Since my article in Der Spiegel on Gaza, which can be read in the following languages, German, English, Arabic, and Italian, I’ve received countless messages from upset Germans. I want to show this angry email from a professor (or more technically, a Privatdozent) which is quintessential as it ticks almost all the boxes with the problematic German position. This started off as a thread on Twitter which garnered lots of insightful responses.
From the outset, I want to clarify that I understand there is a plurality of German views, but this one by far reflects the dominant worldview of the establishment that is impacting domestic and foreign policy.
I chose this email because it comes from a German academic and historian who has published books on German literature. He plays a role of consequence in society. And no, I won’t disclose his identity not just because privacy and ethics matter to me, but because he sent it privately as an email, not through a public medium like Twitter. Also, his views are not uncommon in Germany, it’s a socio-structural problem. Rather than the individual, we need to address the bigger picture that normalizes genocide.
Let’s dissect this.
Although titles don’t bother me, he addresses me as “Mr” while he signs off as doctor. Despite him knowing I’m a doctor. The hierarchy is established from the start. He also doesn’t know if I speak German, but has assumed I don’t in order to build up his following argument.
Putting aside that “We Germans” has a ring of the Volksgemeinschaft. The irony of saying “ignorance of people who judge our country without any knowledge of our language” when Germans who don’t know Arabic, Hebrew, Persian etc will write endlessly on the Middle East.
I’m a scholar of Middle Eastern studies, and if Germany is going to send hundreds of millions of euros in military equipment to Israel, then it should not be surprising that I will treat this as a political and moral problem in my domain.
Here is a classic form of offloading German historical guilt onto the Palestinians who are stripped of political, structural, and colonial factors while marginal individual phenomenons like the Mufti of Jerusalem are centered.
The Zionist narrative is pathologically obsessed with the Mufti. Netanyahu partly blames him rather than Hitler for causing the Holocaust. Here is an article that briefly unpacks the exaggerated role of the Mufti who “when all things considered, was a rather powerless politician in exile who couldn’t even muster his own people to fight at the outset of the 1948 war.”
Never mind the Balfour Decleration and British colonialism, or that Palestinian politics comprised of liberalism, socialism, Islamism, fascism etc. The Zionist narrative likes to go for the marginal one that can justify its legitimacy, with German officialdom cheering this on.
No one is claiming “permanent Palestinian innocence”, not even Palestinians themselves. They have made mistakes like all liberation movements. Yet his subtext is that there is a permanent Zionist innocence as the categories of occupier/occupied, aggressor/victim, etc are switched.
Lots of Tu quoque (you too) fallacies, but on the point of Jews leaving or being expelled is certainly one of the darkest stains committed in the Arab world, not to mention a tragic loss for Arab countries. But history shows it was never as simple, for example, in Iraq, “Zionists bombed sites to encourage migration to Israel”
Yep, he went there. Comparing Hamas with the Nazis. A tiny bit of detail he forgets, that since October 7, most of the murdered civilians in Gaza were born after 2006 or were too young to vote in 2006.
He uses genocide only for October 7th and belittles the Bosnian genocide. He brings up the rejected claims of beheaded babies. No mention of 25,000+ murdered Palestinians. His real point being: only an anti-Semite would deny Israel’s right to carry out a genocide.
No mention if Palestinians have a right to defend themselves or if they have a right to a state. He prefers to frame the entire Palestinian people through the lens of Al-Husseini and Hamas “enemies of the Jewish people…since more than 100 years”. So much German projection here!
Here are some of the many tweet replies that stood out and added value to the discussion:
“This German completely skips over Hitler and Nazi Germany !!” – @Busybee32433175
“Just a German scholar weaponising its historical guilt against anyone critical of ISR. This is peak selective and historical revisionism. These are easily debunked. It’s concerning that it’s coming from an academic.” – @Amarmustafa_
“Who on earth uses a quantifier like ‘small’ to describe the genocide in Srebrenica? Their constant need to offload their historical guilt is patently pathological. Please read this excellent thread.” – @theafroaussie
“Is nobody going to bring up the fact that he made up voting stats to help his point? Hamas NEVER won a majority of voters in Gaza. In 2006, they won a plurality with less than 50% of votes. I’m surprised an academic could get that wrong but then again he has a narrative to push.” – @DiasporaArab
“Worth reading it; as the author rightly suggests this angry email points to a structural / ideological problem rather than to an individual opinion.” – @VolkanCidam
“To such persons we (brown/blacks) will forever be spoken down to, no matter how many qualifications and eduction we successfully complete and receive from THEIR establishments. As the issue is not ignorance but arrogance. In this narrative we are the uncivilised ‘other’ no matter what.” – @imsarakay
“Telling that Palestinians are still responsible for the views of the grand Mufti who continues to be their ‘leader’ but Germans are not still responsible for Hitler. They have offloaded this responsibility by projecting their own demons onto the Palestinians.” – @akkhan81
“Good to detail also that history did not begin on October 7, and address the structural conditions of Palestinian subjugation by Israel for 75 years,(disposition, ethnic, cleansing, military occupation, apartheid), notwithstanding the extreme suffocation of Gaza for 17 years. This does not mean that anything goes against occupying non-combatants in response, but the complete elision of context by the German doctor is criminal and telling. If not outright racist.” – @4Bassam
Author: Amro Ali Click here to download the PDF file. A shortened version of this article was translated into German for Der Speigel on 1 January 2024.
December 21, 2023, Palestinians in Rafah mourn as they wait for the bodies of their relatives killed in Israeli air strikes to be removed from al-Najjar Hospital and buried. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/dpa
There has always been a strange unspoken pact between Germany and the Arab world. The Arabs were less outraged by German support for Israel than by that of the US and UK. This was in part due to the widespread view that Germany could not do otherwise because of its historical guilt. Arab governments and their publics not only reluctantly let Germany off the hook but also bought into a set of historical perks. Germany could claim that it had never colonized Arab countries. Germany’s dark past skirted around the Arab world apart from the Axis invasion of North Africa in the Second World War which was short-lived and saw fewer war crimes that paled in comparison to the horrors that unfolded in Europe. And if you were later unhappy with West Germany, there was always East Germany (GDR). You could like the Germany of your choice.
Admiration remained the case in a reunified Germany too. The fact that Berlin opposed participation in the Iraq war in 2003 was well received. The sight of Syrian refugees being welcomed at German train stations in 2015 warmed the Arab public to Germany even more, as they saw the contrast to the mistreatment of Syrians by their own governments. From Rabat to Baghdad, Germany was seen through its Mercedes cars clogging the streets of Kuwait, through the Goethe Institute sticking out among the trees of Alexandria, or through friendly backpackers hiking in the Lebanese mountains. Berlin’s soft power trickled down to the Arab airport officer giving less scrutiny to the inbound German passport holder. German-Arab problems existed of course, but they were addressed on a country-by-country basis and often resolved. The rise of the far right, which frightened the Arab diaspora in Germany, was barely noticed in Arab countries. The diaspora, immersed in the difficult-lived realities of Germany, were at odds with their country of origin and its glamorization of Germany.
Then the horrific Hamas massacres and kidnappings took place on October 7, and Israel responded by bombing the Gaza Strip, starving its inhabitants, killing thousands of civilians, and displacing almost two million people. It quickly became clear that this war went far beyond self-defense. Germany lost every nuance with its one-sided support for Israel, trivializing the gruesome reality in Gaza and unwilling to demonstrate basic human empathy for the Palestinians. When the German Foreign Ministry is not praising Israel’s “humanitarian” measures, it refers to a catastrophic event with thousands of Palestinian children killed as “the situation in the Middle East.” As if it were nothing more than a Deutsche Bahn delay.
The murders and kidnappings carried out by Hamas on October 7 are reprehensible and unjustifiable. Compassion for the Israeli victims should not be conditional or dismissed because of the history of Palestinian suffering. At the same time, we must make it clear that talking about context is not tantamount to justification. Hamas is first and foremost a product of the occupation; its ideology is fueled by the displacement, dispossession, and violence that Palestinians have experienced daily since 1948. If Hamas is destroyed, something else will take its place as long as there is no just peace.
Hamas recruits many of its members from among orphans who have seen their parents murdered by Israel. The Palestinian Marxist militants from the Black September Organization, who carried out the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, were orphans of previous Israeli wars. Now Israel is creating a new generation of orphans. Palestinians are dying by the thousands and the scenario of the destruction of the entire Gaza Strip with a forced mass expulsion, a second “Nakba”, is very real. Renowned experts are alarmed and are speaking of a genocide taking place. Meanwhile, German politics is concerned with discursive trigger points, censoring “Free Palestine” and making the Palestinians pay the price for Europe’s bloody past to this day by letting Israel get away with everything concerning its own historical guilt.
