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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 April 1999 Issue No. 425
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Past rhetorics
By Hossam Aboul-ElaHistory is always contentious, but for members of in the late twentieth century the examination of the past is at best anxious and at worst a source of pain, recrimination and even fanaticism. Taking the Islamic heritage as the most obvious case, the spiritual example offered up by the prophet and his early followers, the military prowess embodied in the conquests and victories of the first five hundred years of Islamic empire, and the intellectual and scientific achievements of an earlier Islamic civilisation all set a standard that embarrasses modern Arab society. Secular history proves equally depressing with the role of Anglo-French colonialism and Israeli settler colonialism a continuing source of debate. Finally, the seemingly intractable political, social, and economic problems of the Arab world lead to a situation in which even the most distant pre-Islamic histories of the region -- Pharaonic, Jahiliya, Babylonian -- generate passionate discussions full of desire, controversy, and polemic.
The Destruction of Babylon: from a mid-11th century Mozarabic Spanish Beatus Commentary on the Apocalypse. The horseshoe arches and stepped crenellations indicate the extent to which an Islamic aesthetic vocabulary permeated the imagination of the Mozarabic (Arabised Christian) artist who produced this manuscript illumination
In short, the past has become one of the most urgent issues of the Arab present. The inspiration it often provided during the first half of this century has given way -- in the face of Arab defeats and the painful process of Arab integration into a static and indifferent system of global capitalism -- to a wavering between nostalgia on the one hand and harsh revisionism on the other. In this milieu, Arab writers and intellectuals have taken their natural interest in the Arab past in diverse and at times ingenuous directions. The rich material by Arab novelists, poets, and intellectuals invoking, critiquing, refashioning and deploying this contentious and powerful past provided the subject matter for a recent conference entitled History as Mythical Discourse in Modern Arabic Literature, hosted by Harvard University's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies between 18-20 March.
Among the most powerful moments in Arab history are the conquest and rule of Andalusia during Europe's Middle Ages and the nakba and its aftermath in the Palestinian territories. Both figured prominently in several of the thirteen presentations which made up the conference.
Egyptian novelist and critic Radwa Ashour opened the conference with a keynote address in which she presented autobiographical reflections that illustrated the way history plays an almost primal role in the formation of every Egyptian writer, indeed of every Egyptian. Growing up in an apartment only metres from the Nilometer which provided views (on clear days) of both the Pyramids and the Citadel, the rich heritage which enveloped her as a child became a burden during life as a writer and intellectual in post-67 Egypt. The dialectic between civilisational loss and a personal loss of innocence manifests itself in Ashour's recent career as a writer. The celebrated Granada trilogy of historical novels set in Andalusia was followed by the heavily autobiographical Atyaf, her most recent work of fiction. Within other contexts this movement from historical to autobiographical novel may seem counterintuitive; in Egypt it seems inevitable.
The centrality of Professor Ashour emerged over the course of the conference in her consistently insightful commentary and critique on the work of a younger generation of presenters; she somehow managed to mentor us during the three days with complete modesty and openness. As a writer, however, her centrality to the subject matter was presented most prominently by William Granara, director of Arabic at Harvard and co-coordinator of the conference, who gave the first presentation of the first full session of the conference. Granara's paper systematically catalogued the representation of Andalusian Spain in modern Arabic writing by authors as diverse as Abdel-Salaam Al-Ujaily, Nizar Qabbani, Ahmed Zaki, Ahmed Shawki, Suheir Qalamawi, Mahmoud Darwish, and Radwa Ashour herself. But Granara went beyond cataloguing to examine the discursive history of the image of Andalusia in modern Arab writing, carefully tracing the modern attitude towards Muslim Spain from the romanticising of the neo-classical period through the inspirational nostalgia of the early nationalist period and the revisionism of the post-independence writers to the new historicism of contemporary writers like Ashour.
From Granara's general overview of Andalusian representations, Margaret Larkin of the University of California at Berkeley turned the conference to the particular instance of Ahmed Shawki's use of Andalusia in his poem "Al-Ghala" which was composed upon the poet's return from a period of exile in Barcelona and uses neo-classical poetics to critique the Egyptian state at the turn of the century.
If Andalusia represents the epicentre of Arab nostalgia, the succession of Arab defeats in Palestine since World War II encapsulates the decline of the Arabs in modern times. In the most orthodox semiotics of Arab culture, Andalusia is Arab conquest and Palestine is Arab subjugation.
Ashour and Granara made it clear that there is a less orthodox semiotics, however, in which the conquering of Arabs in Palestine in the twentieth century has made it more difficult for Arab writers to offer up unreconstructed nostalgia about Muslim Spain. The sense of loss and defeat instilled to a greater or lesser extent in every Arab by the protracted conflict with Israel has brought about what Granara refers to as a post-nostalgic view of Andalusia.
Two of the conference participants dealt with the source of this sense of loss directly. Susan Slyomovics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviewed the response of Palestinian poets to the massacre of villagers at Kafr Qassim in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Tripartite Aggression of 1956. The poetry by Tawfiq Zayyad, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih Al-Qasim and other prominent Palestinians was often composed for the occasion of commemoration ceremonies of the massacre.
The various poems examined in Slyomovics's presentation do not suggest to the reader diatribe or polemic. Rather, they point out poetry's special relationship with history for the contemporary Arab world since their very existence announces itself as a self-aware intervention in an official history that would be happy to ignore brutal massacres perpetrated against Palestinians.
