Amro Ali, “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif, (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2021) pp. 41-67.PDF version
“Dreams of the detainee” (1961). Painting by Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun. Courtesy of the Barjeel Art Foundation.
Summary: The protest cries of karama (dignity) in 2011 saw the emergence of a new subjectivity in the Arab world that birthed a new citizenship paradigm and elevated the citizenry as a compelling sovereign collective. Karama developed not only as a form of bottom-up universal humanism but also independently outside the confines of academia, religious-secular debates, and even human rights organizations. For many decades, karama had been reserved for the loftiness of the nation and liberation struggles, whereas karama for the individual meant a moral virtue that constituted an apolitical being. In 2011, however, the understanding of karama made a phenomenal leap from the moral into the political realm and thus became a political force in its own right. Karama developed into a self-contained movement, a philosophy that people yearned to develop, encapsulating a story that expands the moral imagination and asks its protagonists to imbibe the rhythm of life with a higher temporal calling. It is the citizen’s inherent worthiness and inalienable right to make the social contract.
I wrote a brief essay for the Forum Transregionale Studien on the techniques I undertook to teach sociology and philosophy to the Egyptian public and to elevate the agency of the audience members.
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.
The youth had attended the first event in a long series of lectures and workshops (2017–2018) that I co-ran with Mona Shahien, the director of Tahrir Lounge Goethe, in Cairo, Alexandria and Minya, mostly in Arabic and some in English, that aimed to introduce philosophy and sociology to the Egyptian public in a comprehensible and practical way. I want to focus on the audience participant as an agent and I will outline, albeit not exhaustively, how the public teaching of sociology and philosophy can be merged with a certain structure, approach and content that elevates the agency of audiences. The project consisted of ten lectures; a workshop on Benjamin’s storytelling and aura, Arendt’s Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa, and a theater play. I will focus mainly on the lectures as they were the primary thrust of the project and hold promise for academics, intellectuals and practitioners who seek to convey the ideas of the academy to the public.
The Theatre of Thought (not a theater as such but lectures) manifesto could be summed up as:
the public should be recognised, and elevated, as the primary ideal, and the individual’s present difficulties in experiencing or attaining pluralism and civic responsibility is tied to the city’s loss of meaning and the citizen’s alienation from one another. The development of philosophical thinking can help address this malaise.[1]
The project explored the notion of restoring the individual’s dignity and agency by ‘recalibrating’ them both to relate to the city. It raised the following questions: How can historical imaginaries, ideas, persons, sensibilities and aesthetics work their way into renegotiating the citizen’s relationship to the city? How can a crippling nostalgia be appropriated for a forward-looking civic vision? How do philosophical themes make one understand the familiar spaces, such as neighborhoods and coffeehouses, better? How can individuals and groups endow their urban terrain with a clearer identity and a relatively better coherent narrative? Does self-expression disguise a different set of established rules and practices in which nonconformity begins to look quite similar? How do we reconcile the digital order with the terrestrial order? What are the implications of perceiving the other, in terms of trustworthiness and reliability, when they are dissolved in a digital swarm?
It has been my long-running interest to merge the field of sociology and the ideas of philosophy to produce a particular type of discussion for Egyptian and Arab contexts. One way to do this was to approach an underdeveloped subdiscipline: Sociological philosophy. The American sociologist Randal Collins describes and validates this area as such: “[N]ormative self-reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology’s scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones” and “[i]f knowledge (or discourse in general) is social, then sociology should be in the most important position to reflect on the nature of philosophy as a form of knowledge or discourse.”[2] To put it another way, philosophy on its own is akin to the blazing sun, while sociology lends the shades that slightly obscure but reveal hues, tints, tones, tinges and contours of the philosophical subject. Philosophy in its ‘purest’ essence can be at high risk of handicapping itself from conveying ideas, making dense texts inaccessible and driving away readers and listeners.
Engaging Agency
Why would a university student in Assuit take the five-hour train journey specifically for an event in Cairo and return the same night? How do we end up with a peculiar scene of an Azhari scholar seated next to a worker from a jeans factory? The why question is critical to make sense of agency and what motivates people to come to an event mostly out of their domain of studies or usual interests. The answers to these questions were helped by the post-lecture conversations and the efficient feedback mechanism instituted by the Tahir Lounge Goethe. Part of the reason why the events could attract audiences was due to Shahien strongly believing in the project’s endeavor, prioritizing it, and putting resources into organization, promotion, and translation. In Cairo’s case, it was also helped by the venue, the Goethe Institute, being central and easy to reach by metro. Moreover, like all cultural spaces, there is often a significant number of returning audience members. However, there were overlapping and distinct factors that need further explanation.
The motives included many attendees seeking, to an extent, to compensate for a dysfunctional education system. For a number of young women from conservative families, the evening events were a way to justify their absence from home to gain extracurricular educational value. It was often some sort of dissatisfaction with the status quo as a sufficient underlying motive for going to these types of events. A number of audience faces at the start of the session revealed a weary gloom as if they had stepped out of the trenches of the suffocated public sphere. They did. The facial expressions are what one would expect after a two-hour long-winded session. Ironically, in many instances, it was the reverse in these events. Where frowns can also eventually turn to smiles. These places have become, in some sense, the last spaces of refuge from a public sphere that is increasingly criminalizing independent thought and non-officially sanctioned culture.