German politicians fell over themselves in moral gymnastics to justify a death toll that has been the deranged phenomenon of our time. Berlin turned the lives of seasoned German diplomats and professional cultural workers abroad into a neurotic hell as they were forced to navigate between the German government of the day and the justified concerns of their host countries.
Last month, Germany cut funding for an anti-trafficking program at the Center for Legal Aid for Egyptian Women because its director, Azza Soliman, opposes Israel’s war in Gaza. Soliman was awarded the Franco-German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law in 2020. Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian human rights organization EIPR, severed cooperation on projects with the German government because “Berlin’s position on the war raises serious doubts about the space of shared values between Germany and human rights activists, feminists and independent media in Egypt.” Across the Arab world, Germany is losing allies who previously saw themselves as part of a community of values committed to human rights.
It has long been clear the liberal order and international law often apply double standards. In the early days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine when meeting German officials in the Bundestag saw their usual stoicism replaced with a somewhat understandable anxious behavior, it was easy to draw an analogy with occupied Palestine. But the response was nothing but silent stares, a silence that spoke volumes. The double standards were unbearable then and are more unbearable now: Berlin is in favor of sending weapons to resist an illegal occupation while providing military, economic, and moral support to an occupying power that continues to seize land illegally and murder with impunity. At best, Israel is occasionally reminded to comply with international law, but without any consequence.
Now, in the face of Western support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, the last semblance of universality has been shattered. The autocrats have taken notes and are ready to use current events as a pretext in the future. The Western reaction to the Israeli war in Gaza is an undeserved gift for Putin, and rarely will anyone soon in the Global South listen when Western politicians insist on international law.
When it comes to the Israeli occupation, there is often an alternate reality in Germany that boggles the mind. Many Syrian refugees would correctly say that Bashar al-Assad’s bloody regime is the cause of why they left. Nothing controversial there. Yet when it is pointed out that Germany is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian refugee population, 100,000, then it should be asked: What caused them to be there if not for the direct or indirect actions of successive Israeli governments? How does that historical reality escape the conversation?
I generally felt that the Arab Spring in 2011 was a welcome change and a breath of fresh air for the German policy establishment. Cities like Tunis and Cairo were beaming with hope and gave Berlin fewer complications compared to Ramallah and Gaza City. But here is the point that many officials missed. The conflict with Israel was feeding the rise of Arab authoritarianism and securitization in the region for decades. It contributed to the destruction of fragile democratic experiments in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s, and gave rise to the ruling military classes that expanded their power partly under the pretext of defending Arabs against Israeli aggression. The modern Egyptian Officer’s Republic was born in 1952 as an indirect result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that was in part triggered by the establishment of Israel and the new state’s expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians.
However, the protest movements of the Arab Spring in 2011 were also inspired by Palestinian popular uprisings, particularly the 2000 Intifada. The current pro-Palestinian protests in the Arab countries are sometimes mixed with other demands, such as an end to the corruption of their governments – which is why the Arab regimes tend not to like to see such protests. In a sense, Palestinian freedom is an antidote to Arab unfreedom. The Palestinian issue is central to Arab public opinion, and it will always shatter illusions that it can be ignored.
Anyone who sits down with German officials can have mostly productive conversations about any Arab country, from human rights to higher education, as they sip on their sparkling water. Yet, when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the moral sensors get suddenly jammed and the script becomes nauseatingly predictable. This reflects a hardening of the boundaries of the culture of remembrance, which has become static in its fixation on Israel, not necessarily the safety of Jews.
It is commendable that Germany is coming to terms with its dark history. The horrors and madness perpetrated by Nazi Germany must be remembered. The world would benefit from more remembrance culture, not less of it. However, there are important criticisms of the development of remembrance culture in Germany. The confrontation with anti-Semitism has become a kind of canonization of Israel that is “immune to historical and evidence-based arguments and blind to the experiences of Palestinians under occupation,” as Israeli historian Alon Confino puts it. This development has allowed the fight against anti-Semitism to be partly instrumentalized by the right wing. It is highly disturbing when high-ranking German politicians share a video by Piers Morgan with the British right-wing activist and journalist Douglas Murray, in which he claims that Hamas is worse than the Nazis. The trend of relativizing the Nazis to Hamas requires us to pause and ask how the discourse got to this sad point.
The editors of the left-leaning Jewish-American magazine Jewish Currents wrote: “The Germans tightly control the shape of Jewishness and Palestinian-ness within their borders… Germany’s stifling embrace of the Jewish community within its borders, with or without the participation of Jews, secures the German self-image as moral arbiter, while shifting the country’s blame to Arabs and Muslims.” Despite genuine Arab-Jewish solidarity efforts, let alone everyday Arab-Jewish intermingling in German cities, the state would prefer to turn Jews and Arabs into heroes and villains, caricatures in the German “theater of memory” – a term coined by the German-Jewish sociologist Y. Michal Bodemann in his critique of the German culture of remembrance. The Federal President’s call for Arabs and Muslims to officially distance themselves from anti-Semitism presupposes that anti-Semitism is a kind of standard attitude among Arabs and Muslims. This problem echoes what Palestinian-German legal scholar Nahed Samour notes in the open-access edited book Arab Berlin (in which I have a chapter) “The Arab turned German citizen is not granted the chance to act as a self-confident citizen but needs to manage the expectations of ‘the Arab’ facing German society.” This is also not to mention that 84 percent of anti-Semitic attacks in 2022 were by the German right.
But the global narrative is changing – and Germany is falling behind. Recently, Belgian transport workers refused to ship weapons destined for Israel that would most likely kill Palestinian civilians. Fortunately, some parties are learning the right lessons from history. The blockade of ports is just one of many actions directed against the West’s complicity in this war of extermination. Activists, students, trade unions, and ordinary citizens – Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, atheists, and anyone who cares about the survival of our shared humanity – are mobilizing to slow down Israel’s war machine. They are all amalgamating into the world’s anti-genocidal infrastructure. Will they succeed? If I were to take a long-term view, then I would adopt the words of the 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Shar is the Arabic word for evil in the Islamic faith, but it actually means insufficient or incomplete. To not live up to the responsibilities of a human being is to be less than complete. Sympathy and mercy are just some of the qualities of that responsibility, the absence of which leads to the failure of humans to act as humans. The formula should be simple: Palestinian life is just as sacred as Jewish life; Jewish life is just as sacred as Palestinian life. Believing it, articulating it, and hopefully acting upon it should not be too difficult. Anything else is moral bankruptcy and will drive us all into the abyss.
Author: Amro Ali Translator: Monika Bolliger Publisher: Der Spiegel Date: 01.01.2024 Article link (Paywall) Download PDF. (Click here for the English version)
Für die arabische Welt war Deutschland ein Vorbild. Das hat sich geändert, seit die israelische Armee im Krieg gegen die Hamas Tausende Zivilisten getötet hat – und von deutschen Politikern kaum Protest zu hören ist.
Palästinenser warten auf die Austeilung von Essen in Rafah im südlichen Gazastreifen Foto: Mohammed Talatene / dpa
Zwischen Deutschland und der arabischen Welt gab es schon immer einen seltsamen, unausgesprochenen Pakt. Die Araber empörten sich weniger über die deutsche Unterstützung für Israel als über jene der USA und Großbritanniens. Das lag auch an der verbreiteten Ansicht, dass Deutschland wegen seiner historischen Schuld gar nicht anders könne.
Arabische Regierungen und ihre Öffentlichkeiten waren Deutschland eher freundlich gesinnt. Deutschland konnte sich darauf berufen, dass es nie arabische Länder kolonisiert hatte. Deutschlands dunkle Vergangenheit ging an der arabischen Welt vorbei, mit Ausnahme der Invasion in Nordafrika im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Und wenn man mit Westdeutschland unzufrieden war, gab es immer noch die DDR. Man konnte das Deutschland seiner Wahl mögen.
Auch im wiedervereinigten Deutschland blieb das so. Man nahm wohlwollend auf, dass Berlin sich 2003 einer Beteiligung am Irakkrieg widersetzte. Der Anblick syrischer Geflüchteter, die 2015 an deutschen Bahnhöfen willkommen geheißen wurden, erwärmte die arabische Öffentlichkeit noch mehr für Deutschland, die den Kontrast zur Misshandlung von Syrern durch ihre eigenen Regierungen sah.
