Is Islam (or are Muslims (or Arabs)) out to get the "West"?

Now that we have been able to examine how the Arab world has been thinking lately and we’ve considered some of the themes of ‘modernising’ Islam, too, let’s try to come back to a further examination of the relationship of the Arab and Islamic world to “us” in the West. Are they out to get us? There appear to be two main opposing views expressed in the works, respectively, of Samuel Huntington and Tariq ‘Ali: The Clash of Civilizations and The Clash of Fundamentalisms.

The first view can probably be seen as having its origins as least as far back as the time of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire published in the 18^th Century. That view is that civilisations clash.

There has on the other hand been an ironic coincidence of aims between the neo-cons in the US, 'led' by George W. Bush, and al-Qaeda. Both groups actually wanted a fight on 'Muslim soil' as al-Qaeda wants to prove that the US wants to kill Muslims, generally (as well as letting its proxy, Israel, do so), as they have been in Iraq and still are in Afghanistan. The reasons of 'the US' include preferring a fight away from the US 'homeland' for domestic political reasons. The US had been warned by observers like Tariq ‘Ali and ‘Abd al-Bari Atwan that al-Qaeda wanted this exact thing but neo cons wanted it so desperately themselves that 'the US' went ahead and did it anyway.

Edward Said in his work, Covering Islam, discusses how this view of Islam as out to get the West has come about in the West. He first suggests that the West and especially the US has been looking for an enemy for internal reasons (i.e. to achieve more unity). Writing immediately after the Iranian Islamic revolution, he gives this as a case in point. He goes on to suggest that Muslims are not out to get the West and that what we in the West have taken to be evidence of this is actually evidence of a struggle within Islam. While he wrote this before 9/11, the post-9/11 struggle is merely a continuation and 'spill-over' of the struggle he identified within Islam.

He notes that what the West ought not to do is seek to control the ‘East’ as much as engage in real dialogue with it.

Clearly, this impulse to control the ‘Other’ accompanied by almost wilful ignorance may produce effects like 9/11. In his masterpiece Orientalism, based in part on Foucault’s discourse theory and also on the work of Noam Chomsky, and in other works, Said explores this in more detail while also clearly opposing the ideology of nationalism. The idea of the Orient as a Foucaultian “subterranean self” of the Occident as opposed to a real place is explored and has inspired entire fields of post modern and “post-colonial” study as well as some criticism. The cover artwork of one of the paperback versions aptly consists of a depiction of Snake Charmer by the 19^th Century French painter of the so-called “Academic School”, Jean Leon Gerome, a mere (but inventive yet still defamatory) pastiche of a purported Middle Eastern scene that poses as a photo-realistic depiction.

One of the complicating features of the question of Islam and the West is the situation in Israel-Palestine. Dr Ghada Karmi has written about how Israel must recognise the rights of Palestinians and has proposed a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Said’s The Question of Palestine and his autobiography, Out of Place, are both significant works for their rich discussion of important issues to the Arab psyche for the benefit of a US audience, cogent argument and fine English prose. He again employs discourse theory and claims objectivity is not possible in the circumstances of conflict in which Israel/Palestine is mired. He further claims Zionism to be a corrosive element in US discourse concerning the conflict and beyond. His main goal, he suggests, is to address the imbalance in the US discourse and encourage other Arabs to find ways to do so also.

The main view that he proposes is that Zionism is racist and colonialist ideology that uses religion disingenuously and that Zionists have disingenuously peddled an absurd view that there is not a Palestinian people that needs to be considered in the Zionist project in Palestine. This turns on its head the idea that anti-Zionism is racist; rather he asserts that it is both anti-racist and anti-imperialist (contrary to the Zionist argument that the Jews are the only natives in Palestine). He shows that there is a Palestinian history and a Palestinian culture, what Zionism is (and how it argues there is no other viable polity in Palestine) and also proposes a secular one-state solution to this “question of Palestine”.

Amin Rihani in the 1920s (and Tanya Reinhart for the Jewish “side” more recently) among others have seriously proposed similar solutions but they have never received serious popular support on either “side”). Rihani also expressed a desire to improve the US discourse concerning this “question” as early as in the 1920s and was also quite active in promotion of an improved and fairer understanding of the Arab world in the US. He was also uncannily prophetic concerning the wider geopolitical effects of the “question” that are evident today.