The audience participant’s voice and disclosure of identity was essential to their agency; the lecture often allowed a rolling conversation as the presentation unfolded. It was important to create sufficient breaks and meetings after the session, actively introduce members of the audience to each other and ask for their names. What may seem as banal or routine in any lecture event was often a profound experience for many of them. Some had never been in a situation at university in which their ideas were solicited or allowed to challenge the instructor. This was not unique to the project, but it did emphasize the importance of building a small community out of the sessions. The other approach to agency involved throwing down a challenge. Instead of me simply giving book recommendations, I asked them to head to the used book markets in Cairo’s Azbakeya or Alexandria’s Nabi Daniel street to engage with the books that seize their interest. Many did so. For some, reading a book after graduating from university was unheard of unless it was for work purposes.
The event always started with a powerful relatable metaphor. It would be the spearhead that set the tone for the lecture. Metaphors included, for example, the legend of Icarus, the Flying Dutchman and a vintage photo of a woman at the station waiting for the train. The metaphor when employed compellingly enabled the audience to project themselves onto the unfolding narrative of the night and add depth to the dizziness of their alienation, review their perception of social problems and kindle a reconstruction of imagination capacities needed for thinking through social and moral quagmires. It also helps to focus on the philosopher’s topic rather than the philosopher to avoid the problem of mini cults growing around the respective philosopher. This is why the philosopher’s name was not included in the lecture titles.
One of the hurdles can, at times, be dispelling the myth that philosophy is opposed to religion. This often needed to be discussed from the outset, and it helped by pointing out that Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and Augustine of Hippo, among many others, were philosophers. A Muslim woman in a hijab in Minya said to me during the lecture break, “I had always feared philosophy as I felt it was atheist-driven, but I came to it through Kierkegaard because he was Christian.” This was interesting although not unusual. The religiosity of the philosopher or books that show a substantial overlap with faith made audiences highly engaged. Starting off with Arendt’s idea of forgiveness and briefly referencing Islamic and Christian texts on forgiveness, for example, helped to give the philosophical conversation a holistic formation and relatable intimacy without losing sight of the ongoing discussion.
This paper briefly examined the conditions and method of bringing sociological-philosophy to the Egyptian public, as well as the role of agency that engages audiences. I hope in future to expand comprehensively on the concept and look at class, social strata, generations, audience dynamics, content delivery, translation and the project’s successes and setbacks, among other factors.
Following the closing of the “Creative Public” session in 2017, a boy scout leader from the audience approached Shahien and said he wished he brought a 19-year-old boy scout he knew to these events. Shahien replied that he can bring him to the next session. The elder replied this was no longer possible as he had recently met the youth at a Cairo coffeehouse to discuss his future that would see him enter the college of engineering. During the chat, the waiter serving the coffee overheard them and stated that he himself had recently graduated from engineering. The prospective student was struck with horror that this could also be his future – serving coffee after completing some four hard years of engineering studies. Two days later, he committed suicide.
This tragic incident would shape successive events. Animating Spaces of Meaning sought responses to the rise of mediocrity and fragmentation of meaning that have become a familiar part of everyday urban life. It also elucidated that all study disciplines, professions and workplaces of all stripes can have their dignity, respect and even charm. Engineering and medicine should not be the only attainable routes to powered social mobility; the social sciences, arts and humanities, and any other stigmatized disciplines, for that matter, need to be elevated into highly respected areas of study. Conveying the sociological-philosophy lessons also means keeping a pulse on the lives and stories that the public brings to the sessions and then responding and shaping the following session accordingly. In some respects, it echoes Hannah Arendt’s personal axiom that “thought itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guideposts by which to take its bearings.”[3]
[1] Amro Ali, “When the Debris of Paradise Calls,” Amro Ali, 15 December 2017, https://amroali.com/2017/12/debris-paradise-calls-philosophical-concept-play/ [accessed 15 February 2021].
[2] Collins, Randall, “For a Sociological Philosophy,” Theory and Society 17/5, 1988, 669-702, 671. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00162615.
[3] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 14.
Citation: Amro Ali, Bringing Philosophy and Sociology to the Egyptian Public, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 15.04.2021, http://trafo.hypotheses.org/28053
My article has been published in KAS (open access) and it examines the fluid, pluralist, and problematic positioning of the Arab label (Arab person, Arab world, Arab spring etc) on its own merit and towards Kurdish, Coptic, and Amazigh identities, among other identities, in the region.
In the opening of her book, Fezzes in the River: Identity politics and European diplomacy in the Middle East on the eve of World War II (2011), Sarah Shields narrates an incident on 10 May 1938 in what may appear to us today to be extremely peculiar. In Reyhanli, a town that was contested by Syrian nationalists and the young Turkish state, (it now sits in today’s Turkey on the Syrian border), a chauffeur named Saydo was seated in front of a café chatting. Soon after, a man named Haydar Hassan Musto along with his friends approached Saydo at his table and then launched into a volley of screams at the chauffeur. They “demanded that Saydo declare himself to be an Arab, threatened to kill him if he claimed to be a Turk,” as well as insulting his mother and mocking his “brimmed hat.”[1] What was unusual, at least from our vantage point, is that this exchange did not take place in Arabic or Turkish, but in Kurdish. In other words, a group of Kurds attacked another Kurd for not affiliating in some way with the then fluid Arab identity or realm of Arabness before the identity eventually drew hard borders around the emerging postcolonial regimes.
When is an Arab an Arab, and when is an Arab not an Arab? This is an extremely difficult question to answer but we can mark the 2011 uprisings as a pivotal station on the identity trajectory as the events not only overthrew dictators and shook political establishments to the core, but they also unsettled the Arab identity out of its long drought. The revolutionary waves unleashed a pluralism that loosened the borders of Arabness, while reanimating or crystalising activity by minorities to make demands for their collective identity. One of the dominating themes in the formation of social movements and civil societies in the region has been the question of identity. If you sit through these sessions, matters of identity can at times consume a large part of the event’s energy or, in some cases, torpedo the event.
