean civilisation area, that it has drawn inspiration in particular from Classical Greek civilisation from ancient times, that its religion, geography, Arabic language and history is distinctive and that national feeling is directed to Egypt and is inclusive of both Muslims and Christians. While Islam is the major national religion, subscription to it is nevertheless not viewed as a national imperative and a secular form of state is therefore seen as preferable. Egyptian Arabic was considered important to the soundness of Egyptian national life. It was equally important that Arabic learn to absorb modern European thought as it had begun to do under the influence of Muhammad ‘Ali in the 19th Century to usher in the Nahda.

Lebanese nationalism was a further division off from complete Arab unity. Even within a movement for a Greater Lebanon there was a further division between the smaller sub-region of Mount Lebanon and the rest of the region. As under the Ottoman state, Mount Lebanon had had a degree of autonomy so people such as Butrus Bustani argued in the 19th Century for Mount Lebanese nationalism, too, albeit within a broader Arab nationalism opposed to Ottoman hegemony in the Arab world.

Greater Lebanon as a historical idea that had pre-Islamic origins was pushed by certain nationals such as Bulus Nujaym and the French (such as a M. Duplain) partly in an endeavour to protect what the French especially saw as a vulnerable Christian minority in this part of the Arab world.

A modification of that political ideal was the idea of an autonomous Mount Lebanon under French protection and tutelage within a Greater Syria. The basis of Lebanese unity was said to be a unique common language, geography, culture and common interests. Proponents of this idea included Shukri Ghanim and George Samn.

Post-WWI these competing ideas, Arabism, Greater Syria and Lebanon, greater or otherwise, produced conflicts. France declared its idea of Greater Lebanon realised in 1920. The new state began as a virtual Maronite hegemony in the face of a virtually complete Muslim boycott. While Syrian nationalism distinct from Arabism more generally faded, the Egyptian and Lebanese nationalist debates continued.

On the Lebanese side, for example, Ameen Rihani and Edmond Rabbath discussed the special local form of Arab civilisation in Lebanon. Gibran Khalil Gibran expressed a different Arabist view but with Lebanon as an important feature in his short essay, Your Lebanon and my Lebanon. For Christian Arabs and others such as Michel Chiha and Sa’id ‘Aql, Lebanon is a protectorate for Christians in the midst of a sea of Islam and a Phoenician nation. Pierre Gemayyil and the party of the Phalanges proposed that Lebanon was about an irreducible entity, democratic freedoms and a special role for the Christians. Others such as Fou’ad Afram al-Bustani saw the idea of Lebanon as superior to both political and cultural Arabism (and any other ideology). Kamil Salibi recognised many problems with Lebanese unity but nevertheless regarded Lebanon as the workable basis of a common national identity. Ghassan Tueini presented another perspective. He sees Lebanese nationalism as an element of Arab nationalism that shared one culture and language but several religions and polities. He stressed that to be Arab was not to be a Muslim but it was to seek an ultimate unity (permitting political and religious pluralism) of some political kind. He sees today’s era as a new time of realism concerning what is possible and of seeking what is practical.

In Egypt, a parallel debate was occurring following the earlier themes. Husayn Fawzi, a marine geographer, regarded the Egyptian national spirit as rightly a secular and liberal one with strong links to a broader Arab-Islamic culture and its achievements as well as with its pre-Islamic Egyptian historical depth. Louis Awad, the literary critic, similarly saw the liberal and secular nature of the separate Egyptian nation with a particular emphasis on the contribution its Coptic and Christian heritage element makes to the Arab whole. For him, the continuity of the Coptic personality of Egypt from its earliest times shines through its history illuminating it. He sees the Egyptian Arab language as the unifier of this ongoing national personality which he nevertheless regards as in need of some of the ideas developed in European culture.

The Muslim geographer Jamal Hamdan discusses the unique geography and history that makes the Egyptian personality the unique one it is. Anouar Abdel Malik is a Coptic Christian social scientist and historian who proposes a special progressive and socialist role for Egypt within the Arab world and the Third World. Ghali Shukri was another Coptic Christian who regarded Egypt as a rightful leader of the Arab world but as an Arab leader more than as a Third World leader. This literary critic, prose writer, Arab nationalist and progressive held that this position arose out of the pre-eminent cultural history he saw as evident in view of what he saw as Egypt’s great contribution to Arab civilisation. Tariq al-Bishri, the liberal Islamist historian, viewed Egypt in a wide Arab context but still saw study of what he alleged was Christian and Muslim cooperation and harmony in Egypt as both edifying to Egypt and a worthy model for the remainder of the Arab world.

Finally, Edward Said contributed significantly to debate on Arab identity. He noted what he saw as an extraordinary lack of co-ordination between the Arab countries in a report on this topic and a frustration with a negativity associated with operation of the grouping of Arab countries. He saw what he regarded as disappointingly little evidence of either strategic or economic co-operation among the Arab states. He, further, contrasted this inactivity with the common sympathies for, for example, the plight of the Palestinian people under Jewish domination and Israeli occupation expressed by the multitudes protesting on their behalf on the Arab street in nearby Egypt, Syria and Jordan but also in Morocco and other countries.

