Présences arabes
Le Paris arabe (Arab Paris), Pascal Blanchard et al, Paris: La Découverte, 2003. pp247
The Islamic world is at the centre of the most recent issue of Al- Hilal, with several articles and essays dealing with Islamic topics on the occasion of Ramadan: Ahmed Saleh on Internet Islam; Mohamed Ragab El-Bayoumi on the Sufi ceremony of dhikr; Nadia Mustafa on foreign interventions in Muslim affairs since the end of the Cold War; and Mahmoud Ahmed on Muslim China. Ramadan notwithstanding, Gamil Mattar supplies his monthly political analysis, Mounir Zahran asks whether the international community can regain trust in the
New World Order and Galal Amin celebrates Egyptian intellectual Abdel-Azim Anis's 80th birthday. The Palestinian question figures in a translation of an Economist article that attacks Sharon's protective shield policy and a review of a new photo book depicting life in the Palestinian refugee camps. In addition to columns by Ibrahim Fathi, Safinaz Kazim and Mustafa Darwish, highlights include a column by Sonallah Ibrahim.
Le Paris arabe, a record of "two centuries of Oriental and North African presence in Paris", contains some 500 images, many of them never before published, of Arab life in Paris from the late 18th century to the present day. In format rather like an exhibition catalogue, but for an exhibition that has not taken place, the book will provide for hours of browsing, some of the images confirming the Orientalist thesis of a European plot to marginalise the Arab peoples, others showing the significant roles they have played in Parisian life over the past two centuries.
The record begins in the late 18th century, with a snippet of information in the accompanying text to the effect that the Convention, true to the universalist vocation of the French Revolution, ordered the publication in Arabic of the Address to the French People in Year III of the Republic, using a typeface developed in the early 17th century. However, the Arab presence in Paris only became palpable in the wake of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1799 Egyptian expedition, following which Ancient Egyptian elements began to be introduced into Parisian architecture and the Paris streetscape, resulting in works such as the Palmier fountain at the place du Châtelet, which features a set of sphinxes, and the erection of the Pharaonic Obelisk in the place de la Concorde in 1836, presented to King Louis-Philippe by Mohamed Ali.
The Egyptian intellectual Rifa'a Al-Tahtawi arrived in Paris with a group of students in 1826, in time to witness the last days of the Bourbon restoration under Charles X, the 1830 Revolution that brought the bourgeoisie to power in the shape of the July Monarchy and the decision to invade Algiers, which later turned into French colonial rule in Algeria. Al-Tahtawi described what he had seen during his five years in Paris in his book Takhlis Al-Ibriz ila Talkhis Bariz, noting that "the Parisians are distinguished by the vivacity of their intelligence, the subtlety of their understanding and the penetration with which they investigate difficult questions."
Al-Tahtawi was among the first of a series of distinguished 19th century Arab visitors to Paris, the compilers of Le Paris arabe noting that under the Second Empire and then, from 1870, the Third Republic, Paris was "an unavoidable step in the education" of Arab writers, students, and journalists. In 1846, Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, was treated to a magnificent welcome in Paris, with a grand reception at the Tuileries and the inspection, at the Invalides, of veterans of Napoleon Bonaparte's armée d'Orient. Much the same reception awaited the Regent of Tunis, Ahmed Bey, when he visited Paris later the same year.
The French capital became an Arab intellectual centre in the later decades of the 19th century, with the publication from Paris of Arabic journals and newspapers such as Misr Al-Qahira, Nahdat Al- Arab and Kawkab Al-Sharq. Among those who lived there for a time were Jamaladdin Al-Afghani and Mohamed Abdu, editing a review in Arabic from an address in the rue de Sèze, "the Parisian rendez-vous for every kind of Arab, Turkish and Persian intellectual". Another intriguing character from this period is James Sanua, described by the editors as the "major figure of the presence égyptienne" in Paris. "Under the pseudonym of Abou Naddara, he edited a satirical publication in Arabic, The Man with Blue Glasses (Abou Naddara zarqa), which he managed to distribute in Cairo despite the censorship... criticising the despotism and incompetence of the Khedive."