Identity is extremely fluid and it is difficult alone to use it as a measurement without factoring age, class, gender, and most importantly, the audience being addressed. As Yasir Sulleiman notes, “the fact that it is not possible to posit identity without speaking of difference, of otherness.”[2] With this in mind, and in order to bring in some focus, rhythm, and structure, I will investigate the term Arab world not only as a claimant to a geographical space stretching from Iraq to Morocco, but as an organizing concept and linguistic “blueprint” that enables the legitimisation of terms like the Arab spring, pan-Arabism, anti-Arabism, and various Arab identities to emerge and be contested, even if in the diaspora. I will argue that while the Arab world is inherently problematic as a term, it is the least bad option available compared to the alternative terms and acronyms. Yet the Arab world enables Gulf regimes to treat this space, the digital space no less, as a political totality and field of interest to ensure democratisation does not take hold in the region. I will use the example of a UAE troll farm stoking anti-Amazigh animosity in Algeria’s Hirak protests while examining how a viral hashtag was fueled by Amazigh activists for identity construction purposes and to “divorce” from the Arab world. The months following the Tunisian revolution wrestled the term Arab world from regimes that made it a source of oppression and sphere of illiberal activity. A decade later, the term has been retaken violently by these regimes. Nonetheless, the conversation to unpack the Arab world needs to continue towards a pluralist direction, with or without elite blessings.
A coin in one’s pocket called “Arab”
Journaling and ethnographic observations over the years point to a dizzying use of the Arab identity that takes on different meanings at different times, or its multiple uses in the same conversation for different aims. Take for example how an Egyptian at a Cairo coffeehouse might use Arab in three different contexts by saying the following: “The roaming Arabs near Marsa Matrouh (a city in northwest Egypt) are not trustworthy,”; “The (Gulf) Arabs have way too much oil money,”; and upon meeting a Syrian, “The Syrians have brightened up Egypt, the Arab nation has to stick together.” There were three different uses of Arab to signal mistrust, greed, or solidarity. The third one is a disclosure to having an Arab identity. For an Egyptian, particularly Muslim, speaking Arabic might be enough to classify him or herself as an Arab, that is, a sociolinguistic identity. A Moroccan might have an ethnic definition of Arab and therefore all the ready to reject the label. This is part of the reason why those from Egypt and the Levant are sometimes puzzled at the Maghreb region’s ambivalence as Arab identity does not generally equate with being a descendent of the seventh-century Arab conquerors of the region.
It is not unusual for individuals in the Arab world to rebuff any identification with the Arab label or had once self-identified as Arabs only to drop the label and take on their country’s historical imaginary such as pharaonic Egypt, ancient Phoenicia, or Assyria. Yet it is also common to encounter the strategic use of (or close proximity to) an Arab identity by individuals who generally do not subscribe to the label or have been known to deny it. A young Tunisian woman staunchly refuses any association with an Arab identity until she moves to a university in the US to start her master’s degree; during orientation week, she comes across an Arab students’ club and is suddenly eager to join it. Two Coptic sisters from Cairo, one gets a job in Toronto, and the other in Kuwait. The latter’s socialization made her more amiable to notions of Arabness while the other completely rejects it. A group of Lebanese businessmen, including a number of Maronite Catholics who do not generally associate with the Arab label, visit a UAE embassy to negotiate a deal, their conversation includes not only a loosening of an anti-Arab discourse, but an endorsement of Arabness to secure their request. An Amazigh in Tangiers who meets a visiting Syrian invokes the mention of an Arab great-grandfather, which he may otherwise not have done so with other Moroccans.
So, how to make sense of this? The authors Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein in seeking to understand the shifting identities of Jews in Latin America argue that ethnicity is simply “a piece within a broader identity mosaic.”[3] Using an apt analogy, they state that “identity might be analyzed as a coin in a pocket filled with coins of different values. Sometimes we need 25 cents and we pull out one ethnicity quarter. Other times we need 100 cents and the ethnicity coin is just a penny of the total.”[4] The array of colours and contradictions prompts a person to take out a certain “coin” when needed.
Therefore, it would be mistaken to say the above examples are opportunistic. Rather, it is the nature of identity to change depending on time, place, audience, and, if not adopting the label, coming closer to it or blurring the lines to establish familiarity and intimacy with the target subject. Taking this a step further beyond the human subject as Arab/non-Arab, we can establish some “solidity” by examining the identity of space as many will have a shared idea of what constitutes the Arab world.
The love-hate relationship with the term “Arab world”
It is not uncommon in the literature to see the justification for the use of “Arab world.” It will be used in the “conventional geographic sense” that constitutes the members of the Arab league.[5] Older sources would restrict it to the “countries of the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt.”[6]Acknowledging complexities also does not preclude the use of Arab world which “covers a complex area where one finds vast differences in politics and ideologies,” while stressing the “underlying similarities… in cultural and social formations” of the populations of the Arab world.[7] The recognition of the term’s difficulty is usually given attention but still, it sticks: “Being conscious of the numerous problem and contrasts, we feel nevertheless, that there is a certain complex unity, which permits the use of ‘Arab world.’”[8] Another work spotlights the Arabic language as the driving force behind the Arab world as it is the “most obvious sign of a cultural or ethnic identity, and emotional feelings arise when there is any hint that language loss is possible.”[9] For other authors, it is a challenge to shed it off, for at the very least, it may be the best “shorthand expression.”[10]The fact that they need to validate the usage of the term highlights the fraught difficulty that it engenders. Yet, many books will use Arab world without giving any explanation as to why they did so, as if it was a natural and given term.