He saw this virtual inaction as resulting from factionalism, disunity and the absence of a sense of common Arab purpose among the leadership and resulting in turn in unending violence and destruction with apparent impunity being meted out to the people that Said suggests each government is supposed to serve – the wider Arab nation but, more importantly, ordinary people. He argued that this factionalism was shot right through the Arab polity at every level and that it was most likely mainly the result of a “marked absence of ideals and role models”. He also suggested in making this argument that the loss of the Egyptian role model, Nasser, for all his policy faults, was a profoundly sad one as Nasser has not been able to be replaced in the Arab imagination by any potential Arab leader of a liberation movement for ordinary Arab people.

Heritage (Turath)

Having discussed all of the mostly West-inspired questions of the Nahda, Arabs were next led to decide precisely what their own heritage and history meant to them and what they meant for the future also. Was Arab history a burden or a support? What really was the history? Was modernity possible? These were the kinds of questions with which many Arab thinkers sought to grapple.

The first great historical thinker of the three modern thinkers whose ideas I will briefly discuss is Constantine Zurayq (1909 - 2000) from Syria-Lebanon. In his We and History he explores Arab attitudes to the past and another major contribution to debate was his In the Battle of Civilization: Dynamics of Present and Future.

‘Abd al-‘Aziz ad-Duri of Iraq propounded a modern methodology for studying Arab history in, for example, Historical Formations of the Arab Nation. He stressed the importance of economic and social histories, identity and awareness.

Abdullah Laroui of Morocco wrote The Arabs and Historical Thought; the Problem of History and Crisis of the Arab Intellectual on the problem of tradition versus historicism.

Four modern Arab philosophers have specifically critiqued traditional Arab approaches to learning and the resultant intellectual heritage. Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri of Morocco critiques both classical and modern Arabic thought, Hasan Hanafi of Egypt discusses heritage, Sadiq al-Azm of Syria critiques religious thought specifically and Fehmi Jadaane of Palestine/Jordan has also provided constructive criticism.

The artist Adonis (‘Ali Ahmad Said of Syria, Lebanon and Paris) has also made a significant contribution. He examined concepts of tradition and originality in exploring the changeless and yet changing natures of Arabic literature and thought.

The transportation of that heritage into a platform for the future was another special concern of Zurayq in his works We and the Future and Demands of the Arab Future. He optimistically speculates on the role of Arab agency and possible futures for the Arab world.

Edward Said (1935 - 2003) of Palestine and the US spoke on the Voice of Palestine radio station of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” in his assessment of the Arab future. His contributions to especially Al-Ahram and Al-Hayat from 1990 to his death were especially significant contributions to the debate. He especially stressed the role of the intellectuals of “speaking truth to power” in relation to both culture and politics.

Other such speculators and visionaries among Arab social scientists include Saad Eddine Ibrahim, Ghassan Salamé, Abdelbaki Elhermassi and Khaldoun al-Naqeeb. Contributions continue to be made by individuals and the Arabic intellectual and cultural press. I’ve discussed Palestinian American Hisham Sharabi’s critique of the current neo-patriarchy, Syrian Lebanese American Halim Barakat’s efforts to analyse the changing face of 20^th Century Arab society and Fehmi Jadaane’s current critique of modern blockages inhibiting progress. The journals include Arab Future (Al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi), a pan-Arab monthly published in Beirut, Al-‘Arabi, an illustrated monthly from Kuwait and The Critic (Al-Naqid) and Horizons (Afaq), both published in Beirut and London.

Debates on the Place and Role of Women

By now it should be obvious how many of the Nahda currents conflicted. A large portion of the conflict derives from the reality of the world; ideology is naturally an abstraction from the world and ideas like nationalism and socialism, for instance, naturally cut directly across each other in confused non-patterns they defy real integration. Such solid efforts to develop a civilisation so steeped in multifarious sectarian cleavages rationally nevertheless command admiration.

I discussed the feminist project within Islam in an earlier post. Now I'm going to consider how it fit into this confused but courageous Nahda context. There may be a little overlap so I apologise for that. That is, in part, a result of the confusion between ideology and reality that I've just mentioned.

Arab tradition and modernism interacted in relation to this issue from the early Nahda period. The questions raised concerned the relevance to the Arab world of a feminist discourse, a feminist vision and a feminist consciousness. The words used for feminism were nisa‘i and nisa‘iyya (from nisa‘ for women), nasawi and nasawiyya (from niswa for women) and unthawi and unthawiyya (from untha for female). An Egyptian writer, Malak Hifni Nasif (1886 - 1918), was apparently the first to use an Arabic word to connote feminism in her writing. She also went by the pen-name Bahithat al-Badiya (Seeker of the Desert) and was involved in the publication of Al-Nisa‘iyyat, a 1909 collection of writings advocating improved education, work opportunities and expanded freedoms for women, generally using the base of the originating texts and traditions of Islam. By 1923, an ‘Egyptian Feminist Union’ used the word nisa‘i for feminist in its title.