Mercedes, Goethe-Institut und Rucksacktouristen
Mercedes, Goethe-Institut und Rucksacktouristen Man sah Deutschland durch seine Mercedes-Autos, die die Straßen von Kuwait verstopfen, durch das Goethe-Institut, das zwischen den Bäumen von Alexandria hervorragt, oder durch freundliche Rucksacktouristen, die im Libanongebirge wandern gehen. Der Aufstieg der extremen Rechten in Deutschland wurde im arabischen Ausland kaum wahrgenommen.
Dann geschahen die entsetzlichen Massaker und Entführungen der Hamas am . Oktober, und Israel begann als Reaktion darauf, den Gazastreifen mit Flächenbombardements zu überziehen, ließ die Bewohner hungern, tötete Tausende von Zivilisten und vertrieb fast zwei Millionen Menschen aus ihren Häusern. Es wurde schnell klar, dass dieser Krieg weit über Selbstverteidigung hinausgeht. Aber Deutschland verlor jede Nuance mit seiner einseitigen Unterstützung Israels, was im krassen Widerspruch zur Realität und zur grundlegenden menschlichen Empathie steht.
Wenn das deutsche Außenministerium nicht gerade die »humanitären« Maßnahmen Israels lobt, bezeichnet es diesen katastrophalen Krieg mit Tausenden getöteten Kindern als »die Lage im Nahen Osten«. Als ob es sich um nichts Weiteres als eine Verspätung der Deutschen Bahn handelt.
Die Morde und Entführungen, die die Hamas am . Oktober verübt hat, sind widerwärtig und nicht zu rechtfertigen. Das Mitgefühl mit den israelischen Opfern sollte nicht an Bedingungen geknüpft oder aufgrund der Geschichte des palästinensischen Leidens abgetan werden.
Gleichzeitig müssen wir klarstellen, dass ein Gespräch über den Kontext nicht gleichbedeutend mit einer Rechtfertigung ist. Die Hamas ist in erster Linie ein Produkt der Besatzung, ihre Ideologie wird durch Vertreibung, Enteignung und Gewalt genährt, die die Palästinenser seit 1948 täglich erleben. Wenn man die Hamas vernichtet, wird etwas anderes an ihre Stelle treten, solange es keinen gerechten Frieden gibt.
Die Hamas rekrutiert viele Mitglieder unter Waisenkindern, die mit ansehen mussten, wie ihre Eltern von Israel getötet wurden. Die palästinensischen Terroristen der Organisation »Schwarzer September«, die ! das Massaker an israelischen Sportlern bei den Olympischen Spielen in München verübten, waren Waisen früherer israelischer Kriege. Jetzt schafft Israel eine neue Generation von Waisenkindern.
Das Szenario einer zweiten »Nakba« ist real
Die Palästinenser sterben zu Tausenden, und das Szenario der Zerstörung des gesamten Gazastreifens mit einer erzwungenen Massenvertreibung, einer zweiten »Nakba «, ist sehr real. Namhafte Experten sind alarmiert, manche sprechen von einem Völkermord. Währenddessen kümmert sich die deutsche Politik um diskursive Triggerpunkte, zensiert »Free Palestine« und lässt die Palästinenser bis heute den Preis für Europas blutige Vergangenheit zahlen, indem sie Israel mit Verweis auf die eigene historische Schuld alles durchgehen lässt.
In diesem Monat hat Deutschland die Mittel für ein Programm zur Bekämpfung des Menschenhandels beim Zentrum für Rechtshilfe für ägyptische Frauen gestrichen, weil die Leiterin Azza Soliman Israels Krieg im Gazastreifen ablehnt. Soliman war mit dem Deutsch-Französischen Preis für Menschenrechte und Rechtsstaatlichkeit ausgezeichnet worden. Hossam Bahgat, Leiter der ägyptischen Menschenrechtsorganisation EIPR, will die Zusammenarbeit bei Projekten mit der deutschen Regierung beenden, weil »Berlins Position bezüglich des Krieges große Zweifel an dem Raum gemeinsamer Werte zwischen Deutschland und Menschenrechtsaktivisten, Feministinnen und unabhängigen Medien in Ägypten aufkommen lässt«. In der ganzen arabischen Welt verliert Deutschland gerade Verbündete, die sich bisher als Teil einer Wertegemeinschaft verstanden, die den Menschenrechten verpflichtet ist.
Es war schon lange klar, dass die liberale Ordnung und das Völkerrecht oft mit zweierlei Maß messen. In den ersten Tagen von Putins Einmarsch in die Ukraine war es ein Leichtes, eine Analogie zum besetzten Palästina herzustellen. Aber man erntete darauf nur schweigende Blicke, ein Schweigen, das Bände sprach.
Eine alternative Realität in Deutschland
Die Doppelmoral ist unerträglich: In einem Fall befürwortet man die Entsendung von Waffen für den Widerstand gegen eine illegale Besatzung, während man im anderen Fall eine Besatzungsmacht, die fortlaufend illegal palästinensisches Land an sich reißt, militärisch, wirtschaftlich und moralisch unterstützt. Bestenfalls erinnert man Israel ab und zu, aber ohne jede Konsequenz, an die Einhaltung des Völkerrechts. Wenn es um die israelische Besatzung geht, gilt in Deutschland oft eine alternative Realität, die einem den Verstand raubt.
Jetzt ist angesichts der westlichen Unterstützung für offenkundige israelische Kriegsverbrechen im Gazastreifen der letzte Anschein von Universalität zerbrochen. Die Autokraten haben sich Notizen gemacht und sind bereit, die aktuellen Ereignisse künftig als Vorwand zu nutzen. Die westliche Reaktion auf den israelischen Krieg im Gazastreifen ist ein unverdientes Geschenk für den russischen Machthaber Wladimir Putin, auch im Globalen Süden wird so bald niemand mehr hinhören, wenn westliche Politiker auf das Völkerrecht pochen.
Ich hatte den Eindruck, dass der Arabische Frühling 2011 eine willkommene Abwechslung für das deutsche politische Establishment war. Städte wie Tunis und Kairo strahlten Hoffnung aus und bereiteten Berlin weniger Komplikationen als Ramallah und Gaza-Stadt. Aber hier ist ein Punkt, den viele Regierungsvertreter übersehen: Der Konflikt mit Israel förderte den Aufstieg des arabischen Autoritarismus und die wachsenden Sicherheitsapparate der Region.
Er trug in den späten 1940er- und 1950er-Jahren zur Zerstörung der zerbrechlichen demokratischen Experimente in Ägypten, Syrien oder dem Irak bei, und brachte die herrschenden Militärklassen hervor, die ihre Macht unter dem Vorwand der Verteidigung der Araber gegen die israelische Aggression ausbauten. Die ägyptische Offiziersrepublik entstand ! als indirekte Folge des arabisch-israelischen Krieges von 1948.
Umgekehrt waren die Protestbewegungen des Arabischen Frühlings auch inspiriert von palästinensischen Volksaufständen. Die aktuellen propalästinensischen Proteste in den arabischen Ländern vermischen sich manchmal auch mit anderen Forderungen, wie einem Ende der Korruption der eigenen Regime – weshalb die arabischen Regimes solche Proteste nicht gern sehen. In gewissem Sinne ist die palästinensische Freiheit ein Gegenmittel gegen arabische Unfreiheit. Die palästinensische Frage ist für die arabische Öffentlichkeit zentral, und sie wird immer wieder die Illusionen zerstören, dass man sie ignorieren könnte.
Mehr Erinnerungskultur, nicht weniger
Wer sich mit deutschen Politikern zusammensetzt, kann produktive Gespräche über jedes beliebige arabische Land führen, von Menschenrechten bis zur Hochschulbildung. Wenn es jedoch um Israel und Palästina geht, sind die moralischen Sensoren plötzlich blockiert. Das spiegelt eine Verhärtung der Grenzen der Erinnerungskultur wider, die in ihrer Fixierung auf Israel, nicht unbedingt auf die Sicherheit der Juden, statisch geworden ist.
Es ist lobenswert, dass Deutschland sich mit seiner dunklen Vergangenheit auseinandersetzt. Die Schrecken und der Wahnsinn, die von Nazideutschland verübt wurden, müssen in Erinnerung bleiben. Der Welt würde mehr Erinnerungskultur guttun, nicht weniger davon.
