29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Issue No.562
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001 Issue No.562 |
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Thematic leaps and bounds
17-20 November, San Francisco, the MESA conference. Hala Halim dips in and out
The flight from LA to San Francisco was without mishaps: if my Egyptian passport had any effect, it was that my luggage was subjected to a "random search" -- this conducted without much ado.
In San Francisco I was to attend a small portion of the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), this being the 35th round. In addition to the panels and roundtable discussions, MESA is accompanied by a book-fair and a film festival. The events of 11 September meant a certain number of cancellations of panels and participants' withdrawals as well as tighter, if unobtrusive, security measures at the conference itself. To its credit, MESA devoted a special session to "September 11: Responses and Future Implications," as well as a "Special Current Events Roundtable on Afghanistan." Bearing in mind that there were well over 130 sessions, cancellations excluded, my 24-hour visit to MESA was a sample of a sample, really, but no less stimulating for that.
The first session I walked into was entitled "Diverse Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature." I heard the second half of the talk given by Richard Alan Popp, of Georgetown University, on émigré Arab-American journals, specifically Al-Funun, in the early twentieth century, comparing the extent of their denominational affiliations, the type of news items they carried as well as the literary role they played. Next came Orit Bashkin, Princeton University, on the historical novels of Jurji Zaydan, particularly, Abbasa Ukht Al-Rashid, Aw Nakbat Al-Baramika. Bashkin problematised the context within which Zaydan's historical novels are often read, with reference to Walter Scott, proposing instead that they should be read with reference to the Al-Hilal series in which they were published, as well as within the framework of the medieval sources Zaydan drew on for these texts. She went on to demonstrate the influence of the medieval sources on Zaydan, how he depicts landscape as an extension of the individual, the metaphors and metonymies of femininity to which he makes recourse in his depiction of key Abbasid figures, and the contemporary controversy surrounding his less than glorifying depiction of the Golden Age. Teirab AshShareef, American University in Cairo, discussed Syrian poet Fuad Rifqah's existentialist poetics, tracing the central conception of death in his poetry to the strong influence of Martin Heidegger, and showing how for Rifqah humans conquer death through hope, love and poetry.
I then attended two of the talks given in a session devoted to "Empowering Muslim Women: Legal Changes and Challenges." Making a plea for the deconstruction of legal systems in the Arab world, the main focus of Amira Al-Azhary Sonbol, Georgetown University, was the diverse and eclectic sources of personal status laws in Jordan whereby tighter patriarchal codes could be enforced. Thus, among several examples she gave, tracing also European laws, whereas the declared source of the law continued to be Hanafi, in writing the law also drew on Malaki doctrines regarding marriage contracts; likewise tribal law accounts for honour crimes. Anita Weiss, University of Oregon, addressing the case of Pakistan and Tunisia from among a number of Muslim states signatory to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), contextualised her discussion by asking what the rights are that are to be identified, who is to define them, and who is to enforce them, as well as the extent to which Muslim states are willing to deal with issues of Shari'a and ijtihad. Covering the efforts of the Ministry for Women's Development in Pakistan to identify discriminatory laws and to create, with various bodies, a national policy on women as well as postcolonial Tunisia's laws empowering women, Weiss also contrasted the two countries' remaining discriminatory laws. While in Pakistan the issue of guardianship is very contentious, in Tunisia it has been decided that a woman can become guardian; meanwhile, a Tunisian woman's foreign husband cannot obtain Tunisian citizenship, whereas this is being addressed in Pakistan.
From there it was a thematic leap to a session on "Archaeology and the Construction of National Identity." An interest in the connection between Egyptology and Neo-Pharaonism, about which Donald Reid has written, made me particularly keen on hearing his talk on "Muslims, Copts, and the Uses of Archaeology in the Construction of National Identity." Reid traced colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial policies regarding excavations, museums, learned societies and the division of labour among archaeology departments. Taking in the Egyptian government's successful battle to keep Tutankhamun's treasures in the 1920s, Reid went on to trace the marked interest of Copts in Egyptian antiquities and their high representation earlier in the twentieth century in Egyptology studies -- Sami Gabra being a prime example. In contrast, students of Islamic Archaeology were nearly all Muslim. But in 1936 nationalists were sorely disappointed when one Frenchman, the Abbe Etienne Drioton, who enjoyed royal patronage, succeeded another as director-general of the Antiquities Service, elbowing out an Egyptian candidate. Directorship of the Coptic Museum, after Morocos Smeika, was by Egyptology graduates as opposed to Coptologists. Meanwhile, Reid suggested, Coptology fell between different seats: there is no Coptic equivalent to Al- Azhar and Coptic is used at Cairo University for introductory purposes in Egyptology. After a short foray into Graeco-Roman studies and the Italian curatorial presence in the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria until the revolution, Reid concluded that while the marginality of Coptic studies and the tendency of Islamic archaeology to be a Muslim preserve belong to national history, Muslims and Copts have more uniting than dividing them.