There is actually literary evidence of discussion of women’s rights and roles in what may be viewed as a feminist way by women from the 1860s but Arab men also sought to discuss this issue and perhaps to hijack the debate, whether consciously or not. Qasim Amin, an Egyptian man, published his The Liberation of Women in 1899 and The New Woman in 1900 and Tahir al-Haddad, a Tunisian man, published his Our Woman in Islamic Law and Society in 1929. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke’s Opening the Gates: a Century of Arab Feminist Writing, published in 1990 explores these issues. Dr Badran suggests there that these early men had been exposed to European societies in which women were more visible and that this led to their favouring of feminism for the Arab world. She also suggests that the Arab women who embraced feminism generally initially belonged to the upper classes of the Arab world inspired by the volatility of the Nahda period to embrace change.

These early Muslim women, especially, discussed customs and traditions of Muslim societies that allegedly oppressed women to determine if they were, in fact, depriving women of Islamic ‘rights’. They decided that religion had, in fact, been used wrongly to justify some such customs and traditions and that it was therefore in the interests of women and ultimately their families and society that women were more fully taught their Islamic ‘rights’.

Foremost among these was Nazira Zain al-Din. She gave a ‘feminist’ reinterpretation of the Qur’an and Hadith in the 1920s in “Veiling and Unveiling (as-Sufur wal-Hijab)” and determined that the veil was an insult to both men and women. It was initially controversial but the essence of her argument was that Islamic texts intrinsically provided for the human rights of women. She has simply been ignored (along with her arguments) by the subsequent writings of later traditionist Muslim scholars although she engaged directly in serious intellectual debates with contemporary ulema during her lifetime (though probably not earlier or later than this).

‘Feminist’ men focused on the contribution of the 'ignorance' and 'backwardness' of women to the ignorance and backwardness of Arab society generally. They saw the veiling and seclusion of the middle and upper classes as social inhibitors of the women’s education that would be required to overcome the backwardness of Arab society as a whole. The Iraqi poet Jamil al-Zahawi was imprisoned in 1911 for advocating unveiling. Arab men thus spoke for women on the education of girls, polygamy, rights and duties and equality in gender relations, seclusion and veiling, independence and guardianship issues and the emancipation of women through education, work and, ultimately, their participation in public life.

Women’s groups espousing ‘feminist’ ideas existed from the 1920s as branches of nationalist and independence thought and movements. They advocated unveiling and emancipation for women for nationalist among other reasons and a radical social restructuring for feminist purposes. Arab women’s journals were established in Cairo and Alexandria.

The Egyptian Feminist Union was founded in the 1920s by Huda Shaarawi as a participant in the nationalist movement. The Arab Feminist Union of the 1940s was supported by Palestinian women and there were also feminist movements in Sudan in the 1950s and in Algeria in revolutionary times. While in the Arabian Peninsula there have been less advances, in Kuwait, especially, where there are now many education and work opportunities for women, 'feminists' are now able to organise and express unpopular views. Besides local national movements, in the 1980s Nawal as-Sa’dawi founded an international Pan-Arab feminist group, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA). The group expressly opposed conservative forces that sought to limit the public roles of women and rescind progressive family laws that enhanced women’s rights.

Arab women themselves thus contributed more to the debate from later in the Nahda period especially when women’s issues and modernism were overtaken in debates precipitated by political crises in the Arab world in the mid to late 20th Century. A Syrian minister and academic, Dr Bouthaina Shaaban (b. 1953) addressed this topic recently in a public lecture entitled The True Role of Arab Women.

Some of the female Muslim ‘feminists’ such as Aisha ‘Abd al-Rahman (Bint ash-Shati), Zaynab al-Ghazali and Duriya Shafiq were still conservative. ‘Abd al-Rahman was a pioneering female Islamic scholar who focused upon study of the women of Islam and who once explained the extent of her conservatism by commenting “I am conservative to a degree that crosses no woman’s mind”. Ghazali was an activist who expressed the view that “the Muslim woman must study Islam so she will know that it is Islam that has given all her rights”. Shafiq also discussed Islam’s contribution to the rights of women. Her views can be found in her essay “Islam and the Constitutional Rights of Woman” in Badran and Cooke’s Opening the Gates: a Century of Arab Feminist Writing.

Some feminists, such as as-Sa’dawi, were Marxist. She discusses gender relations in their social, economic and political contexts from a Marxist perspective.