In a collection of Said’s interviews, Power, Politics and Culture, he typically advocates the secular one-state solution even more strongly in his later years as he also does in his later writings.

The 'scholarly' argument that goes to support this position of recommending controlling the East has been called ‘fundamentalism with footnotes’. It often seeks to portray Islam as having an essence rather than being the indefinite thing that it is, defined only in its historical contexts, in much the same way Islamic fundamentalists also do. The Jewish historian, Bernard Lewis is a classic example of this kind of ‘essentialising’ scholar against whom Said rightly railed.

Islam is thus often referred to in this debate as ‘inherently backward’. This form of scholarship sometimes uses the tactic of comparing apples and oranges such as the best of the West with the worst of the East, in order to deliberately draw specious conclusions about the two hemispheres to the detriment especially of ‘inherently backward’ Islamic populations.

The less ‘scientific’ approach to this side of the debate with definite political axes to grind is exemplified by the neo-conservative New American Century group. Their approach is to assert a God-ordained position in the world for the United States as al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups assert a similar role for themselves.

Fundamentalism on both sides stems from emotions of fear, insecurity, anger, despair and inflexibility and a Weltanshauung characterised by irrational ahistoricity and hatred of the ‘Other’. In the end, the debate often serves to define ‘our’ values as ‘human’ values to the exclusion of the views of the ‘inherently backward Other’. Consequently, invasion of countries such as Iraq comes to seem to make complete sense for reasons of ‘world’ peace and ‘human’ rights.

Suicide bombers on a large scale are such an obvious example of a recent phenomenon in Islam that the idea that Islam is unchanging is clearly demolished by it. What is, of course, changing is the level of some of the negative emotions in various parts of the Islamic world for clearly historical reasons. For Islamists, apparently Western ideas such as ‘democracy’ thus naturally lose some of their lustre in these kinds of contexts.

Karen Armstrong has become a noted Western apologist for Islam and supporter of theism more generally and has neatly divided the historical Islam into five periods; beginnings, development, culmination, triumph and the current agonist phase. She suggests that the effect of colonialism and the Western ideas of nationalism and modernism on Muslims rather than the effect of Islam itself (which she holds is also inherently democratic and egalitarian) has been the catalyst of the fundamentalist and violent form of Islam that is most problematic today. She also regards Shi’a Islam as inherently less optimistic in its outlook than Sunnism.

Benedict Anderson has also explored the nature of religiously inspired and other nationalisms in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Hans Küng has also attempted (perhaps with more insight than Armstrong, it’s hard to say I have to admit) to tease out the paradigmatic dimensions represented in the history that would allow a Westerner, and more specifically a Christian (as a Catholic theologian himself), to have a serious dialogue with Muslims and through them with Islam. I note with some disappointment the unwillingness of Richard Dawkins to move outside the Orientalist perspective when discussing Islam.

Yitzhak Nakash, a Jewish Brandeis academic, has written of the particular place of the Shi’a in a new Arab Islamic era first catalysed by both Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’a Iran in Reaching for Power: the Shi’a in the Modern Arab World. The book examines the games that are ongoing between the Sunni and Shi’a in Arab Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Lebanon and Iraq. It begins with a discussion of the hatred for the Shi’a engendered by 18^th Century Wahhabism in the region that became Saudi Arabia and extended also to Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain. It also examines the effects of the current Western policy of containment of Iran in the region and the situation today in Iraq. The author notices that the Shi’a political classes in Iraq have reached a unique accommodation with the West that I must add possibly isn’t well supported by Shi’a political ideology or the Shi’a masses. The author also discusses comparative Sunni and Shi’a views concerning democracy, Shi’a nationalisms in general, problems in Iraq for mostly Shi’a non-Ottoman citizens in the succession from Ottoman rule and the nature of the significant Shi’a resurgence in Lebanon in recent years.

The Arab World Today, edited in 1994 by Dan Tschirgi seems to suggest an Arab crisis in the immediate aftermath of the US Gulf War of 1991. It generally focuses upon implications for the West and various USSR successor states but a wide range of views are included. The general conclusion is that the crisis produced a deepening of fissures between pro- and anti-US camps in the Arab world. Looking back, its predictions generally weren’t especially prescient (especially Alan Richards’s concerning oil prices) but the authors’ analysis is generally interesting.