The Coptic Museum in Cairo
I had missed a paper on Iran, given by James Goode, Grand Valley State University, but heard a talk on Iraqi archaeology in colonial and postcolonial contexts, by Magnus Bernhardsson, Hofstra University. Bernhardsson charted a pre-World War I stage, not isolated from the Western colonial enterprise, where European and Americans had free reign, manifested in a proprietary interest to claim certain sites and antiquities. Next, during World War I and after, came a British stage, a key figure being Gertrude Bell, during which Arab Islamic sites received scant attention, the national museum was founded but antiquities continued to be exported. During a visit to the museum nationalist Sati' Al-Husri was shocked by the absence of things Islamic. Iraqis eventually came to the realisation that their antiquities were being plundered through both the story of a foreigner caught smuggling artefacts out of the country and the stark difference between the quantity of artefacts in the Iraqi museum and those abroad. Hence Al-Husri started the first Iraqi excavation, choosing a very symbolic site. Asli Gur, University of Michigan, discussed the continued promotion of "Anatolian civilization discourse" in Turkey whether through museology or folkloric dance shows employing artefacts, partly as a permutation of an earlier nationalist concern with promoting a Turkish racial continuity in Anatolia via the argument that the Hittites had come from the same area as the Turks themselves. Whereas no one today would claim that the Turks are of the same blood as the Hittites, Gur explained, parallels continue to be drawn under the rubric of Anatolianness.
The following day, I attended a session on "The Ottoman Empire and the Great War: History and Memory." James Gelvin, University of California at Los Angeles, took Pre-Mandate Syria and the "politics of remembrance" of the Great War as an occasion to put the under-theorised term "collective memory" to the test, and question the dichotomy between it and official historical narratives. Through a discussion of apparent inconsistencies and incongruities in remembrances of the war in memoirs and literary texts, Gelvin posed questions, among others, about who determines the boundaries of the collectivity, whose memory it is that collective memory reflects, and whether, once written, collective memory becomes history. Analysing scholarly discussions of the subject in diverse contexts, Gelvin suggested that memory might be overwhelmed by official narratives, which selectively draw on and provide an official component of collective memory, but that national narratives should not be seen as monolithic either. Eugene Rogan, St. Antony's College, Oxford, delineated the paradoxes in accounts of the exile of Arab nationalists, or those guilty by association, under Ottoman rule in World War I. Exile was one of the hardships of living under the Ottomans, used by the latter to coerce support from their subjects; yet, the recourse to connections and loyalties in the porous Ottoman world by those exiled surprisingly brought them closer to the order that was shortly to come to an end.
Najwa Al-Qattan, Loyola Marymount University, presented a paper on "Safarbarlik: Remembering the Great War in Syria." Drawing on a rich corpus of memoirs, plays, films and colloquial poems produced throughout the past century, Al-Qattan analysed the many significations of the term "Safarbarlik." Invoked in the context of the war, the Ottoman Turkish term refers to mobilisation and conscription during World War I, but has also been used, among other things, to denote travel, not of conscripts, but of civilians because of famine, and sometimes exile, and often signifies "war" more generally; as Al-Qattan explained Syrian collective memory sometimes conflated World War I with other wars, such as the Balkan War. Safarbarlik's association with hunger and famine, she continued, accounted for the trope of cannibalism that goes with it in some literary texts, with stories of mothers devouring their children. But Al-Qattan then went on to outline another trope that has come to be associated with the term, that of the wedding, demonstrating how historical suffering had become an occasion for hope.
In a paper entitled "Babies or the Ballot/Babies and the Ballot: Women's Political Aspirations and Construction of the Great War in Egypt," Marilyn Booth, of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, analysed the topic through women's periodicals, such as Al-Jins Al-Latif and Fatat Al- Sharq, relying as a main source on biographies of women, such as spouses of European war heroes and war nurses, that they published. Pointing out the elite class affiliations of these journals, Booth took issue with previous scholarship's casting of the women's press as formulating and urging a conservative, domesticising agenda for women; despite the women's journals protestations that they were apolitical, such disclaimers, she suggested, were belied by the actual texts they published, not least in the biographies of politically active women they printed during the war. After the war, she added, the discussions became much more pointed, either hinting more strongly at or declaring outright an interest in the vote and linking this right to women's waged employment. Yet the rhetorical strategies of the journals, she continued, may have simultaneously and unintentionally set boundaries around women's political demands by couching them, sometimes, in domestic and service terms.
I then fast-forwarded from the Great War to the Al-Aqsa Intifada in a session dedicated to its causes and consequences. Azmi Bishara, I knew, had withdrawn from the session; but both the topic and the speakers meant that the room was so packed there was barely any space to stand, let alone a free seat. I stepped out, then stepped back in to attend the talk by Israeli journalist Amira Haas (sometimes spelt Hass), Ha'aretz correspondent, widely praised for her objectivity and commitment to covering the Palestinians' situation and point of view. Haas's topic was "Closure as a Physical and Political Weapon against the Palestinians." Posing the question why there is little resistance to the Israeli policy of closure and checkpoints, Haas admitted she might be accused of placing the blame on the victim. She then dwelt at length on the day-to-day results of the closure policy, which not only robs people of space, but also of time, making it impossible to plan anything in advance, to make it on time to schools, and so on, and described the "state of third world-ization" -- dirt and chaos -- at the checkpoints. Returning to her question about why resistance is minimal, Haas suggested the fear of losing permits accounts in part for it, as does the draining of human resources that comes with the policy and the knowledge that you can be shot at without any international condemnation.
I shared a shuttle to the airport with a remarkably loquacious young woman who held forth on skydiving, the perils thereof (a boyfriend with a broken leg), and the ins and outs of the academic job interview -- of which she had had 15 in the past two days during a conference she had been attending, likewise, in San Francisco.
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