Feminist scholars of today include the redoubtable Fatima Mernissi. She generally adopts a sociological approach and has propounded a fitna (seduction) theory of Islam that suggests that Islam’s worldview has it that women are not bad per se but that male-female relations are problematic per se.

As in the West, the Arab thinkers discussed precisely what feminism is. Unlike in the West, however, the Arab thinkers also considered whether it ought to, in fact, be considered a Western cultural imperialist tool and therefore not appropriate for the Arab world. Thus it is a political and cultural as well as a social subject that invokes a polarised debate. There is still no generally agreed Arabic word for feminism and the idea of the liberation of women does not yet resonate with the cultural zeitgeist. The additional argument employed against consideration of ‘women’s issues’ generally is that more pressing issues currently confront the Arab. Even women such as Liana Badr (b. 1950), a prominent Palestinian writer, have written such things as “however deeply I empathise with the women’s issue I can’t give it priority in a society which is rife with social and political problems”.

Many Arab women do suggest, however, that, as a significant human rights issue, ‘the women’s issue’ deserves immediate attention regardless of what other issues confront the Arab world and further argue that dealing with ‘their issue’ is actually productive in relation to the other concerns of the Arab world. They argue that required socio-political changes for progress must therefore include changes in the status and role of women. This issue thus rates highly in the current peace and democracy debates as a relevant progress and human rights/justice issue. Others, of course, still counter from the mid Nahda ‘play book’ that the issue plays into Western imperialist hands by weakening Arab culture in various ways and by providing a distraction from other, more urgent, issues. Support from the US and other Western ‘powers’ for the women’s issue rather thus plays into the hands of these naysayers, as it turns out. However, proponents of the rights of women counter back that the very pressure of the Western imperialists itself which is not denied may be the very patriarchal model readily adopted by Arab men in the Arab world to further oppress women. This oppression, they claim, is helping to produce the sense of hopelessness throughout the Arab world that inhibits progress.

The status of women can be seen from three different graded main 'progressive' perspectives. The traditionalist would tend to see the major role of the woman to be motherhood. Reformists would promote further educational opportunities and social advancement and liberation without recommending a major public or political role for women or major legislative reform. The final grade (that of liberal progressives) would also propose major legislative reform. Qasim Amin can be seen as having instituted this trend in 1900 that has been followed by various progressive political groupings such as the Arab Ba’th Party and Nasser’s party.

In Egypt, there have historically been three divisions of 'feminists'. The first group may be regarded as Islamists and would tend to reject the label feminist as too limiting and Western imperialist. They are aware of forms of oppression that are occurring today and seek redress of their grievances by means of resort to Islamic principles of argument. They tend to see the Western model of feminism as itself perhaps even the greater form of oppression because it seeks to promote a sense of equality with men that they would argue can not exist and because, as a Western ideology, feminism is not authentic in Egyptian or Muslim cultures. In these claims they appear to agree with conservative traditionalists.

Muslim feminists, on the other hand, see the modern feminist claim for full equality as islamically valid and see UN texts concerning human rights and equality as contributing helpfully to the feminist equality discourse. They tend to agree with secularists that reform to family law is necessary but stipulate that the reform should conform to modern Islamic Shariah norms. They thus also agree with the Islamist feminist position that reforms are possible by means of the mutually valued tradition of Islamic Ijtihad (legal ‘progress’ by means of Islamic legal reasoning).

The third group is the aforementioned category of secularists. They saw and see reform of family laws as necessary but believe in grounding their discourse outside any religious bounds. They place it squarely within the international human rights discourse. They respect the right to the exercise of religion as a private matter but see it as inimical with the emancipation of women that they value.

The idea of women under the “male gaze” has been explored by various feminists. The thought has been that in Arab culture, woman has been considered a mere body and object of male attention. Attention is drawn to the ‘extremes’ of Westernised fashion and conservative traditional Islamic dress as it relates to the male perception of women (especially by Khalida Sa’id in 1982).

The theory of “Neopatriarchy” in the Arab world and its link with various earlier and ongoing patriarchal forms was dealt with, of course, by Hisham Sharabi in his work, Neopatriarchy: a Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society. Sharabi suggests that this patriarchy is evident in the family, the society and the state and affects divisions of labour, relative education levels and social and economic relationships. He agrees that women are generally oppressed in these relationships and sees the struggle to end this as social, political and representational (the patriarch and power/authority should be separated). At the same time, a process of liberation of women should occur. Halim Barakat has also had a special interest in the sociology of patriarchy. Sharabi notes that the patriarchy is especially active at the extended family level, relative equality having been obtained at the nuclear family level by means of a reduction in the inequality of local economic relations. At the state level, he argues that full equality requires a fuller liberalisation of the national economic system. He also argues for emphasis on the nuclear family and notes that full emancipation from the domination over women and families of male patriarchs requires further advances in education and further opportunities for economic independence.

Activism by women and women’s groups began to be more vocal after the 1970s. I’ve mentioned above some of the activists and groups. Islamic fundamentalism also resurged in a similar period (inspired by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran).