A large part of the reason why the Arab world keeps sticking is that the alternatives have not been useful. The MENA (Middle East and North Africa) is too broad as it allows the entry of Israel, Turkey, and Iran. That would be fine if the discussion included those three countries, but if one is referring to the swathe of territories from Morocco to Iraq due to the similarities that include core political economies, shared public spheres, historical circulation of knowledge production, and the most obvious, linguistic ties, then MENA does not help. SWANA (South-West Asia and North Africa) is another device trumped as a “decolonial” term, unlike MENA which was spawned by Eurocentrism. SWANA was conceived in diasporic spaces in the US to transcend nationalist and ethnic lines by elevating the regional dimension. These noble intentions are eclipsed by the fact that SWANA, same as MENA, is rarely used in the region. It raises the question if SWANA in attempting to dislodge other foreign terms, is it not also imposing a term from abroad? While perhaps better than MENA or Middle East, it still repeats the MENA fallacy by not crystallising the unique dynamics at play on the Rabat-Baghdad axis. Even the term Middle East, despite its colonial origin, is heavily used in everyday regional discourse because it still comes closer to the Arabic idea of Mashreq (east). Some authors in Europe and North America will use MENA and SWANA but make it conditional that they will limit it only to the Arab or Arabic-speaking parts of the region, which then simply becomes a longer route to say the Arab world. Perhaps Arabic-speaking world might be a candidate? It is somewhat more convincing than Arab world but then we are left with the exclusion of non-Arabic speaking minorities, similar to how the complaint is lodged at the term Arab world for excluding non-Arab minorities. Furthermore, it is not difficult to see Arab and Arabic being used as a synonym or interchangeably as if they meant the same thing. As it stands, the Asharq Al-Awsat (Middle East), Mashreq (east), Maghreb (west), Al-Alem Al-Araby (Arab world), Al-dowal Al-Araby (Arab countries) are the most widely used terms in the region.
I have heard activists at times say the Arab world is a byproduct of orientalist or colonial constructs. This presumes that there was no Arabic-speaking imaginary prior to the twentieth century that would have been necessary to facilitate trade, pilgrimage routes, alliances, diplomacy, marriages, and scholarly exchanges. The Arab world is used by pre-twentieth century regional scholars but certainly did not have the same politicised meaning as it does today. In an issue of Ṣihyūn, a late 1800s Coptic periodical, Alaa Murad, a PhD researcher on the nineteenth century nahḍa (renaissance) intellectualism and the competing historical claims over identities, notes that the Arab world is rendered in the text but clearly does not refer to the Arab world recognisable in post-World War One scholarship, let alone any coherent political and social imaginaries. For Egyptian Copts, it was a reference that is “vaguely adjacent to an Arabic tongue and seemed to include Egyptian Copts in this designation but not Ethiopian Copts.” Notions of Arabness and the Arab world have always been around, but its boundaries were blurry, Murad adds, and it is difficult to know how it was defined: linguistically? Ethnically? Religiously? Ethnographies-religiously? Geographically?
Moreover, the contemporary use of Arab World can be racist, orientalist, liberating, alienating, pragmatic, or informative, depending on the source and framing. The mention of the Arab world by a far right-wing extremist in a speech rally in Amsterdam is obviously not of the same conception when used by an activist leader in a protest march in Beirut.
Another way the term Arab world is challenged by nationalists is by making the exceptionalism argument. For example, a segment of Moroccan activists and intellectuals have sternly rejected the idea of Morocco being described as an Arab country or being included in the Arab world but will then indirectly reinforce the country’s traditional position because exceptionalism arguments need a comparative structure. To say “unlike the rest of the Arab world, Morocco has been able to” still drags Morocco back into the Arab world simply because the latter is its frame of reference. Irrespective if “Arab” is used in a positive or negative sense. Every country in the Arab world makes some sort of popular claim that their country is unique, neglecting the transnational influences that built it up. An Egyptian citizen will boast of their country as “Om al dunya” (“mother of the world”) and its soft power over the Arab world, yet the reverse is true. Egypt has been heavily shaped by the constructive and destructive forces of its region including Dubai-style capitalism, Tunisia’s revolution, Moroccan Sufism, Saudi Wahabism, and Levant-authored pan-Arabism.
Identity shifts, even if hypothetically underpinned through a collective agreement by the population, do not simply make a country miraculously escape from the socio-historical forces that made it part of that region. A large swathe of the Arab world is not going to significantly alter its contemporary imaginary of Morocco whether it be the kingdom’s attempt to gain entry into the European Communities (the precursor to the EU) in 1987 based on its “European-ness” and failed,[11]or its building of economic pathways to sub-Saharan Africa through an indigenous framework capitalising on its rich Amazigh heritage. These factors do not change the rest of the Arab world’s, or Muslim world’s, perception of the integrity of the Maghreb to its body. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s pivoting Spain to Latin America and away from Europe did not equal socio-culturally separating the Iberian peninsula from Europe from the perspective of the continent’s inhabitants.[12]At worst (or best?), post-Franco Spain eventually went from a “different” to a “normal” European country.[13] Just as the same argument played out in Lebanon for decades, in which Albert Hourani wrote in 1947 that an idea might take hold in Lebanon that sees a small state “not [on] the western edge of the Arabic Moslem world but the eastern edge of Western Christendom…with its face turned towards Europe.”[14]Lebanon has been anything but divorced from the region, no matter where it turns its face towards. Social movements and those with an interest in identity questions need to be constantly aware of identity shifts but short of a cataclysmic event on the magnitude of the loss of Moorish Spain or Palestine, a narrative continuum will underpin how these countries are envisioned, engaged, and reproduced.
