8 - 14 March 2001
Issue No.524
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 8 - 14 March 2001 Issue No.524 |
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Identity crisis
On Identity, Amin Maalouf, Harvill Press, 2000. pp 144
A Lebanese national who has chosen to make his home in France and to adopt French as the language in which to write his books and to make his living, Amin Maalouf has made a reputation for himself in the West with such novels as Leo the African, The Rock of Tanios (awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1993), and Samarkand. He is also the author of The Crusades through Arab Eyes, a book that needed to be written. The easy-to-read translation of the present book has been done by Barbara Bray, a translator who has made available in English much of modern French literature and who was in Cairo when her husband was briefly a lecturer at Fouad Al-Awwal University (now Cairo University).With this pedigree behind him, Maalouf has written a short book, On Identity, that deals with such important issues as identity and the much talked about subject of globalisation. In it, he asks vital questions such as how is it that so-called civilised men can continue to slaughter each other with evident relish for the mere reason that their skins are differently coloured, that they speak different languages and that they entertain different beliefs about how the world was created and by whom. Maalouf's particular circumstances also ideally qualify him to deal with the tricky subject of identity.
"Identity," he explains, is what prevents one man from being identical with another. But how is this identity acquired? The popular view is that it is given at birth, and that it is transmitted by our parents. Yet, as the author shows, this in many cases is simply not so. Only too often a man's identity is determined by himself or by events beyond his control. The historian Marc Bloch summed up this thought in his words that "Men are more the sons of their time than of their fathers," and Maalouf similarly argues that one's identity can change throughout one's life. What about a baby who is taken away from its parents and set down in a different environment, he asks. Might this child not one day find itself fighting against those very people who by birth would be its nearest and dearest?
Being himself of Lebanese origin, the examples Maalouf gives for his thesis about identity are taken in the main from the Middle East and from the Arab World. He points to the paradox of being born a Christian and yet having as his native tongue the holy language of Islam. This combination of being Christian and at the same time Arab puts him in the special position of being a member of a minority, and this positioning, Maalouf says, has played a decisive part in his life, including the decision to write the present book. Yet his decision to live in France, away from his native Lebanon, has also given Maalouf another kind of positioning, and he deals in particular with the position of the immigrant who, by his own action, brings himself face to face with difficult decisions about his own identity. Should he try wholeheartedly to adopt the habits, customs and beliefs of his adopted country, or should he try to retain his old identity intact while living in new circumstances? Both are patently impossible objectives. Thus, he must inevitably make some sort of a compromise, with each individual deciding for himself what to take on and what to shed in constructing for himself his identity.
In a book such as this the tricky question of religion cannot be skirted. While blaming both Islam and Christianity for intolerance, past and present -- "nobody", Maalouf says, "has a monopoly on fanaticism" -- he makes the point that recent history shows that the worst forms of persecution and despotism have been practiced in the name not of religion but of such nationalist doctrines as Nazism. All forms of fanaticism however, whatever their source may be, inevitably create fertile ground in which some groups of men are allowed or even encouraged to persecute others. The author argues that it is a "tribal" concept of identity, still prevalent throughout the world, that permits such phenomena as racial hatred and religious persecution; too often we cling, he argues, "through sheer habit and intellectual laziness, to concepts we have inherited from our ancestors and are then surprised and shocked when these attitudes produce conflict and bloodshed."
When dealing with nationalism, however, Maalouf also discusses the growth of this in the Arab World and in the Middle East, looking at the way in which the East failed to achieve a sufficient degree of modernisation to enable it to rival the West. Here he takes Egypt as his main example, examining first the results of Napoleon's brief occupation of the country at the end of the 18th century, then Mohamed Ali's attempts at modernisation and then those of Nasser. Maalouf argues that the Arab World largely did not achieve the kind of modernisation that it set out to achieve, and that therefore it has, in a sense, become "a consumer" of western invention. The rise of religious fundamentalism has resulted from this failure, he thinks, arguing that those who espouse it see it as giving some kind of alternative identity to that of consumer, which is otherwise the only one they see as being offered them. Maalouf is, however, of course equally unsympathetic towards Islamic fundamentalism as he is to many of the present regimes existing in the region. As he says, the tyranny of a majority is no better morally than the tyranny of a minority, believing as he does in the supreme value of individual liberty.
Maalouf deals, finally, with the question of the present predominance of the West and the linked issue of globalisation. He himself does not judge this as either good or bad, yet, as he points out, the present scale of western predominance is an event unprecedented in history and that wherever on the planet one may happen to live, all modernisation now derives from the West. As a result, globalisation means different things to those born in the West and to those born outside of it. The former, unless they happen to regard it with misgivings, can in the main accept globalisation in their stride, and they can even profit from it; the latter, on the other hand, too often have to pay the price of globalisation by "the giving up of part of themselves" to western predominance, "and thus being forced into a crisis of identity."
In general, Maalouf is uncomfortably convincing in expressing his fears of globalisation, emphasising that there is a real possibility that all of us will, in the not too distant future, end up with an inferior type of western jam spread too thinly on our bread. Unfortunately, he is less reassuring when suggesting ways in which the general impoverishment of human potential and cultural diversity that come with western predominance can be avoided. While he admits that real effort must be expended if cultural diversity is to be preserved, for this reviewer he fails sufficiently to face up to the sad fact that it is the profit motive that rules our world today and that cultural diversity is not, on the whole, a source of revenue. Maalouf succeeds only too well in drawing attention to the dangers that lie ahead, but he relies too much on wishful thinking and the goodwill of those possessing the necessary clout to dictate things on their own terms when looking for ways in which the brakes can be applied.
Amin Maalouf, living now with the identity of a Frenchman, remarks that many of his friends speak of globalisation as if it were some sort of global catastrophe. Inevitably, for them, globalisation is synonymous with Americanisation, both processes meaning irreparable cultural loss and the loss, too, of a precious cultural identity. In such a world, he asks, a world that is becoming increasingly standardised, what will be the fate of the French language, for example? For just as religion is one of the basic ingredients of identity, so too is language, and in the same way as whole species of animals are presently being threatened with extinction, so too are many languages. It might be thought that one practical solution to the language problem would be for everyone to speak English in addition to his native language. Maalouf, however, prefers to see a world in which each individual would have a practical knowledge of English, plus his native language, plus a further foreign language, such as Arabic or Chinese. It is a nice thought, and it is one that would undoubtedly do much to extend certain, overly narrow conceptions of identity. But is not the author here, at least in this regard, indulging in wishful thinking?
Reviewed by Denys Johnson-Davies
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