Es gibt jedoch wichtige Kritik an der Entwicklung der Erinnerungskultur in Deutschland. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Antisemitismus ist zu einer Art Heiligsprechung Israels geworden, die »immun gegen historische und evidenzbasierte Argumente und blind für die Erfahrungen der Palästinenser unter der Besatzung« ist, wie es der israelische Historiker Alon Confino formuliert. Diese Entwicklung hat es ermöglicht, dass der Kampf gegen Antisemitismus teilweise vom rechten Flügel instrumentalisiert wurde.
Es ist höchst beunruhigend, wenn deutsche Politiker ein Interview des britischen Journalisten Piers Morgan mit dem britischen Rechtsaktivisten und Journalisten Douglas Murray teilen, in dem dieser behauptet, die Hamas sei schlimmer als die Nazis. Der Trend zur Relativierung der Nazis gegenüber der Hamas erfordert ein Innehalten und die Frage, wie der Diskurs an diesen traurigen Punkt gelangt ist.
Deutschland als moralischer Schiedsrichter
Die Redaktion des linken jüdisch-amerikanischen Magazins »Jewish Currents« schrieb : »Die Deutschen kontrollieren streng die Form des Jüdischseins und des Palästinensischseins innerhalb ihrer Grenzen… Deutschlands erdrückende Umarmung der jüdischen Gemeinschaft innerhalb seiner Grenzen, mit oder ohne Beteiligung von Juden, sichert das deutsche Selbstbild als moralischer Schiedsrichter, während die Schuld des Landes auf Araber und Muslime abgewälzt wird.«
Es ist, als ob Juden und Araber zu Helden und Bösewichten gemacht werden, zu Karikaturen im deutschen »Gedächtnistheater« – ein Begriff, den der deutsch-jüdische Soziologe Y. Michal Bodemann in seiner Kritik der deutschen Erinnerungskultur geprägt hat. Das untergräbt die jüdischarabische Solidarität – etwa, wenn die Polizei in Berlin jüdische Demonstranten verhaftet, weil sie gegen den Krieg im Gazastreifen protestieren. Der Raum für solche jüdischen Stimmen ist sehr eng.
Die Aufforderung des Bundespräsidenten an Araber und Muslime, sich offiziell von Antisemitismus zu distanzieren, setzt voraus, dass Antisemitismus bei Arabern und Muslimen eine Art Standardeinstellung ist. Ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass 84 Prozent der antisemitischen Angriffe im vergangenen Jahr von der deutschen Rechten verübt wurden.
Doch das globale Narrativ verändert sich – und lässt Deutschland ins Hintertreffen geraten. Kürzlich weigerten sich belgische Transportarbeiter, für Israel bestimmte Waffen zu verfrachten, mit denen höchstwahrscheinlich palästinensische Zivilisten getötet würden. Glücklicherweise ziehen einige Parteien die richtigen Lehren aus der Geschichte. Die Blockade von Häfen ist nur eine von vielen Aktionen, die sich gegen die Komplizenschaft des Westens in diesem Krieg richten.
Protest gegen Israels Krieg
Aktivisten, Studenten, Gewerkschaften und ganz normale Bürger – Juden, Araber, Muslime, Christen, Atheisten und im Grunde jeder, dem das Überleben der Menschheit am Herzen liegt – mobilisieren für Protestaktivitäten, um Israels Kriegsmaschinerie zu bremsen. Werden sie Erfolg haben? Wenn ich eine langfristige Sichtweise einnehmen sollte, dann würde ich es mit den Worten des unitarischen Pfarrers Theodore Parker aus dem !. Jahrhundert tun: »Der moralische Bogen des Universums ist lang, aber er neigt sich zur Gerechtigkeit.«
»Shar« ist das arabische Wort für das Böse im islamischen Glauben, aber eigentlich bedeutet es »unzureichend, unvollständig«. Der vollen Verantwortung eines Menschen nicht gerecht zu werden, bedeutet, weniger als vollständig zu sein. Mitgefühl und Barmherzigkeit sind solche verantwortungsvollen Eigenschaften, deren Fehlen das Versagen der Menschen widerspiegeln, als Menschen zu handeln. Die Formel sollte einfach sein: Palästinensisches Leben ist genauso heilig wie jüdisches Leben, jüdisches Leben ist genauso heilig wie palästinensisches Leben. Daran zu glauben, es auszusprechen und danach zu handeln, sollte nicht allzu schwer sein.
Amro Ali, “On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body in Berlin” in Arab Berlin: Dynamics of Transformation, Eds. Hanan Badr and Nahed Samour (Berlin: Transcript Urban Studies, 2023)
Abstract: Berlin is increasingly emerging as a hub of Arab intellectual life in Europe. In this first study of Arab culture to zoom in on the thriving metropolis, the contributors shed light on the dynamics of transformation with Arabs as agents, subjects, and objects of change in the spheres of politics, society and history, gender, demographics and migration, media and culture, and education and research. The kaleidoscopic character of the collection, embracing academic articles, essays, interviews and photos, reflects critical encounters in Berlin. It brings together authors from inter- and multidisciplinary fields and backgrounds and invites the readers into a much-needed conversation on contemporary transformations.
The Palestinian question has become the storm at the World Cup in Doha, the most-watched event in the world, with the Palestinian flag emerging as the dominant icon. The repeated raising of the Palestinian flag following every win by the Moroccan team has become a sort of ritual. Supporters and critics have not failed to take notice.
Many will say but this is just a football tournament, how will it help Palestine? This would be true if symbols and signals had no value in our world. The morale boost it provides to the Palestinians is electrifying. That a country at the far corner of the Arab world can be the closest to the Palestinian people, sending out love and support.
But it also points to something bigger. Doha’s World Cup hosting has become a political laboratory in many respects. With the absence of the usual Arab regime choreography, Doha provided an unfiltered and unmediated space in which the Arab realities toward the Palestinian struggle were exhibited in full force. The repeated pro-Palestine chants by Arab fans, their refusal to do interviews with Israeli reporters on the ground, and the Moroccan team flying the Palestinian flag highlights the severe distortion of the normalization process and the stark contrast between Arab regimes and Arab publics.
In recent years, Arab regimes would state or give the impression that the Arab world was sick of the Palestinian cause and would not stand against peace with Israel on that basis (not that the public ever has a choice), despite poll after poll across the Arab world showing that most people were against mending relations with Israel if it were not conditional upon ending the brutal Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. But polls can only tell us so much, in contrast to the live coverage of the coming together of that large demographic from across the MENA region descending onto a small space within a fixed time frame that ignited a loud unanticipated noise and coherent narrative. Those voices said that Palestine would not be thrown under the bus.
What Doha did was provide an unfiltered and unmediated space in which the Arab support of the Palestinian struggle was visually and viscerally exhibited. This World Cup has become a referendum on the normalization facade. The planet’s largest televised event has thrust Palestine dramatically into the spotlight. It seems no regime or public was prepared for that.
Amro Ali, “Bringing Philosophy and Sociology to the Egyptian Public” in The Humanities in the 21st Century: Perspectives from the Arab World and Germany, Eds. Nuha Alshaar, Beate La Sala, Jenny Oesterle, Barbara Winckler (Berlin: Forum Transregionale Studien, 2022).
This book is open-access. The Arabic version can be accessed here. For more information on the project and conference, click here.
Chapter abstract: The chapter briefly examines the conditions and method of bringing sociological-philosophy to the Egyptian public, as well as the role of agency that engages audiences.
An enthusiastic Egyptian youth exited the closing of a lecture event in late November 2017 and rushed to a coffeehouse near Tahrir Square to meet up with his friends. He told them about this woman thinker called ‘Hannah Arendt’ who he just learned about and her peculiar idea of ‘new beginnings.’ Several nearby curious patrons overheard the chatter and enquired about the philosopher. The social circle widened, and the youth continued discussing the lecture that he had just attended. It would see some of the patrons coming to the next lecture session on Walter Benjamin’s loss of aura concept.
Book abstract: The role of the humanities, their standing in the academic field and their impact on society are questions of global relevance. Why is it important to study, teach and do research in the humanities? What role do the humanities play in the Arab world and Germany—both in the academic domain and the public sphere of ‘societies in change’? Which challenges and obstacles do scholars in the humanities face across the Arab world, especially in war or postwar situations, such as in Syria, Yemen or Iraq, and which research opportunities do the students and academics have? What could be done to strengthen the humanities in the Arab world, in Germany and on a global level? And what can we learn from each other’s experiences? These and other questions were raised and discussed at the international conference ‘The Place of Humanities in Research, Education and Society: An Arab-German Dialogue’, which was held in Berlin in November 2019, as part of the activities of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). This collection of essays, titled ‘The Humanities in the 21st Century: Perspectives from the Arab World and Germany’, which was first published as a blog series, takes up key issues that were raised and discussed during our conference.