The Arab world of 2021 is not the Arab world of 2011. A handful of the region’s academics and civil society workers who are ambiguous about the term Arab world were liberally making use of the term in 2011. The change could be for many reasons: a move towards a nationalist, ethnic, or minority worldview; discomfort with the term’s association with illiberal currents; Arab regimes that sponsor partisan violence in their “fellow Arab brother” countries; not to mention the trauma and despair inflicted by war, counter-revolutions, terrorism, and ISIS. However, 2011 could simply be the old adage of “Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.” The term Arab, for a while at least, redeemed itself enough for Gulf News to title an article “It’s Cool to be Arab again”[15]which was quoted by other outlets. The case for using another term than the Arab world is a sound one, but the names on offer are not constructive.
The “Arab Spring”
The Arab Spring as a term has faced even more difficulty. The literature often prefaces why Arab Spring will be used or not be used in the text. It is shunned because of its seasonal imposition (except Syria, protests in other Arab countries broke out in winter), its association with the failed 1968 Prague spring, and its usage in 2005 following the quasi-liberalisation of political spaces in the Middle East.[16] On the other hand, it could also be argued that unlike uprisings and revolutions which have a timeframe, spring is more elastic and metaphorical, it could be employed as an undetermined phase or recurring waves of resistance. The term is used widely in the Arab world and for some peculiar reason, scholars cannot seem to fathom that a term can be re-appropriated. A term’s dubious origins do not negate its subsequent redefinition and eventual acquisition by local narratives. Surprisingly, the criticism is often at the “spring” part and not the “Arab” part of the term. The legitimate criticisms by minorities that they feel excluded are barely factored into the discussion. However, there is a key reason why the Arab Spring still holds up as a compelling term.
The simultaneous uprisings of 2011 “recreated” the idea of the Arab world because they did not unfold in non-Arab countries. If there was any skepticism of an Arab world, the uprisings reaffirmed a new pan-Arabism that scholars had long thought to have waned since the 1967 Arab defeat by Israel. “If any doubts remain that Arabs retain a sense of common political identity despite living in 20 different states, the events of this year should put them to rest,”[17] argued F. Gregory Cause III, in perhaps one of the most popular shared articles amongst scholars in 2011. The dizzying domino effect following Tunisia’s January 2011 protests helped spark the revolution in Egypt (25 January) and Yemen (27 January) with the former toppling Mubarak on 11 February; which was followed by the eruption in Bahrain (14 February); the Libyan protests (15 February); Moroccan protests (19 February), and the Syria uprising a month later (15 March). To say nothing of the widespread simultaneous challenges to governments in the region. These events could arguably only happen because “of shared built-in sociological constructs regarding freedom, resistance, unity, justice” and explains why they employed a “similar vocabulary with comparable objectives.”[18]
The events of 2011 were erected on the idea of the Arab public sphere and space that not only formed a “shifting frontier between state forces and ordinary citizens,”[19]but commenced in 2011 as a “single, unified narrative of protest with shared heroes and villains, common stakes, and a deeply felt sense of shared destiny.”[20]This phenomenon internalised a “new kind of pan-Arabist identity” one that was from below rather than imposed from the top, while also focusing protest energies toward domestic factors.[21]
Many years later, ambivalence towards the 2011 Arab Spring was witnessed in the protests by the reluctant successors of Sudan and Algeria in 2018 and 2019. While solidarity was visible through signs and chants with other simultaneous popular mobilisations in the Arab world, similar exceptionalism arguments were made which ironically reinforced similarities. For example, following the breakout of protests in Algeria in February 2019, it became a pattern to hear Algerians emphasise their uprising as uniquely Algerian and divorced from the Arab spring, partly due to the Arab spring’s perceived failure and because of its homogenous term that would not sit well in a country with Arab and Amazigh heritage. Yet, again, the frames of reference were still the Arab spring. Hours would barely pass without an Algerian commentator or activist invoking the haunting spectre of facing their own el-Sisi and Egyptian-style military coup. They were not hinting at Latin American or Asian despots, but, specifically, Arab ones and within the framework of the region’s past decade.
The distortion of identity in the digital terrain
It is not unusual to encounter young scholars and activists who upon meeting at conferences and workshops in different cities in Europe will, after disclosing Morocco as their homeland and place of residence, will immediately follow it up with unsolicited variations of “I’m Amazigh, not Arab.” This type of response I have yet to encounter with any other group from the region. In a sense, the Amazigh struggle is not new but it can come across as new due to their struggle for recognition being in vivid flux and accessing new outlets beyond the Francophone world. The reason why I have chosen to focus on Amazigh activism through the use of social media relates to the growing numbers that seemingly dominate internet traffic in minority politics from the region (in this context, I use the word “minority” not in terms of numbers, but those who sit on the lower end of the power structure). As well as how their activism has drawn the attention of Gulf countries that treat the Arab world, term and concept, as a totality and their sphere of influence. The Amazigh occupy a critical node in the transnational activist spectrum, and this is clashing with the authoritarian streak of (if not quasi) Arabism and pan-Arabism in which authoritarian governments have been active in thwarting mobilisation across the region.