However, interaction between Paris and the Arab world was not always carried out on such an elevated level: for the Parisians themselves, knowledge of the Arab world was more likely to come by way of the grand exhibitions that took place in the city in the late 19th and early 20th century, bringing the "Arab street" to Paris. At the expositions universelles of 1867, 1878 and 1889, Parisian audiences were brought face to face with "Arab figures" straight off the streets of Cairo, as one exhibit at the 1889 exhibition was called. "Born of the imagination of Comte Delort de Gléon, a rich Frenchman living in Egypt, [the rue du Caire] offered the public a reproduction of 20 Cairene houses, placed around a copy of the minaret of Qait- Bey. 'You are in Cairo' it said in the Marvellous Journey of the Exhibition," an accompanying brochure. The colonial exhibitions that followed in 1906 and 1907 introduced Touaregs, Bedouin and Arab tribesmen to Parisian audiences, designed to remind them of the extent of the French colonial empire.
Between Al-Tahtawi's visit to Paris in the 1820s and the appearance of the rue du Caire in the city at the 1889 exhibition had come the development of French colonialism in the Arab world. Algeria, invaded in 1830 and later colonised, was the first casualty, and Tunisia was declared a French protectorate in 1881, followed by Morocco in 1912. By the end of the 19th century, French and European representations of "the Arab" reflected the prevailing belief that civilisation was a European affair, showing Arabs as "cruel, deceitful and lazy... and vulgarised in exhibitions, the popular press and vaudeville shows". However, that image coexisted with another, born of an earlier Romantic fascination with the Arab world, that showed Arab figures as "refined and seductive", feeding into "Diaghilev's ballet russes with Nijinsky in the role of Scheherazade's golden slave" (from the Thousand and One Nights), which was all the rage in the dying days of the Belle Epoque before WWI.
At around this time, too, a further form of Arab imagery began to appear in the French capital in the form of popular book illustration, children's books, and various forms of commercial ephemera featuring Arabs, including advertising. Bedouin figures had been used to sell cigarettes and carpets from the 1860s onwards (Imperiale Maden, Araks), but soap was now also sold in this way, drawing on associations with oriental perfumes. Cheap postcards and children's books began to draw on Arab figures, with postcards showing "Mysterious Africa: Moroccans at a café" and the books of Louis Boussenard recounting the adventures of a "Paris kid" in Morocco. On the other hand, at the Paris Hippodrome exhibitions of Arab horsemen from the Sahara could be seen, and Arab motifs, such as arabesques, began to find their way into Parisian domestic architecture.
There had already been a significant population of Algerian workers in Paris before WWI, and the war itself saw their numbers rise, Algerian and other North African troops also making a significant contribution to France's war effort. Around 40,000 North African workers entered France on fixed-term contracts in 1920, in Paris mostly settling in the Goutte d'Or district in the 18th arrondissement, which remains a centre of Arab cultural life. However, this influx also began to lead to tensions, and nationalist ideas began to spread among the capital's Arab population, making Paris, for a time, a centre of Arab nationalism: not only were movements for the independence of the Maghreb countries based in Paris, such as Messali Hadj's Etoile Nord- Africaine, founded in 1926, but Salaheddine Bitar and Michel Aflak, among the founders of the Ba'th, worked in Paris in the 1930s.
Le Paris arabe contains fascinating material from the period after WWII, showing the ways in which the Algerian war of independence from France was lived among Paris's Arab populations and the consequences of the immigration into France that followed. During the 1960s, the labour needs of French industry, then still experiencing the post-war boom, meant that immigration from Algeria, in particular, to France presented few difficulties: the 1962 Evian Accords that marked the end of the Algerian war in any case guaranteed free circulation between France and Algeria. However, with the end of the boom years in the early 1970s, legislation was introduced to prevent further immigration, and economic crisis brought with it the beginnings of an extreme-right political discourse determined to blame immigrants for France's economic troubles. This discourse, growing through the 1980s and 1990s, has not hesitated to identify France's population of Arab origin with unemployment, crime and international terrorism.
Finally, the editors of the present book conclude their survey of the Arab contributions to the French capital with images taken from the last decade or so of Parisian life. There are, for example, images of the 1998 French national football team, winners of the world cup and including many players of North African origin, of Djamel Debbouze, a comedian, of the rai singers Khaled, Rachid Taha and Faudel and of multi-cultural popular districts of the capital, such as Clichy, Belleville and Pantin. However, there are also more sombre images, illustrating what the editors describe as "the deterioration in images of Arabs and of Islam in France" owing to "the rise in Muslim fundamentalism, the crises that have rocked the Arab world, terrorism, the 11th September and fears linked to immigration in the context of economic recession".
Such images, unfortunately cultivated by a hostile media, have gained ground in France in recent years, and it is to be hoped that this book, taking in a two-century-old panorama, will encourage the development of more positive ones.
Reviewed by David Tresilian
C a p t i o n :
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 November 2003 (Issue No. 665)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/665/bo5.htm