Artists that have explored the relationship of women and their causes with Islam include Naguib Mahfuz with The Cairo Trilogy, Hanan ash-Shaykh with Hikayat Zahra (the Story of Zahra) and Nizar Qabbani with his poetry.

The making of The Cairo Trilogy into a series of films is possibly instructive in examining the relationship of the representation of women and their issues in recent years and the resurgence of fundamentalism, as suggested by Dr Nijmeh Hajjar of the University of Sydney. While the novels were written in the 1950s, the films were produced in the 1960s and 70s. The books show the modernising Cairo of the first part of the 20th Century in all of its diversity and vibrancy whereas the films blunt a large part of this. This appears to be in response to a change in the dominant zeitgeists that occurred between the 1950s and 1970s. In the books, women and men were both allowed to be and were present in public spaces yet not in the films; men also socially dominated virtually all spaces in the novels but ‘good’ women had even become physically non-existent in most spaces in the films.

The books depict the public space as sexualised under the gaze of the dominant male. The public face of woman was thus the alma-prostitute (the public ‘dancer’). Respectable women were expected to have very good reasons for being in public spaces and their movements were strictly regulated. They were closely questioned by authorities and others on the rare occasions that they were ‘seen’ in public. The Trilogy specifically links each rare occasion of women of the households that are the subject of the Trilogy leaving the private sphere with a disaster.

The women, too, are dominated in their homes, having no opinions of their own, being marginal, powerless, oppressed and subordinate. The mother has no say in the education and future of her sons and is unable to mediate between the sons and their father. Daughters fear even the name of their father. They don’t attend a school, are preoccupied with marriage and bicker and gossip at home among themselves.

The patriarch is depicted as the absolute monarch and authority of the family. This depiction itself is a traditional model for the Arab family. Respect for and absolute unquestioning obedience to the rules set down by the patriarch is compulsory. The rationale for this is that he is the sole bread-winner and thus provider. The wife and daughters are an annex of the patriarch and his dependents. The home is the feudal private property of the patriarch and his sacred space. His deputies in his absence would be other men who would take over his reins of power.

Further, in the Trilogy, while women engage in political activism in public, this is not depicted as altering the gendered, masculine, sexualised and eroticised quality of the public space or the powerlessness in the private space. Women thus chanted for freedom that would nevertheless not interrupt the power-monopoly of men or the domination of the male gaze in modern Cairo.

Simona Sharoni, an Israeli Jew now living in the US, has written about the ethnography of the Arab women’s movement in Israel-Palestine in Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: the Politics of Women’s Resistance in the mid 1990s. The focus is, of course, on the resistance, but the work considers the roles played by women and feminists in the region in some detail. Sharoni also formed the related Women in Black movements that now exist in many countries including in Australia. They are essentially peace groups that consider war an aspect of the domination of women by men. This book also gives examples of what I’ve mentioned in an earlier post; that women’s groups have sought a reward from their men (unsuccessfully in this case) for services rendered in the liberation struggle against an occupier, in this case Israel.

Sharoni notes that Israeli women, having not had the advantage of this 'bargaining chip', are still typically restricted to fulfilling only the traditional roles of giving birth and motherhood. Abortion is frequently regarded as a form of treason. These attitudes may have origins as recent as the 1950s and were probably produced in part by the virtual state of war that has existed since the late 1940s with much of the Arab world.

The author also notes the efforts of Palestinian and Israeli women’s groups to work together (for example at Brussels in 1988). She possibly attempts to draw a long bow, however, when she credits women for the at-the-time-of-her-writing fairly popular Oslo accords, which she in turn blames for undermining the Palestinian bargaining chip I mentioned above by producing relative peace. Her arguments here may be a little limited by her relatively limited understanding of the issues on the Arab side.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind (or it might be Out of Mind, Out of Sight) is one recent work whose author I can't recall that discusses the visual representation and realities of women’s lives in Lebanon and various easily accessible fatawa websites also give attention to women’s rights issues thus giving an insight into the intensity of the current discussion within Islam of women’s rights. The novel Zahra by Hanan ash-Shaykh mentioned above appears to be a hopeful feminist critique of often grim times and circumstances for women. Work is also ongoing into the sexist (or otherwise) nature of the Arabic language itself.

Socialism and Social Justice

While the Arab world was undergoing its Nahda, the ideal of justice was also being discussed in the West and a popular form of political organisation under discussion was socialism. Socialism (of a kind) was also a form of political organisation well known in Arab history and not necessarily anathema to Islam. A programme of socialism was advanced by a variety of major parties, once the Arab countries in the 20^th Century achieved a degree of independence, including the party of Nasser, the Syrian Nationalist Party and the Ba’th Party as well as a variety of Islamist parties.

Kawakibi was one of the earliest Nahda proponents of a social justice ideal and a socialist system as his solution to the problem of social injustice and economic tyranny (Istibdād).