Kites flying above the Alexandria corniche. Photo by Amro Ali (2020)
The modern history and contemporary nature of Alexandria is a brew of different identities that give off (or once gave) a distinct resonance: Mediterranean, Egyptian, Arab, African, Middle Eastern, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Levantine, among others. But the one profile that emerges as rooted in Alexandria’s existential survival is the Mediterranean identity. Within a few decades, rising sea levels will inundate parts of Alexandria in what could be the start of history’s closing curtains on the 2300-year-old city. Along with political and institutional will, it is imperative that Alexandria’s relationship to the Mediterranean shifts its face from past and present towards the future and pushed further into a wider regional narrative.
Ask an Alexandrian what makes up their identity and the first word you will most likely hear is the sea. The sea is central to the popular imagination, literature, films, theatre, escapism, growing up, families, wedding shoots, and a street art that reflects the bond with the sea and its history and myths: mermaids, citadel, centurions, Alexander the Great, and lots of ship-themed graffiti. Right down to the common line “If I leave Alexandria, I will feel like a fish out of water.”
The long stretch of corniche and wave breakers have displaced the beaches as the dividing line, liminal space, and intersection between the public and the sea. Access to the corniche and the ability to see the sea is a continuing battle in light of the privatisation and “development” drive that has, in many cases, cut off the public from viewing the sea, let alone accessing it. Yet pockets of communal respite are to be found. At the outset of the pandemic, the corniche furnished many of Alexandria’s young with the newly discovered hobby of kite flying that became a unifying public spectacle as even street children could get access to cheaply made kites. I had never seen that high degree of elation induced by any activity before on the corniche in many years. Barely a month or so passed and the kites were banned by the government on the official reason that they were behind a series of accidents (which is a legitimate concern but outright banning is different to regulating). The kite had, for a moment, become a hovering icon that connected sky, sea, corniche, and public.
To speak of Alexandria in a regional narrative is nothing new. Since the 1990s, elite efforts have been made to reintegrate Alexandria into the Mediterranean imaginary – albeit a neoliberal one that succeeded its colonial predecessor. The government rehabilitated the façade of the city as several institutes directed energies to crystalizing Alexandria’s role in the Mediterranean world which included the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Anna Lindh Foundation, and the former Swedish Institute, along with various cultural centres and initiatives.
Yet an endeavor needs to expand the notion of the sea from one linked to the past that evokes nostalgia and childhood memories, as well as the present that touches upon romance, enchantment, leisure, and livelihoods, to a future where an apocalypse looms on the horizon. Not to terrify the populace, but rather to deepen civic responsibility – from anti-littering to reconsideration of investment decisions – as part of the fight against climate change that can complement the respective policy on the matter. As well as linking Alexandria to efforts made by other cities in the basin as part of an unfolding story that aims to rescue the historical hubs of the middle sea. However, short of radical adaption measures, it is Alexandria, the only major city in the Mediterranean, that is at the highest risk of being largely submerged by 2050. It is no wonder why popular Google searches for Alexandria in the context of climate change reveal bizarre questions such as “Does Alexandria Egypt still exist?” and “who destroyed Alexandria Egypt?” It is an omen the city can do without.
Time and again, events have shown that Alexandrian public engagement or interest, particularly among the young and students, in their city’s welfare is heightened when they feel the city is part of a regional or global story – whether it be visits by foreign heads of state, clean up campaigns, artistic troupes, or the Africa Cup. It is part of the conscious Alexandrian mode of living to make sense of the fractured present while living in the shadow of multiple ancestral giants. It is the “nature of identity”, individual or city identity no less, “to change depending on time, place, [and] audience.” In this case, the repositioning of Alexandria’s Mediterranean identity can no longer be limited to culture wars, Euro-centric elites, and postcolonial critiques. It is now a question of survival.
As I have argued before, the Mediterranean is a laboratory with natural demarcations, rich history, trade, and cultural ties that could enable “an overarching new Mediterranean narrative to be written through a series of conferences, symposiums, workshops and accessible publications” with the possibility of contributing to “animating forms of transnational citizenship, a project that builds a Mediterranean platform” that can construct a new narrative and social contract.
Alexandria needs to feel part of the neighborhood story and brought into a mission in which its fate is tied with the same menace confronting Beirut, Tunis, Tangiers, Barcelona, Marseilles, and the rest of the cities dotted around the basin. While many Mediterranean cities will suffer from rising sea levels to hotter temperatures, the menace is eyeing Alexandria with the utmost ferocity and has earmarked a swathe of the city to be turned into one large underwater museum. A rising sea level that will perhaps regurgitate onto the city’s future and permanently flooded streets the thousands of abandoned facemasks and lost kites.
Fishermen in Alexandria, 2020 (photo by Amro Ali).
This essay was first published in German in the Berlin journal Die Politische Meinung (PDF) under the title, Mediterran?: Eine Lebensart und das Phänomen der Entfremdung (“Mediterranean?: A way of life and the phenomenon of alienation”) and later appeared in the English edition of the same journal.
“At my first sight of the Mediterranean world I realized that I had never known light before. I was from the world of darkness. London was not so bad, but the light of the northwest is a very dull light. The light of the Mediterranean held my eyes so I decided to stay for a time.” – Albert Hourani (1915-1993)
Hearing the word “Mediterranean” can elicit metaphors of cruises, golden beaches, lush hills, and succulent cuisines. In fact, follow up Mediterranean by appending the words diet, sunset, and villa, among others, and you have already produced the mental image of a semi paradise on earth. Yet the so-called “Mediterranean lifestyle” is often a highly-charged romanticised product of western consumption habits, holiday brochures, and diaspora musings – with a heavy focus on Greece, Italy, and Spain with the rest of the other Mediterranean countries at times acting as background furniture. The lifestyle is habitually treated as a given – it evacuates economics, class, and gender, and presumes that geography is all that counts. I want to visit this idea of the Mediterranean lifestyle and broaden its meaning, to look at how modern alienation ails the notion of the Mediterranean lifestyle and how we can think of it beyond its olive oil coat of arms.
In the literature and popular culture, the Mediterranean lifestyle is mostly the domain of food consumption, followed by tropes such as laughter, simplicity, passion, pleasure, living the moment, and visiting family and friends. This is not to say that none of these can be true or one does not relate to them on some level, but an idealised Mediterranean lifestyle is a claimant to a shared identity and space which does not necessarily exist for many.
The Mediterranean lifestyle weds a collective imaginary with an individual identity to form outlooks, attitudes, social relations, and possessions. As a key marker of social geography, the sea is an integral piece to the mosaic of personal identity. Inhabitants of the cities dotted around the sea will have some conception of a lifestyle uniquely tied to the sea. This distinguishes their coastal metropolis as different or “privileged” by virtue of being by the water, even if they do not necessarily call it the Mediterranean lifestyle. Sitting on opposite ends of the basin’s shore, a Spaniard in Barcelona and a Palestinian in Gaza would understand the sea differently. It can be a poetical space or a tormenting space, but it can also be one of shared possibilities.
Retrospective of a wonderful sea
Yet it is one of the ironies that a beautiful basin can be made the least economically viable. The story is an all too familiar one. The newly-minted graduate in Alexandria that eats her last seafood meal with loved ones before rushing to catch the train to start her new job in Cairo; the Sicilian youth in Palermo that gives one last glance to the sea before migrating to the affluent north in search for work in landlocked Milan; the underemployed Greek man who leaves his homeland for the colder but prosperous lands of the EU; the young Lebanese woman who has for years worked in Beirut’s culture scene and has decided to leave for Montreal to start her PhD, not only for educational advancement but to acquire a western passport as a form of mobility and partial restitution justice in an unequal world. Over the years, you get the impression that no one seems to want to leave the Mediterranean, but they are given little choice. Short of family connections, viable monetary inheritance, access to meaningful employment, ability to save, marry and buy a home; a growing number choose to abandon a wondrous sea that does not deserve to be abandoned.
Historically, the Mediterranean is not without its darkness. It is the sea that saw millions of deaths and gallons of blood spilled over the centuries through empire building, colonial conquests, pirate raids, and two world wars that turned blue skies into recurring passages of grey. Not to mention today’s refugee who flees political persecution and economic destitution, and dreads the possibility that the sea might become his or her graveyard.