It begins by contextualising the crisis including within the loosening framework of the end period of the Cold War analysed by Carl Brown of Princeton. He suggests that the Arab states were thus left increasingly dependent on the US militarily for what are now their highly militarised regimes in the new instability of the region. That may now be a dated view but the sophistication of the military power now available in the region is undoubted despite the relative ease with which Hussein’s regime was later ousted. Nicholas Hopkins assesses the region using the kind of class analysis employed by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and finds the analysis wanting. Cynthia Nelson engagingly suggests a feminist critique of the crisis and her prognostications for the region are unfortunately pessimistic. One author sees Russia continuing to be a powerful influence in the region. Saad Eddin Ibrahim considers most efforts in the direction of democratisation in the region to have been abortive. It remains to be seen, of course, what will become of the most recent regime in Iraq. Ferghany considers the intra- and inter-region effects of globalisation as they relate to the region. Features of the instability included regional unemployment (which is an ongoing problem) and an interruption in remittances from the Gulf (also an ongoing potential threat as fewer (especially but not exclusively) non-Gulf Arabs tend to be able to take advantage of employment opportunities there). Al-Khoury rightly notes that the alleged liberality of Jordan is, in fact, quite limited. He doesn’t see the 1991 war as an historically major event. Bassam Tibi considers the deleterious effects of this intra-Arab world war on any prospects for the elusive and perhaps illusory pan-Arab unity in the near term. He nevertheless considers the EU model as worth considering in the Arab context. Al-Djami, a member of the Palestinian National Council, suggests that Saddam’s prosecution of the war effectively stiffened the backbones of the Israeli hawks and that Israel was made relatively strong as it faced a further divided Arab world but still amazingly but laudably expresses optimism for the “peace process”.

In 2005, Kuwaiti American Khalid Abou el-Fadl wrote The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. He has legal training from both Kuwait and Al-Azhar and prestigious US law schools and a PhD from Princeton and teaches at UCLA. The essence of the work is a comparative jurisprudence of two Islamic ‘sides’ and seeks to arrive at a relatively ‘moderate’ true position of Islam thus undermining extremist Islamist interpretations on what he calls the Puritan side. He acknowledges both the more ‘Puritan’ and ‘moderate’ legal traditions within Islam. He understands the rise of the Puritan views to prominence in historical periods as having political causes.

He suggests that Afghani represented the moderate view whereas al-Banna, Qutb and Rida all came from the Puritan tradition. The distinction may not be as clear-cut as he proposes but he himself, as an Usuli-trained scholar in Sunni terms, may fall quite near the meeting point between the two styles. He appears to give some limited support to the ideas of secularism. The work explains well the debate within Islamic jurisprudence of the two invested sides.

El-Fadl explores the history of the Wahhabi ideology and its linkages with modernist thinkers such as ‘Abduh. He also has a provocatively titled section, What all Muslims Agree on, in which he explores the attitude of Muslims to the sources of Islamic law, just government and law, rights of resistance against unjust government, democracy and women. The cleavages, he suggests, are not predominantly over the sources per se but over the uses to which they are put. The Puritans are, in essence, not willing to allow law to be derived from the sources by any kind of analogy, he says, or even any consensus of the scholars or legal authorities that were not actually alive in the time of the Prophet.

So whether 'they' hate the West or not there is certainly significant internal division that may easily be confused with a state of being out to get the West but should not be. The state of Afghanistan today, though, is relevant to how the West is being viewed. In 2007, Dr Sima Samar, the human rights ‘watchdog’ (the Independent Human Rights Commissioner/Chairperson) in Afghanistan, former deputy president and a medical doctor gave a lecture to a Politics Society meeting at the University of Sydney on the conditions of women and human rights in her country. She went into exile under the Marxist government in 1978 and returned to her country post-Taliban (i.e. post-2001). She is also the human rights ‘watchdog’ in Sudan so she clearly has some monumental challenges on her plate.