The first words used to describe the mainly French and British ideas of socialism and socialist in Arabic were, respectively, Ishtirākiyya and Ishtirāki based on the Arabic word Ishtirāk (for sharing). In the early Arab Nahda period, Turkish and Arab thinkers both tended to simply transliterate from the European words and the Turks still use sosyalist to mean socialist.

Egyptian thinkers especially (including Syrian/Lebanese émigrés writing for the literary and cultural presses in Cairo such as Shibli Shumayyil (1860 - 1917)) began to debate the ideas of European socialism from the first decade of the 20^th Century. Shumayyil first advocated scientific rationalism, materialism and Darwinism. He then argued that the capitalist system imposed economic and social injustices based, as he saw it, in conflict and proposed state involvement in the economy and social development and state-operated social welfare programmes as good socialist remedies.

Naturally, as in Europe, the early discussion of socialism also concerned its relationship with various formal democratic values. Salama Musa (1887 – 1957) was apparently influenced by the ideas of British Fabian socialism. He saw what he called sosialiyya as producing economic liberation and equal job opportunities. In the meantime he saw training Egyptians in democratic values and socialism within the government system as important precursors to the wider acceptance of socialist values and the adoption of socialism.

When Egypt adopted a liberal democratic system, a Socialist Party of Workers was founded by Mahmud Husni al-‘Arabi in Alexandria in 1920 recognising the democratic process. He then formed a Communist Party there in 1922 (Communist parties also appeared in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq by the end of the decade).

Further more or less democratic socialist parties appeared in the Arab world in the decades beginning with the 1930s. Anton Sa’adeh formed the Syrian National Socialist Party in that decade, using ijtima’i for socialist; in Iraq, a major democratic socialist figure was Kamil al-Jadarji; and in Lebanon, Kamal Jumblatt established the Socialist Progressive Party now led by his son, Walid.

In the 1940s in Syria, Akram al-Hawrani formed the Arab Socialist Party that was later absorbed into the Arab Ba’th (Renaissance) Party, which was founded by Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Bitar of Damascus, and thus it became the Arab Socialist Ba’th Party.

So the Arab Ba’th Socialist Party was founded in the 1940s and still exists in Syria as a governing party despite having been made illegal in neighbouring Iraq during the recent occupation administration. The ideology of the party requires that it control both economic and social policy and thus produce the redistribution of wealth and thereby social justice. Industries were thus nationalised and workers were given a degree of management control of enterprises. Limits were also placed on both land and industrial ownership while economic development was promoted.

The period 1954 to 1970 was the socialist reign of Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser in Egypt. In that period, Nasser attempted to bridge the class divide that had existed. Large enterprises (and many medium-size ones) were nationalised in this period in Egypt. This was accompanied by substantial agrarian reform, industrialisation programmes and the National Charter produced in 1962.

Today, thinkers in the Arab world tend to fall into socialist and anti-socialist camps. “Arab socialism” has always tended to adopt and blend ideas from Arab nationalism and socialism. The relationship between socialism and democracy has tended to be antagonistic and socialism has lost its appeal in this contest since the 1970s. There has also been an emerging consensus among secular Arab progressive thinkers developing that democracy and respect for human rights are in fact necessary for the revolution, for socialism and for the national unity and liberation to which they aspire. The debate has occurred in the context of a globalisation driven in part by the forces of capitalism and with the participation of female socialist thinkers and activists such as Nawal as-Sa’dawi.

Secularism

The issue underlying much of the Nahda debate of the last few posts is whether the Arab world’s governments can be or should be secular and/or to what extent. The nature of Arab nationalist thought was clearly secular as Arabs belong to several religious groupings and the idea of the nation required a unifying theme which thus clearly couldn’t be seen to unduly favour any particular religion. Science and education were considered important progressive forces and it was generally considered that freedom required progress. National education schemes were therefore instrumental in producing an ethos of secularism without ever fully articulating its nature.

More recently, attempts have been made to more fully do this job of articulating how secularism fits into Arab politics and society. The Arab words for secularism and secular are respectively ‘Almana and ‘Almani. Other words used include ‘Ilmaniyya, ‘Alamiyya, ‘Aqlaniyya, ‘Asrana and the French words Laïcus and Laicité. The current articulations pick up threads from the work of such major Arab thinkers and opinion formers as Tahtawi, Bustani, Kawakibi, Farah Antun, Husri, Zurayq, ‘Aflaq and Rihani. The three main secular ideas are that religious tolerance is desirable, that a secular national education is progressive and that, while religion has a valid role in politics and society, there ought to be some separation between religion and politics and between religion and the state (ad-Din wa ad-Dawla).