But history is not always a history of sorrow and despair. In the everyday spectrum of life, there was a time when the Mediterranean lifestyle was understood as part of the sacred route by a Muslim pilgrim from Tangiers crossing several cities of the Mediterranean to eventually reach Mecca. The traders from Venice and Damascus that intermingled at the port in Alexandria. The Syrian that decided not to leave Tunis after he married and settled down there. The aspiring scholar on the Libyan coast that goes to Al-Andalus to further their studies.
A distortion of time and space
This is not to engage in a past utopia but to highlight that mobility was much more frequent among key demographics that enabled a holistic approach to the Mediterranean unlike our modern era which is characterised increasingly by forms of alienation. To speak of a vibrant Mediterranean lifestyle today requires some contemplation on the missing human encounters and away from mutant capitalist discourse that treats individuals as commodities zapping between resorts for Instagram shots, and mostly by travellers from the global north.
The alienation, in part, commenced long ago when port cities fell out of fashion with the dramatic reduction in the use of sea travel and the rise of commercial airlines in the mid-twentieth century which meant a person can go from Athens to Cairo, bypassing Alexandria. The once demanding but rhythmic process of departure and arrival across the sea now took on a radical change in which the human being exited the terrestrial order and was now suspended above the sea and moving at high velocity across the skies. Time and space were not only distorted, but the traditional relationship between humans and sea became a form of alienation limited to touching or swimming in the waters of one’s respective city, rather than traversing it. The once familiar homecoming and farewell scenes at ports greatly diminished. Civilian travel by sea was now mostly restricted to trips of limited duration and environmental-destructive cruises.
The 1990s saw the revival of port or second cities, such as Tangiers and Alexandria, that became favourable to neoliberal trade and transnationalism which, unlike capital cities that heavily invested in national culture, favoured cultural experimentation given that it could also be monetised. But this new Mediterranean world fell victim to the Washington Consensus, northern European banks, privatisation, environmental damage, and debilitating strands of neoliberal modernity. The expression “I no longer recognise my city” became a frequent mantra of a new internal exile in the Mediterranean.
The other form of alienation is governed by the visa regimes and passport tyranny, especially for the southern and eastern shores. As I have written before, “no transnational Mediterranean project can materialize when one side faces insurmountable inequalities in partnerships, safety, movement, and engagements.”[1] While I was specifically referring to the notion of a Mediterranean social contract and projects, the absence of equitable passport and visa arrangements still has the effect of skewing lifestyles in the lands of the global south depriving them of meaningful travel, exposure, and growth in their own neighbourhood. This is not only obvious from south to north; an Italian national can visit the entire countries of North Africa and the Levant with little to no effort in terms of no-visa requirement or a cheap visa on arrival. The Egyptian national does not know this world, travel is possible but it comes at a high probable chance of rejection by the consulate. The postcolonial story is one of insecurity even towards fellow global south countries. The end result is that the Italian is able to acquire a developed acquaintance with the region which add layers to his or her understanding of the Mediterranean lifestyle while the Egyptian is trapped in a provincial dimension of what constitutes his or her idea of that lifestyle. The Mediterranean lifestyle is not just a social or economic question, it is in the end, a political one.
Perhaps the Mediterranean lifestyle needs an accompanying conversation on developing a Mediterranean philosophy, one that correlates and thinks with rising political thought and activities through a shared space beyond markets. Activists and organisations are glaringly aware of the inequalities and are endeavouring to revive some sort of philosophy or social contract grounded in human rights, climate change initiatives, backed by the pandemic-induced shunning of long-haul flights in favour of short trips. Yet as someone who has sat through numerous meetings at the institutional level to discuss subjects related to the Mediterranean, I would sometimes wonder where are we going with all this? Gianluca Solera, who has advocated for a “renaissance” of the Mediterranean, argued that institutions with a Mediterranean mandate suffer from “deleterious development ideas, the same void decision-making mechanisms, the same discriminatory interpretation of citizenship, the same lassitude vis-à-vis its founding values would be produced, in the middle of a crisis, which is, before being economic, a political and cultural one.”[2]
“Return to origin” myth
It is heartening that there has been a growing interest in the Mediterranean that has been driven by organisations, cultural currents, universities, and international bodies and this stems from the fact that the Mediterranean sells itself: it is a metaphysical blueprint and socio-geographical crossroads that furnishes centuries of civilisations, scholarship, trade, religions, philosophies, and marriages. In a sense, there is a “return to origin” myth that enchants even the coldest of cold international bureaucracies that deal with the Mediterranean subject. But the question remains, how to readjust the gaze at the sea that is often one of distortion? Exacerbated by the excessive focus on the securitization and the refugee crisis which does little to address the alienation question. A democratic bottom-up approach is needed to marshal the thousands of initiatives that are taking place, stories told to one another, theorizing through the nights, workshops and training, and solidifying grassroots networks across the basin in what Solera has dared to deem a Mediterranean “Shadow-government.” I was at a meeting in Brussels, at the Friends of Europe summit, in 2019 where there was even talk of a “talent passport,” which still came across as problematic, but at least the question of global south mobility was being recognised and was pushed by activists and cultural workers. Still, there is a long way to go, many conversations to be had, and difficult questions to be addressed.
A depoliticised Mediterranean lifestyle should be respected, but we should also allow its political counterpart to show another way out of the alienation abyss. As it stands, the Mediterranean lifestyle is an indeterminate, fluid, and elastic conception that means different things to different people, yet is bounded by the natural demarcations of an ancient sea that sees an overlap of history, trade, tourism, cultural ties, and social justice within wider shared narratives. Despite the region’s cultural richness, the internal exile is a modern phenomenon of our time. Alienation, in the midst of underutilised cultural bonds, is a peculiar aspect of the modern Mediterranean lifestyle.
Passing by the wave breakers on Alexandria’s shore, I came across an impoverished boy gazing longingly at the sea. I asked him his name, he replied “Shaaban,” I followed it up with what his dream was when he became older, “to be a pilot.” I knew everything was stacked against his dream but I still told him “I hope you become a pilot, Inshallah.” He gave a big smile. These little moments in our Mediterranean world still matter.
Alexandria’s connection to the Maghreb is often overlooked. But the cosmopolitan port city developed through centuries of migration and influence from the western side of the Mediterranean, up until the colonial era and the building of self-centered nation states.
This essay was originally published in Mashallah Magazine as part of the Mediterranean Routes series
***
“She is a unique pearl of glowing opalescence, and a secluded maiden arrayed in her bridal adornments, glorious in her surpassing beauty, uniting in herself the excellences that are shared out by other cities between themselves through her mediating situation between the East and the West.” – Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta on Alexandria, 1326 CE.
***
It was always a quiet curiosity to me as a child in Alexandria that I would address my maternal grandfather as baba sidou when every other child around me referred to their own grandfather as gidou – the customary address to an Egyptian grandfather. It was only many years later that I discovered that baba sidou’s father, my great grandfather, was a Moroccan merchant who left northern Morocco circa 1903 to settle and marry in Alexandria, earning a living by importing goods from his homeland to Egypt. The title baba sidou, used to address grandfathers in some parts of northern Morocco, was a linguistic inheritance of an otherwise enigmatic heritage.
The memory of this form of address to my larger-than-life grandfather, Abdelmeged, was enough to spark an interest in attempting to trace the origins of his father. It also led me to widen my understanding of Alexandria in the great historical narrative of movements and peoples and the role of the Maghreb (here used in the classical sense to include northwestern Africa and Islamic Spain or Al-Andalus 711-1492 CE) in this spectrum.
The Maghrebi character of Alexandria is undeniable when you consider architecture, religious currents, philosophy and historical knowledge production.
The Maghrebi character of Alexandria is undeniable when you consider architecture, religious currents, philosophy and historical knowledge production. The city’s most prominent mosques and districts are named after medieval Moroccan and Al-Andulusian Sufi scholars including Sidi Gaber, Sidi Bishr and Shatby. It is, however, the iconic Abu Al-Abbas Al-Mursi mosque by the sea that stands out, housing the tomb of the scholar who gave the mosque its name. Born in Murcia in the south-east of Al-Andalus in 1219 CE, Al-Mursi moved to Tunis, then finally Alexandria, where he remained teaching for 43 years until his death. The white marble floor of the mosque, which was renovated and expanded over the centuries, underpins a cream-coloured structure with four domes that surround the octagonal skylight. The mosque itself was the inspiration for the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi which opened in 2007.
The Middle Ages saw Moroccan colonies emerge in Cairo and Alexandria, with the latter witnessing the construction of a madrasah for Maghrebi students founded by Saladin. By the late nineteenth century, the words jisr (bridge) and juj (pair or two) were frequently heard in the streets of Alexandria, meaning that either Moroccan Darija words had supplanted some Egyptian words in the Alexandrian dialect or it was simply a case of two dialects being spoken.