She explains the context of the current situation beginning with the 1978 Marxist government by coup d’état and its call to the Soviets that led to their 1979 invasion and anti-religion and anti-landowner government. This, of course, met with violent reaction region-wide in the further context of a recently Islamising Middle East and Talibanising (‘brain washing’) Pakistani madrasa system. The movement for the Islamic polity that was thus set into motion, she says, was anti-woman. She notes that most of the humanitarian NGOs had been forced out by 1992. When the Soviets were defeated, the mostly Arab mujahidin that had until then been supported by the West then essentially left the young local Taliban fighters to continue the jihad alone. The idea Dr Samar stressed was that the West helped break her country so they essentially bought it but nevertheless piked out and left it in the parlous state that ended in the anti-woman Taliban regime beginning in Kandahar in 1994 (incidentally the name Kandahar is a local form of Alexandria - the city was established in Hellenistic times and thus named for Alexander. Iskander is a Persian form of Alexander, too). I understand Dr Samar's current view is that the West has now done enough damage and should just leave. The West, of course, became most concerned for the women again after 9/11/2001.

The Taliban promised peace but soon disappointed. Women, of course, were not allowed to be educated or hardly even to speak and the imposition of the Burka and the severest of punishments is well known. The Arab hijackers of 9/11 were trained in Talibani Afghanistan and the US and others invaded the very type of regime whose beginnings it supported against the USSR. Would it make the same mistakes again? Surely it had a responsibility now not to repeat that mistake.

The US invasion, of course, is unfinished business but the first interim government and the US put Dr Samar in her current role. She claims to have been since working with some success to make herself unpopular by continuing to expose the “wound” of ongoing human rights abuses in Afghanistan. She said she believed she still had the support of President Karzai.

The primary issue she has faced has been the Western stink of the concept of human rights. She asserts that Islam nevertheless ought to be concerned with them. Thus her theme has been the creation of a human rights commission that suits Afghanistan and Islam despite its Western stink. With advertising and school curriculum reform attempts, she has attempted to educate the general population and children about the idea of basic rights. While this is ongoing, she emphasised, there is a role for the international community in bringing about an actual rule of law, law enforcement, good governance, a fair judiciary, support for her commission and security.

The major current ideological deficits have produced persistent inequalities based on race and sex in overall impecunious circumstances at the best of times. The absence of a social security safety-net has led to children still forced either to work, starve or attend madrasas so that they might be fed – only one option is viable for any given child. For the moment, Dr Samar sees work as the least of these three evils. Strangely, this form of equality - of children with their parents - is currently acceptable in today’s Afghanistan. This should serve as a reminder that much in the way of resources is still needed from the West; health services are among the things in most distress. Women only receive any protection in the large cities due to the security situation as at 2007 [this has probably since worsened]. There, but only there, they could usually receive an education, exercise some freedoms and unveil somewhat.

Besides advocating the reforms above, the role of the commission has been to independently witness compliance or otherwise in the country generally with international human rights-related treaties including those concerning the rights of women, children and the disabled and concerning the institution of a just penal system. Some of the women’s rights are also provided for directly in the constitution. One strategy in advertising that aims to promote more respect for women is, remarkably, to remind Afghani men that their mothers are women. To an extent, the commission also has a role in highlighting successes in the penal system but must report on abuses. Prison visiting is one of the means of establishing the success or otherwise of reforms. Practices are improving somewhat and are somewhat more regularised with less open use of torture evident than previously. Advertising of particularly egregious abuses in local media has apparently proved effective. The commission also reports on governance, miscarriages of justice and security concerns. It has sought to emulate the South African truth and reconciliation model to some extent but punishments and justice have been demanded. The commission was (in 2007) establishing the facts of atrocities related to around 84 mass grave sites.

So what is the situation in summary and what must be done? The story is of lacks of resources, good governance, justice, rule of law, law enforcement, security and women’s empowerment, conditions generally in most of the country and access to health services. Limited improvements in some areas for women and in prison practices are the success stories. Even the participation of women in the government remains tokenistic, according to Dr Samar. The international community broke it, she says, so they bought it for a while yet (they should also, of course, allow the Afghans a degree of autonomy). As I mentioned above, her attitude may have since hardened against the continuing direct involvement of the West in Afghanistan. She argued that the US has produced a double threat of opium dependence and the Taliban which it must now deal with and that women should be encouraged more to be employed in government in order to restore sanity to the nation. Quality and quantity of education must be ramped up to promote empowerment for the entire nation (but especially for women).

That's a little of the flavour of the inputs into answering the question I've posed in the title of today's post. The answer requires more posts (as I mentioned in the last post) so they will be forthcoming soon.

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.