The secular theorists thus did things like critique political sectarianism (at-Ta’ifiyya as-Siyasiyya) and advocate civil courts (Mahakim Madaniyya), reform of some personal status laws and the principle of equality of all citizens regardless of sect or creed. Rationalism was thought to be the best approach to producing fairness and progress towards secular aims. The parlous situation in Lebanon, a system dominated by sectarianism, was an obvious focus of attention for many thinkers anxious to make a secular anti-sectarian system seem desirable. Many thinkers opposed to extremes of secularism could equally point to the alleged depredations of radically secular Kemalist Turkey.

Thus secular and anti-secular camps developed, each with examples of the extremes to which the ideas of the other camp might be expected to lead. It has been argued by thinkers such as Muhammad Arkoun (b. 1928) and Aziz al-Azmeh (b. 1947) that conservative religious ideologies are unhelpfully extreme in their anti-secular prescriptions. Such progressive Islamic thinkers have called for Islamic thought to be secularised. Azmeh, in particular, has promoted a new understanding of secularism and argued that secularism is necessary for any democratic order and that it has been misunderstood as being anti-religious. I will discuss further the debates concerning the merits or otherwise of Western liberal or other democracies later.

The idea that secularism ought to be a rational choice received further impetus from the events of 9/11. Fehmi Jadaane and Clovis Maksoud have contributed to the most recent debate. Maksoud has suggested that the role of Islam is not comparable with the role of religion in the West and that secularism is therefore a more problematical process as there is no institution of the church to be separated from the state. He also notes that Islam is a component of national identity for Arab Christians as it is for Arab Muslims and the peace treaty Anwar Sadat made with Israel following the 1967 Nakba has therefore contributed to a complex attitude to secularism which remains to be and must be resolved rationally. The debate continues.

Progress and Modernity

Before I begin on the meat of today's post, I want to thank Neil (the only Wordpress blogger from the sidebar) for supporting this blog with a message in his header (I'm not sure of my blogging terminology so I hope that's right). He called this blog "interesting", which is very generous. His blog is more than interesting to me and I highly recommend it. While I'm being self-conscious, I also want to remind anybody who comes to my blog that it may make more sense (hopefully) read as a serial from start to finish as I'm developing it somewhat narratively as a comprehensive (admittedly quite flawed, I expect) history of the Middle East, Islam and the Arab World and its relationship with the West. I'm now up to 59 posts of varying quality (with this one) so I quite understand if readers would prefer not to read them all, however.

I do want to renew my pledge that I am always keen to receive any comments, corrections or suggested improvements. I am aware of some of its flaws but I would love to hear what anyone thinks (please be kind). I would probably also do a lot more linking and include more images, which may improve its look, if I was more familiar with the medium. I'm not and I have a persistent wrist sprain so I am a little limited in my ability to edit and improve things at the moment. I still hope it is an informative read and may help to give context to debates that so often reveal, at the moment, the ignorance of the region's history and culture of otherwise intelligent and admirable Western men (usually). The best example of such a thing (that I regard ironically as irrationally Islamophobic given his general support for the practice of rationality) is the general attitude to Islam of Richard Dawkins, a man that I otherwise admire. For those who haven't read it in earlier posts, I am an atheist and actually want a post-religious world. I just dislike what I regard as bigotry from atheists I admire like Dawkins (who calls himself a cultural Anglican, which indicates roughly the issue I have with his attitude). That's my rant done for today. On back to the Nahda.

Having discussed freedom and the nation, then, it was natural (because its effects were all around) to also consider what modernity meant to a free Arab and a free Arab nation and whether progress and modernity were in keeping with being Arab and with being free. Was democracy progress, for example? Arabs had attemped it and found the form wanting. I've mentioned in another post that the idea that Arabs needed to be readied for democracy before it could be transplanted effectively to the Arab world (as Europeans were supposed to have been readied for it by various benevolent or enlightened despots) was considered. These were progressive ideas perhaps leaving the problem to be considered how could an Arab enlightened despot be enlightened without an Arab enlightenment (or was the Nahda it)?

The Arab proponents of progress visualised it as a forward movement (taqaddum) and an upward one (taraqqi or ruqiyy). It was also seen as a civilising process (tamaddun or hadara).

The idea of progress in knowledge and thus towards civilisation had earlier been considered in the classical Arab period before modernity became the multicultural idea it has since arguably become (whose modernity being the basis of the problem for many Arabs?) Major thinkers involved included al-Kindi and al-Mas’udi of the 9^th and 10^th Centuries and Ibn Khaldun of the 14^th Century.

The first problem for these theoreticians’ ideas taken up in the 19^th Century was how to account for an apparent ‘reverse progress’ from the 15^th to the 19^th Centuries. The next problem was how to achieve a re-reversal that was not dependent on external forces and this led thinkers to seek an internal cultural revival. Many of the thinkers, considering the society and progress produced in the early Islamic period, regarded ‘true’ Islam as the potential catalyst for this or at least not incompatible with the required revival.