Why Alexandria?
The late Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri notes a tradition in which the borders of the Maghreb “end where couscous ends, and couscous ends in the east in Alexandria and Upper Egypt.” Of course, Egypt historically has rarely been considered part of the Maghreb, which commonly ends at Libya at most. Yet the obscure tradition is quite interesting as it signals that distant Alexandria must have formed some reference point in the Maghrebi worldview.
The motives to make Alexandria their new home were quite evident. Mohammed El-Razzaz argues that the city was perhaps the furthest one could flee while still linking up to the familiarity of a multicultural harbour city. Alexandria was the last major port before heading to Mecca on the pilgrimage route. It had a vibrant merchant class due to, as the fourteenth century Tangiers-born explorer Ibn Batuta noted, its unique position of a “mediating situation between the East and the West.” In Alexandria, Maghrebi scholars could meet their counterparts from Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and distant places. It is not difficult to see how couscous ended up as a dish being served in Alexandria.
“The Maghreb ends where couscous ends, and couscous ends in the east in Alexandria and Upper Egypt.”
The relationship between the Maghreb and Alexandria is not only old, it also had a dramatic start fit for a novel or film. In 818 CE Cordoba, an uprising that came to be known as the “Suburb Affair” took place in the southern impoverished district of Al-Rabad, across the Guadalquivir river, and was brutally suppressed by the Al-Andalusian caliph Al-Hakim II. Some 15,000 Cordoba residents fled the tyranny and, because they lived largely off piracy, sailed towards Egypt and seized Alexandria, turning it, in effect, into a city state. This was the first major case of re-immigration back into North Africa from Islamic Spain, including a smaller number that escaped to Fes. While it is possible the Cordobian exiles had local support at first, Muslim and Coptic sources speak of the cruelty that Alexandria endured under their rule. They were expelled a decade later by Caliph Al-Ma’mun when he reasserted his authority over Alexandria. The exiles then left and took over Crete. An indomitable bunch.
In one sense, the violent affair set the historical tempo of the Maghrebi resonance with Alexandria, which paved the way for a peaceful centuries-long story where merchants, travellers, pilgrims, exiles, scholars, philosophers and mystics left the Maghreb and the collapsing Al-Andalus and headed eastward to Alexandria and, at times, to the rest of Egypt. The Fatimid empire that sprung from Tunisia and ruled Egypt (969-1171 CE) facilitated one of the largest population migrations from Sicily (which was part of the Maghreb), Algeria, Morocco, Libya and, especially, Tunisia to Alexandria. The Valencia born Al-Andalusian geographer and poet Ibn Jubayr noted upon his arrival in Alexandria in 1183 CE the multitudes of Maghrebis arriving, and was mesmerised by the city: “We have never seen a town with broader streets, or higher structures, or one more ancient and beautiful … We observed many marble columns and slabs of height, amplitude, and splendour such as cannot be imagined … Another of the remarkable features of this city is that people are as active in their affairs at night as they are by day.”
Piecing fragments
On my first visit to Morocco in January 2018, I was trekking along the mountains of Chefchaouen when I met a farmer named Abdullah who narrated interesting local fables that dealt with Egypt, including one in which Pharaoh Ramses II gave Morocco its name, even while “he preferred to die in Egypt.” The Egyptian pharaoh holds an impressive grip over the Moroccan imagination as the epitome of all evil (I have discussed this in a 2018 photo essay). Fables go both ways. In Alexandria, an aging resident in 2012 told me a local legend of the ghost of Sidi Gaber, named after sheikh Jaber Al-Ansari, a scholar and shepherd who grew up in Al-Andalus shortly after the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula and settled in Alexandria. In June 1940, his ghost saw the Axis warplanes approach as they were about to bomb the British military installations in the Sidi Gaber area. So as to protect his name-bearing Sidi Gaber Mosque, he waved the planes away and consequently – so the story goes – all bombs fell on the nearby Cleopatra Hamamat district in the first week of the campaign.
The oversupply of information and digital asphyxia has de-narrativised the Mediterranean.
These tales are frozen in time, as the routes that enabled them no longer emerge in today’s era of mass media and predictable tourism patterns. The oversupply of information and digital asphyxia has de-narrativised the Mediterranean as it no longer permits for the emergence of fables and an air of mystery to this world.
Land and sea hajj routes that for centuries were essential to the flourishing Maghrebi self-understanding have long since been replaced by air travel, bypassing the symbolically rich ports along the way, Alexandria no less. As Abderrahmane El-Moudden puts it succinctly:
“For many centuries, the pilgrimage caravan was the most important, if not the only, means of travel to the Holy Lands. On their way, Moroccan pilgrims were forced to cross the majority of Arab Muslim lands. This fact alone gives the Moroccan travels a complexity that is reflected in the texts and colours the perception of sacred space and time.”
The author hints at the slow lingering process and toil that came with travelling that carried a high risk of death but enabled the surviving returnees to retell their stories that were chiselled from, perhaps, the longest journey they have ever embarked upon. The idea of such deep and prolonged transcontinental experiences today collapses under the parochial weight of Egyptian and Moroccan nationalist narratives and their desire to demarcate borders, categorise populations, and restrict movements in a region once characterised by fluid boundaries and transnational migration.
The idea of such deep and prolonged transcontinental experiences collapses under the parochial weight of Egyptian and Moroccan nationalist narratives
Scratch the surface of many Egyptians and Maghrebis and you will find foreign links in their family tree. Nationalist constructs can get quite ludicrous if you really think it through. For example, for an Egyptian to claim descent from pharaonic Egypt is to make the impossible claim that the chain of one’s lineage was never “disrupted” in over 2000 years. It would also deny the history that saw movements of peoples including Arabs, Maghrebis, Al-Andalusians, Berbers, Ottomans, Jews and so forth that married into Egyptian Muslim families, or the innumerable Greek, Syrian and Ethiopian Christians that married into Coptic communities. This is not the same as making a cultural claim. One can certainly associate with and draw lessons from a country’s long history and rich traditions. But culture is often too lightweight a contender to the disturbing “races and blood” discourse even if these terms are not specifically used, but implied.
How it ends
It is probably worthwhile to capture a snapshot of the current dynamics between Egypt and Morocco. At the political elite level, tensions surface from time to time, given that Egypt faces a balancing act to placate Morocco and Algeria who have long standing hostilities with one another. In the media, attacks have taken place with a misogynistic stab.
In 2014, Egyptian presenter Amany Al-Khayat – spited by the Palestinian leadership’s appeal to distant Morocco, rather than neighbouring Egypt, for help during the war on Gaza – deried Morocco as a country with a “HIV prevalence rate” and an “economy of prostitution.”
This ignited a wave of anger from Morocco and sparked a diplomatic crisis; Al-Khayat later apologised. In 2020, Moroccan singer Ibtissam Moumni was outraged that Egypt cancelled a concert by fellow Moroccan artist Saad Lamjarred because of rape charges that he was facing: “You think that Saad Lamjarred will hold a concert and harass your daughters, who are like men.” This caused a fury on Egyptian social media and she later apologised on Instagram.
Yet policymakers, media pundits and celebrity bickering usually operate in a world away from coffeehouses, mosques and campuses. Interestingly, Al-Khayat and Moumni’s conciliatory approaches saw them appeal to both countries’ civilisations, rich heritage and intellectual traditions. This, incidentally, is how the countries’ publics view the other. When the former grand mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa, labelled the fourteenth century Granada-born Maghrebi scholar Imam Abu Ishaq Al-Shatibi (who is buried in Alexandria and has a major district named after him) as a mere “journalist,” Moroccan scholars were angered and launched a heated rebuttal at Gomaa. At least the once thriving medieval relationship still matters in some sense.
The current passport apartheid system have restricted meaningful mobility, preventing Moroccans and Egyptians from visiting each other freely.
But the above mentioned incidents pale in comparison to the greater tragedy of the North African story. The historical symbiotic relationship between Egypt and Morocco is not as flourishing as it once was. The francophone and anglophone colonial trajectories divided the Maghreb and Mashreq further. The current passport apartheid system, and visa regimes that prioritise EU nationals over someone else from the global south, have restricted meaningful mobility, preventing Moroccans and Egyptians from visiting each other freely.