The intrusion of UAE troll farms in the Algerian protests in 2019 is a case study of disturbing signs to come. An Algerian Facebook page Fake news DZ was created in April 2019 to reveal “fake news and attempts to manipulate public opinion via social networks.”[22]Facebook pages sprang up “with the main goal of leading a counter-revolution online.”[23] Algerian media started to point the finger at the UAE, confirmed by international media, which was pushing virulent anti-Amazigh prejudice, and accusing them of being in the pay of France. France or French were the most frequently used words to falsely accuse opponents of colluding with the former colonial boogeyman.[24] DZ also spotted outdated photos of the Kabylie region showing the deployment of special units as a warning to Algerians to stay home and avoid joining the scheduled Friday protests. It was described by DZ as an attempt to “destabilise the movement.”[25]
Algeria, undoubtedly, has more than its fair share of regime loyalists to carry out a smear campaign, and it would probably be more difficult to know a troll based in Algeria than one in the UAE. But it still matters. The injection of Gulf-funded troll farms is a new development that will impact adversely social movements in the region and worsen polarisation. The situation before troll farms can be glanced from a study on Egypt’s transition between the overthrow of president Mubarak on 11 February 2011 and the coup on 3 July 2013 in which social media “exacerbate and intensify those factors which make failure more likely than in comparable cases which did not feature high levels of social media usage.”[26]Identity is a key component of three developments that includes the reinforcement of solidarity for in-group solidarity and demonisation for the out-group; consolidation of crisis narratives with its own martyrs and villains. Finally, the mobilisation of fear through visual imagery, rumours, perceived outrage, and emotionally-induced, and often unconfirmed, stories.[27]Existential insecurity takes the helm and hostile camps are further polarised. Yet, that era of “extraordinary uncertainty”[28] was taking place long before the debilitating onslaught of troll farms which now come with significant roadblocks for social movements and civil society.
While the UAE illustrates how Arab identity can be hegemonically reinforced from the patriarchal top, – “the Arab world is not allowed democracy, pluralism, and freedom of speech” – cyberspace also acts as a platform in which Amazigh activists challenge Arab identity dominance through “strategic essentialism” which repositions marginalised populations through a shared identity and narrative in the public sphere. As Mokhtar Gambou notes, “The Berber narrative, like any minor narrative seeking to protect itself from an absorbing sameness, must highlight distinct characteristics on the one hand and dim those it shares with the dominant discourse on the other.”[29]
Gambou’s point can be gleaned from an analysis of over 200 Twitter accounts (English, Arabic, and French), including news outlets, that centre Amazigh politics exclusively in order to challenge Arab hegemonic discourse or, less so, black African centrism that denies the indigenous claim to Africa of the “lighter-skinned” Amazigh. Most of the Twitter accounts display a high level of identity policing towards other Twitter users which can be characterised by the following: Requesting the use of Amazigh instead of Berber; protesting against the labeling of Morocco or Algeria as an Arab country; shaming other Amazigh users who claim both Amazigh and Arab identities, or even worse for the suspect, acknowledging Amazigh heritage but claiming to be an Arab. The last point was prominently seen with French-Moroccan reporter Aziza Nait Sibaha, who denied making such a statement, and there is no evidence that she ever did make this claim, yet she was harassed incessantly by other Twitter users.[30]Moreover, there is a strong brandishing or citation of “DNA testing” for heritage legitimisation. The term Arab is often used in a negative, neutral, or comparative manner vis-à-vis the Amazigh subject. A high number of accounts do not use their real names.
In the disorienting swarm of Twitter, a viral hashtag can give some structure to how an event evolves because it will have a clear origin, focused subject content, and eventual trickling out. One case that is of particular interest unfolded following the Arabic hashtag (لستم_عربا#) “You are not Arab” which emerged on 19 June 2020 by the @fr2bit account that argued the origins of humanity are from Africa and displayed a photo of different pantone skin colours.[31]This is the first known use of the hashtag. It was supposed to indicate to the Amazigh on Twitter that this provides “proof” that they are not Arab. The same day, the account @najlanakadh quoted a news source from portail-Amaazigh.com in which a Saudi troll (@wy_4h) made an Arab supremacy claim, but he did not use the hashtag.[32]The article nonetheless linked the hashtag to him with a stereotypical stock photo of a Gulf Arab in sunglasses. This was followed by @Tripolitaniano tweeting the same article with the “you are not Arab” hashtag. In effect, the news article propagated a false claim that a “massive campaign” by Gulf Arabs was launched to deny that the Amazigh were Arabs.[33] The hashtag quickly spread and was used by accounts that identify as Amazigh to exhibit pride and attack Arabs, while using the counter hashtag (لسنا_عرب#) “We are not Arabs” as a mark of defiance. The campaign was picked up widely, from a Tunis radio station to BBC Arabic.[34]
How the initial message got intentionally twisted and embellished should be of concern. What made the campaign suspect from the start is that the region’s dominant discourse pushes an Arabisation and uniformity that spreads or assumes Arab identity in Arabic-speaking lands. It is unlikely to withdraw the Arab identity. What became clear from observing the engagement with the hashtag is how accounts fell into a pattern of virulently seeking exclusion. This is not unusual in identity construction, after all, “Otherness or difference helps structure the Self and enables symbolic meanings to emerge.”[35] Daniella Merolla offers a sound explanation of the simplifying nature of this particular style of online Amazigh activism, “If the unifying discourse on the past and the cultural heritage is simplified and simplifying, such a simplification is ‘strategic’ because it functions to get people ‘moving’ and to engage in cultural and political forms of activism online and offline.”[36] This would be fine in other situations, but the hashtag campaign, just like the troll farm attack, leaves one with more questions as to how to better inform the cyber public to prevent or torpedo the next wave of cyber hate. It took a few days to question the campaign, with some Arab and Amazigh activists employing Islamic appeals to equality, but it was too late by then. The hashtag still circulates, albeit in trickles, into 2021.
Conclusion
One of the enduring successes of colonialism is not only that it fomented ethnic divisions and sectarian cleavages, but it made them seem natural, historical, and timeless to the respective populations. What often is a century-old problem, is treated as a centuries-old problem. Social movements have a responsibility to critique the politics of identity that is more recent than many would imagine. It is dangerous to accept certain divisive myths as historical. Just as many today would be repulsed by the now-weary myth of Arabs and Jews “fighting each other for centuries” to legitimise the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or take a hands-off approach to Palestinian suffering. Moreover, the Arab identity cannot simply be taken for granted or assumed. Are we talking about Arab as an ethnic or sociolinguistic identity? Or something else? This slip of communication contributes to gross misunderstandings in the region.