Afghani, ‘Abduh and their followers discussed how to achieve this modernism within Islam by renewal of a ‘true’ Islam. Kawakibi, whose ideas about freedom I mentioned in the last post, viewed the political, economic and religious despotisms he discussed as obstacles to progress as well as to freedom.

Tahtawi, Bustani, ‘Abduh and Qasim Amin all discussed education (including of women - especially for Bustani and Amin) as necessary for progress. The putative links between education, reform, progress and freedom were naturally then examined by such thinkers as Bustani and Qasim Amin. The Ottoman Tanzimat reforms were naturally subject to discussion in the early part of the Arab Nahda as they were represented as progress but also arose from elements of Turkish nationalism and had impacts on freedoms (especially on the freedoms of non-Turks). Arab cultural nationalist societies played a significant role in these discussions.

The 19^th Century 'fashions' of so-called ‘social Darwinism’, science and socialism also played roles in the discussions concerning progress especially in the writings of Farah Antoun (1874 - 1922) and Shibli Shumayyil (1850 - 1917).

Ameen Rihani continued this new tradition of scientific emphasis and support for liberalism among progressive Arabs further into the 20^th Century. He linked science itself with moral progress rather than merely the 'material progress’ produced by technology. He argued against what he saw as the American form of progress (dependent upon the material advances produced by industrialisation and capitalism) as a legitimate goal. Nevertheless his experience of America and the Arab world convinced him of the value of some form of modernisation in the Arab world and suggested to him what obstacles to and resources of progress existed there. He pioneered the idea of progress based on a combination of Eastern and Western cultures between the two mono-cultural extremes until his time being the only two ‘options’ for progress under serious consideration. In this he can be said to have continued in and expanded on the tradition of the Egyptian, Tahtawi. Egyptian thinkers such as Ahmad Lutfi as-Sayyid (1872 - 1963), Taha Husayn (1889 - 1973) and Ahmad Amin (1886 - 1954) had arrived at similar conclusions by the early 20^th Century partly as a result of Egyptian thought already being so evidently the result of such a synthesis of cultures.

After the Second World War and the beginning of independent Arab states, the debates continued throughout the Arab world based on this variety of regional, religious and other perspectives.

The idea of Islam as a self-contained ‘system’ built for progress and as a solution for Arab social stagnation was reinforced against the secular tendency of most of the pre-war ideas for progress. The ideas of Sayyid Qutb, another Egyptian thinker and a Muslim Brother, constitute a most significant example of this trend of thought. His views are criticised as fundamentalist for their allegedly too-narrow and not sufficiently humanistic interpretation of the ‘correct’ traditions of Islam.

On the scientific side of the debate, thinkers such as the Syrian/Lebanese Constantine Zurayq (1909 - 2000) sought to rationally and scientifically (and self critically, where necessary) consider the reasons for the successive ‘disasters’ (beginning with the 1948 war against Israel) which continued to mar Arab history. He thus fell into the camp that regarded science and rationality (rather than religion) as the sources of progress for Arab society. Another advocate of Arab scientific awakening was Fu’ad Sarruf of Lebanon. Various liberal literary and intellectual journals were also significant supporters of this view (such as al-Adab and al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi in Beirut, al-Ma’rifah in Damascus, ‘Alam al-Fikr in Kuwait and Afaq in London).

The further disaster (Nakba) of the 1967 war against Israel produced yet more soul-searching among Arab thinkers. More radical measures were seen to be necessary than had previously been considered in the light of this further apparent humiliation. Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm (b. 1934), a Syrian scion working in Lebanon, produced his Critique of Religious Thought. The Moroccan Mohammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri (b. 1936) viewed the Arab thinking of the past as a burden to be shrugged off by Arab thinkers of today. Hasan Hanafi (b. 1935) of Egypt saw rationality combined with an attitude of conciliation in approaching Arab-Islamic tradition as necessary for Arab-Islamic progress.

The feminist aspect of the new Arab Nahda thinking continued to be somewhat in evidence as it had been among earlier Nahda thinkers. For example, the idea that a special impediment to progress in Arab societies in particular was a thing he labelled “Neopatriarchy” was also propounded in this period by the Palestinian-American political sociologist, Hisham Sharabi.

Also a new range of journals and other mass media continued to play a role similar to that played by an earlier generation of print periodicals. Satellite television stations such as al-Jazeera, for example, played a greater and more balanced intellectual role than has been suggested by much Western criticism and today the role is beginning to be played by internet sites. The Arab daily press and literary supplements now play a role in introducing readers to the in-depth analysis of issues via columnists once played by a more intellectually specialised press. In Cairo, Al-Ahram and Al-Ahram weekly (also published in English) play this role, while An-Nahar and its weekly supplement play this role in Beirut. Two periodicals published in London, Al-Hayat and Al-Quds al-Arabi, also play this role. Today’s rather existential and post-modern debates concern whether change is possible without progress and whether progress is possible without change. Next post, is secularism the change that refreshes?