Moroccans rarely meet Egyptians, which creates a vacuum that is filled with personalities and places like the pharaohs, Um Kalthoum, Abdul Basit Abdus Samad (a famous Quran reciter, 1927-1988), Al-Azhar, the pyramids and, undoubtedly, Mohamed Salah. Perhaps also comedian Adel Imam, who gets a disproportionate amount of attention and has skewed the image of Egypt like everywhere else. The decline of Egyptian soft power through film means that the Egyptian dialect is now understood mainly by the older generation of Moroccans. For Egyptians, the mention of Morocco evokes beauty, enchantment, religious heritage and kinship, with a sprinkle of celebrities or the talk of a recent football game.
For Egyptians, the mention of Morocco evokes beauty, enchantment, religious heritage and kinship.
However, regrettably, Egypt joins the rest of the Arab world chorus in never failing to note sehr (black magic) when the topic of Morocco arises. The idea is that Moroccan women are prone to employing witchcraft to cause some sort of harm to others. This can indicate why Egypt’s opposition media outlets were able to effectively spread the rumour – relying on dubious documents – that the current Egyptian president’s mother was a Moroccan Jew. Not only was there no factual basis to the antisemitic nature of this claim, it also says a lot about the function of Morocco as a distant and mysterious enough place to give the rumour an air of plausibility. The viral claim moved the Moroccan state to officially declare the documents to be a forgery.
On dying and rebirth
Towards the end of the conversation, Abdullah, the farmer in Chefchaouen, mentioned something that grabbed my attention. “A big part of our community migrated to the city of Alexandria over the centuries,” he said. I beamed with a smile.
Soon after, I came to realise that my great grandfather had dropped his Moroccan surname, making it difficult to trace his origins, and picked up an Egyptian name instead, Al-Fayoum, after the oasis town in Middle Egypt. Why he chose that name in particular I could only speculate. Given that it was part of a trade route, I would suspect that he had visited the town. One family tale says that he had fled a conflict taking place in Morocco, most likely the rebellion against the French and Spanish carving out colonial zones of influence in Morocco in the early 1900s. The name change may have been a way to evade the transcolonial collaboration across North Africa to arrest dissidents in distant lands. Additionally, the rising sense of Egyptianness at the turn of the century could have been an invitation for him to become part of the emerging national narrative. This was symbolically realised when he married an Egyptian woman named Baheya El-Sherif.
He knew I loved to go to the top and see my city from there, as if I was a low gliding bird.
My usual routine as a five-year-old in the 1980s was to go to see baba sidou after school. He would take me to the downtown area of Mahatet el-Raml and buy me popcorn or a sweet of sorts. On other occasions, he would wait specifically for the double decker blue tram as he knew I loved to go to the top and see my city from there, as if I was a low gliding bird. I would take out chalk from my pocket that I had snatched from the blackboard at school and start writing on the floor of the tram, both in Arabic and English, to the delight of the curious onlookers. One passenger told my grandfather that, “he will be something great in the future someday.” We would disembark in Azarita where he grew up, attend his favourite mosque for the asr (mid-afternoon) prayer, then he would go to the coffeehouse to meet friends and smoke sheesha while I played in the street in front of him.
This routine also included a visit with baba sidou to see his mother Baheya in the same area. Although her husband Al-Fayoum had died long before I was born, I was able to glimpse the last two years of her life, as a bedridden 95-year-old widow with her browned caramel skin drooping down gracefully. She had a certificate that qualified her as a midwife – I cannot remember if she hung it on the wall but she was extremely proud of the achievement – having received it at a time when education and qualifications for Egyptian women were hard to come by. A once outspoken wealthy woman who rose from the working classes, she ran coffeehouses and had her own horse-drawn carriage, but due to dwindling fortunes now lived in a tiny apartment. She died soon thereafter.
With his death, along with that of my great grandmother, came the end of one era as I knew it in Alexandria.
A few months later, her beloved son, the 69-year-old Abdelmeged – baba sidou to me – entered his beloved mosque in Azarita and, while in the kneeling position, passed away. The stoic worshippers shifted him so that he would lean against the wall, still kneeling, and then prayed over his body. With his death, along with that of my great grandmother, came the end of one era as I knew it in Alexandria. The time of seamless movement of personalities and their lives across the southern Mediterranean had dried up in the shadow of the mighty nation state and the hardening of borders.
My great grandfather, Al-Fayoum, who I know little about, became a sort of vector point. He left no photographs or written evidence – or I have yet to locate them – and thus I have relied on fragmented oral testimonies. My fickle memory of my dying great grandmother, a formidable Egyptian woman who married a stranger from the other side of the southern Mediterranean and edge of the Arab world, still lingers in my mind. Two simple words, baba sidou, encapsulates my own Egyptianness and sheds a new light of complexity on my Egyptian parents; one that is accomodating of complicated histories and sits well with my multifaceted Muslim, Arab, Egyptian, North African, Mediterranean, Alexandrian, and Australian identities.
Towards a reverse journey
In the summer of 2018, while in Alexandria, I made an error in my booking of a flight to Spain to attend a conference in Seville. I ended up having two tickets to Madrid that were non-refundable, but I could reschedule one of the flights. After the conference, I made my way to Cordoba and then to Granada. There was a restlessness to my presence in these two glorious cities. Cordoba is a place where you either find love or bring someone you love. In Granada, I stood before the gates of the Alhambra but could not bring myself to enter it. It is so majestic that entering it alone would have felt like selfishness.
The stopover in Casablanca had fate written all over it, as I had a chance encounter with a Moroccan doctoral researcher.
At the back of my mind throughout the trip was the costly accidental ticket. The rescheduled flight was for March 2019, a very inconvenient date during the teaching semester at the American University in Cairo. Since the airline would not allow me any later date, and because I was not quite yet in a holiday mood, I decided to pepper the trip with academic engagements.
The stopover in Casablanca had fate written all over it, as I had a chance encounter with a Moroccan doctoral researcher. After a week in Madrid, I booked my return flight with a three-day layover in Casablanca just to get to know this person better.
As we walked along the Casablanca shore one day, she narrated her life and showed me a black and white picture of her grandfather, a merchant riding a horse at the pyramids. She talked about her paternal ancestors, who were expelled from southern Spain in the closing curtain of the long Spanish Reconquista era, settled in the Moroccan port city of Tetouan in the fifteenth century and remained there until her great grandparents’ time. After that, the descendants migrated south. For a moment, I joked and wondered, what if Al-Fayoum had ever crossed paths with her great grandparents.
I told her that the hardest question I could ever be asked is “where is home?”
It was as if I was on the reverse journey of my great grandfather, or that of the Andalusian shepherd boy Santiago in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (in my defence, I was young when I read the book), who has recurring dreams of a hidden treasure at the pyramids of Giza. His journey across North Africa passes through the town of Al-Fayoum where he meets the alchemist and falls in love with a woman named Fatima.
The inquisitive researcher and I talked about the world and how I never knew a proper sense of home, having lived in several places. I told her that the hardest question I could ever be asked is “where is home?” She gave an evocative response that broke the long silence of my universe, “I will be your home.” Her name is Kenza, meaning “hidden treasure” in Arabic.
After a long series of obstacles, including a pandemic that is not kind to movement, we eventually married last summer. Hopefully someday, we can make it to Cordoba and, maybe, eventually cross the gates of Alhambra in Granada. Inshallah. For the time being, we will head to Alexandria, and do the ritual walk along the corniche until we arrive at the wave breakers along the Sidi Gaber shore, only to sit down, facing the sea, eating couscousy bel sukkar, sweet couscous cooked the Egyptian way with shredded coconut, butter, nuts, sultanas, cinnamon and hot milk.
***
References
Eickelman, Dale F (eds.) Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination Comparative Studies On Muslim Societies (1990).
Norman Rosh, A. M. R. (1994). Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims in Medieval Spain: Cooperation and Conflict. Leiden, E.J. Brill.
Razzaz, M. E. (2013) In the Footsteps of Mystics and Intellectuals: The Andalusi Legacy in Egypt Rawi Magazine.
Von Grunebaum, G. E. (1970). Classical Islam: A History, 600 A.D. to 1258 A.D. New York, Taylor & Francis.
Woidich, P. B. a. M. (2018). The Formation of the Egyptian Arabic Dialect Area. Arabic Historical dialectology: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Approaches. C. Holes. Oxford, Oxford University Press: xix, 422 pages.
***
All illustrations for the Mediterranean Routes series were produced by Atelier Glibett in Tunis.
I have uploaded my book chapter on Mo Salah that came out this year with the University of California Press. Click here for the PDF
Amro Ali, “Mo Salah, a Moral Somebody?” in Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century. ed. Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 90-102.