The term Arab world is still problematic and needs to be further unpacked towards a pluralist direction that makes the Arab identity more elastic and widens the net to new conceptions as it once did in 2011, and even better a century before. In its current incarnation, not helped by the powers that be, it still perpetuates an overbearing discourse that unsettles the sense of place, space, and time for minorities. However, the alternatives to Arab world are still not an effective instrument to address the transnational sphere stretching from Iraq to Morocco. Perhaps a movement of the Arab world towards a language construct like Latin America? A redefinition or a new term still awaits. The idea of the Arab world, along with Arab identity in general, enjoyed a honeymoon period in 2011 and saw pan-Arabism engendered with pluralism and dignity, only to be soon usurped by regimes committed to grievous wrongs – not in the name of some abstract Arabism, but by regime proximity to the language and remnants of authoritarian Arabism.
The troll farm scourge and hate-laced viral hashtags provide a picture of the need for social movements to wrestle identity-construction questions away from the digital storm. As I have argued before, “when the digital order subverts or skews the terrestrial order, it undermines the abilities of civil society and social movements to give name, shape, and form, to the world they are seeking to make a better place.”[37] A digital ethics discussion and platform are needed for the region’s social movements and documented strategies to deal with politically consequential trolls and misleading hashtag campaigns.
The normalisation of ethnic genetics and commercial DNA testing, along with terms like “pure Egyptians”, “Berber blood”, “authentic Amazigh”, and “Arab race” can only be a road to darker territory. Accountable social movements are not expected to halt the wave of individuals posting DNA-test results on the internet, but they need to explicitly critique the problem of this approach with respect and humility. The aim should be to create conditions where it is sufficient for one to culturally claim to be Amazigh, Assyrian, Nubian, Arab, and so forth. The endeavour should be to humanise marginalised peoples, not turn them into caricatures in a historical play.
While strategic essentialism and the whole identities literature will provide an array of different answers, it should be taken into consideration along with locally lived experiences and the complexity of human beings. One should keep in mind that social media is not the best representation of ground realities. Agadir and Benghazi are a world away from hashtags. One way to think about this, for example, is how surprising the function of faith does not figure prominently in these identity battles. Is it because prioritisation of faith can deprioritise ethnic identity politics or make temporal identities porous? Liberals, socialists, Arab-Islamists, and secular nationalists, not to mention the highly problematic diaspora organisations in Europe and North America who largely dominate the discourse, will skew the collective identity labels that can often be far removed from the daily lives of the people they claim to represent.
We may need to return to the Kurd, actually, we should instead call him by his name Saydo, at the café and politely inform him that there are many coins in all our pockets and he can choose one that suits him and come help build something better than what is present around us. Or we can just leave him alone to enjoy his coffee and conversation with his friend. That too is also an identity.
[1]. Sarah D. Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3.
[2]. Yasir Suleiman, Arabic in the Fray: Language Ideology and Cultural Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 16-17.
[3]. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, “Challenging Particularity: Jews as a Lens on Latin American Ethnicity,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1080/17442220600908010. 251.
[5]. Will Kymlicka and Eva Pföstl, “Introduction,” in Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World, ed. Will Kymlicka and Eva Pföstl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 19.
[6]. Mohammed Shafi Agwani, The United States and the Arab World, 1945-1952 (Institute of Islamic Studies, Muslim University, 1955). 1.
[7]. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley, Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 7.
[8]. Djambatan, Atlas of the Arab World and the Middle East (Macmillan, 1960). 1.
[9]. Reem Bassiouney and Keith Walters, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic and Identity (London: Routledge, 2020).
[10]. Nicola Christine Pratt, Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007). 22.
[11]. Volkan İPek and Selin Türkeş-Kılıç, “European Turkey and European Morocco: Two Identity Construction Cases in the Path to the EEC Membership,” Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 6, no. 2 (12/30 2019), https://doi.org/10.26513/tocd.607538. 43.
[12]. Désirée Kleiner-Liebau, Migration and the Construction of National Identity in Spain (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009). 56.
[26]. Marc Lynch, Deen Freelon, and Sean Aday, “Online clustering, fear and uncertainty in Egypt’s transition,” Democratization 24, no. 6 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2017.1289179. 2.
[29]. Mokhtar Ghambou, “The “Numidian” Origins of North Africa,” in Berbers and Other: Beyond Tribe and Nation in the Maghrib, ed. Katherine E. Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 156.
[34]. “#WeAreNotArabs, this is how people of the Maghreb responded to the campaign #YouAreNotArabs launched by Saudis against North African countries (Arabic),” Mosaique FM (22 June 2020). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOb5-3xXx60&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=MosaiqueFM. ; “‘You are not Arabs’: controversy over campaign questioning the ‘Arabism’ of North African countries,” BBC Arabic (22 June 2020). https://www.bbc.com/arabic/trending-53141047.
[35]. Yasir Suleiman, Arabic, Self and Identity: A Study in Conflict and Displacement (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 71.
[36]. Daniela Merolla, “Cultural Heritage, Artistic Innovation, and Activism on Amazigh Berber Websites,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 32, no. 1 (2020/01/02 2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2019.1624153. 14.
“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (Arabic).