Palestine and memory were also central to the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli commemorations of the 50 year anniversary of 1948 by Carol Bardenstein of the University of Michigan. Coming near the end of the final day of the conference, this overview crystallised a number of themes that recurred in various presentations. Here, as in Slyomovics's presentation, memory and time become matters of great moment for the Arab subject faced with a history that seems alternatively a burden (in the case of Andalusian histories), a curse (in the case of colonial history), and a lie (in the case of official western histories of the Palestine conflict).
The theme of time was initially raised in a much less grave context in the presentation by Michael Cooperson of the University of California at Los Angeles. His paper, "Abu Nawwas in America", both illuminated the centrality of time in discussions of history (Arab or non-Arab) and provided one of the more entertaining sessions of the three days.
Focusing on texts involving time travel by Al-Muwaylihi, Khayri Shalabi, and Safa Khulusi, an Iraqi author of a book in which the great Abbassid poet and drinker Abu Nawwas visits the United States in the 1950s and discovers he likes its nightlife, Cooperson demonstrated that writing has occasionally managed to transform the weighty matters of time and history's burden to hearty laughter.
On the afternoon of the second day of the conference two presentations attempted to wrestle with the complicated issue of turath (heritage) and its reverberations in modern Arabic narrative. While such studies have been presented in other academic discussions of Arabic literature, the true complexity of the question of classical Arabic literature's influence on modern culture emerged with a new urgency in the context of the conference's discussions of the ruptures that have afflicted Arab history. Georgetown University scholar Amin Bonnah's presentation considered the reverberations of the pre-Islamic ode in two recent novels by Ibrahim Al-Kuny and Sabri Moussa, while Sarra Tlili of the University of Pennsylvania discussed the Tunisian Mahmoud Al-Mesadi's iconoclastic reinvention of Islamic heritage.
On the final day of the conference, the emphasis switched noticeably from history to historiography in a series of presentations which proposed new strategies of reading. Ayman El-Desouky of Harvard, a co-organiser of the conference, offered up one of the most noteworthy examples of a presentation which examined approaches to history rather than historical epochs or events. Using Gamal Al-Ghitani's novel Mutun Al-Ahram as a focal point, El-Desouky distinguished the various categories of myth, story, and history and then showed how each had developed and changed over time before presenting Al-Ghitani's attempt to move these categories from the level of the collective to that of the individual in his episodic novel featuring a plethora of characters, each living out diverse personal histories in the shadow of the Pyramids.
Other panels of the last day that manifested this historiographical trend included a presentation by Eve Troutt-Powell of the University of Georgia which dealt with turn of the century intellectual Abdullah Al-Nadim's intervention in the slavery debate set off by the British as their influence in the late nineteenth century spread to all aspects of Egyptian life. Al-Nadim was a unique figure, standing apart from both the self-righteousness of the British and the defensive apologetics of pro-slavery Egyptians. His role in the debate illustrates the complexity of conceptions of the family in a changing colonial Egyptian society.
For Sinan Antoon, a scholar of Arabic literature at Harvard University, the detailed delineation of modes and meanings of repression that has been presented by western theoreticians -- particularly René Girard -- provides a useful key to reading the cultural politics of contemporary Iraq as manifested in the novel Imraat Al-Qarura by Selim Mattar Kamil. My own presentation, also on the final day of the conference, examined the deep structure of Arabic novels by Tayeb Salih, Yehya Taher Abdullah and Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid to argue that a post-67 cynicism about Arab history (based on economic underdevelopment as much as on political and military defeats) plays a role in shaping the new Arabic novel.
The conference ended with Moroccan critic and novelist Ben Salem Himmich discussing his own unique -- almost Nietzschean -- vision of history's relationship to writing. It is a vision which led Himmich to choose the notorious Fatimid Caliph Abu Ali Mansour and his 25 year reign of terror over Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Tunis as the subject for his award winning novel The Mad Rule.
Amidst two and a half days of discussion and debate about the past, the Harvard conference ultimately made a statement about the future. The vast majority of participants were of the next generation of Arab studies in the American academy coming mostly from the ranks of graduate students, adjuncts, instructors and assistant professors. Much of the vitality inhering in the analyses and discussions in and around the conference grew out of the group's willingness to break with old patterns adhered to by critics of Arabic literature in the US. Many of the papers were surprisingly theoretically sophisticated; others manifested an unabashed comparativism; still others proved willing to commit other transgressions against the established ways of studying Arabic literature in the US by juxtaposing texts from various epochs or by incorporating political or anthropological material into literary readings.
As exciting as this new comparativism in Arab Studies in the US is, it also presents a challenge. Each of the attempts to ground a study in a particular theoretical or disciplinary approach over the course of the two days seemed to go in a different direction: Cooperson to Lukacs and Jameson, Troutt-Powell to Anne McClintock and Cultural Studies, El-Desouky to Northrop Frye, Antoon to Girard and Bhabha, Bardenstein to David Wood and other philosophers of time. Perhaps the eclecticism of this coming generation indicts the previous generation of Arabic scholars and Orientalists in the Anglo-American academy who have failed to create a common language that we might work within. In any case, the current situation makes one thing clear: explaining the burdens of the past represents one of the formidable challenges of the future.