The “Mediterranean Without Borders” map was produced, in the political euphoria of 2011, by Paris-based artist Sabine Réthoré. Its profound simple 90-degree rotation not only underwrites an artistic streak, but can also largely impact one’s perspective. The end result is that the question is no longer about north-south as much as it is about parity and closeness. In the context of Mediterranean geopolitics, refugees crossing and drowning, fortress Europe, colonial history, skewed markets, condescending north to south (top to bottom) attitudes, post-colonial stagnation and so forth, means the simple rotation of the map is a big political statement with humanizing tendencies that make transnational ties look more intimate. That is an artistic statement in itself. This does not mean it will work for all maps, but it does so with the Mediterranean basin given the weight of its contemporary politics and long rich history.
“Mediterranean Without Borders” Sabine Réthoré, 2011 (French).
The map was shown at an event in Brussels in November 2019, where I was invited to speak to EU and MENA youth, the opening was made by Marseille-based writer Mary Fitzgerald who presented this curious map of the Mediterranean rotated 90 degrees to the right. Fitzgerald provoked a lively discussion and the audience related more to the alternative map than its standard appearance. When I shared the image with others, it elicited various responses from it looking like a fantasy map to the humorous old woman trying to avoid stepping into the mud. Intimacy was a key response to the map. When I posted it to Twitter, geographer Joshua S. Campbell responded “Amazing how rotating a map changes your perspective. Maps tend to ossify spatial relationships in your mind…tweak the map, break the pattern. Also why spatial thinkers are useful, they possess the ability to rotate spatial relationships in their mind.”
What Réthoré’s artwork also does is furnish a metaphysical canopy to Gianluca Solera’s idea of transnational Mediterranean citizenship and breathes life into the dying political imagination. Solera argues
“the Mediterranean could become again a cradle of a new Renaissance if conditions were put in place for a project of transnational citizenship. A shared political initiative, putting together the various experiences of resistance, protest and popular alternatives, and building a Mediterranean platform for a new social contract, so urgent in times of profound crisis both in Europe and in the Mediterranean” (Solera, 2017).
Indeed, it may appear that we are a long way from this, but the grim reality of securitization, refugee crisis, and a pandemic overturning the world as we know it, can eclipse the years that saw thousands of initiatives taking place, stories, theorizing, training, in what Solera has deemed a Mediterranean “Shadow government.” Moreover, the region is moving towards a thinking in which the social contract will require rewriting as it faces the pressures of epidemiological threats, climate change, alarm at the dominance of big tech, to the receding of the long-haul flight in favor of local and regional travel, a travel bubble in some cases.
This is crucial if civil society, social movements, and transnational Mediterranean responsibility is to take on meaningful qualities towards how the digital order and terrestrial order are to be negotiated. Italian sociologist Franco Cassano noted:
“Unbridled technology does not signify the abandonment of earthy grittiness, but its perfecting it through the will to power. Mediterranean man, instead, lives always between land and sea; he restrains one through the other; and, in his technological delay, in his vices, there is also a moderation that others have lost. The unbridled development of technology is not tied to the crossing of land and sea, but to the oceanic lack of moderation, the chasing of the sunset by the sun, the absolutization of the West.” (Cassano, 2011).
In other words, the Mediterranean world is a philosophical gateway to deconstruct fundamentalisms as it has the “capacity to transform our limitations in a common benefit, a tragic memory in the fight against all forms of fundamentalism” (Cassano, 2011). Be it techno-fundamentalism or else.
The above is a short modified extract from my paper, “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The journal article is open access.
This is a short extract from the paper “Re-envisioning Civil Society and Social Movements in the Mediterranean in an Era of Techno-Fundamentalism,” published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The article is open access.
Techno-fundamentalism is the belief that technology is “not only the means and will to triumph over adversity through gadgets and schemes, but the sense that invention is the best of all possible methods of confronting problems” (Vaidhyanathan, 2006). At its essence, techno-fundamentalism sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. When technological thinking becomes central to political thought, it draws high risks to civil society and social movements that now become “arranged around platforms and abstractions” while weakening the link between politically-aware citizens and “locally rooted action” (Bartlett, 2018).
It can be argued that the digital technological realm is generally pursued by civil society and social movements for the securing of freedom for society, through organizing, coordinating, garnering public attention, and evading censorship; while governments often pursue the digital technological realm for securing society from freedom – through control, surveillance, censorship, upholding neoliberal modernity or diversion from civic questions… Techno-fundamentalism produces and thrives in a foggy and spectral environment where real world realities and online abstracts bleed into each other, the latter forming a digital swarm that lacks “internal coherence,” as it is fleeting, unstable, and volatile, and can come across less as a voice than noise (Han, 2017). Thus, when the digital order subverts or skews the terrestrial order, it undermines the abilities of civil society and social movements to give name, shape, and form, to the world they are seeking to make a better place.
This paper explores what drives techno-fundamentalism, arguing that having become a default mode of thinking, more so in the era of the pandemic and likely to hold sway long after, it empties political language of its meaning, disfigures human-technology relationships, expedites the progress fallacy and the mistaken belief that technology is a neutral affair. As a fundamentalism, it has been blind to notice the growing global backlash against technology – an obliviousness that can be observed repeatedly at tech conferences prior to the pandemic. At best, it is considered a sub-point worthy of discussion, such as “the right to disconnect”, as long as it acquiesces to the big progress machine. The literature is awash with the toxins of digital activism, from narcissism to security surveillance. However, this paper will focus on the practical realities of how civil society and social movements are constructively affected by digital technologies, and eventually stumble upon the law of diminishing returns that adversely works against their activism as in the case of scaling and polarization.
The hype of innovation stimulates the onward march of digital technology which has been underpinned by the age-old logical fallacy of argumentum ad novitatem (appeal to novelty), also known as the progress fallacy that says the new or recent is better than what came before it. The new is good without giving substantial analysis of the social and ethical implications of the new technology. The argument is further reinforced by tech protagonists, and everyday society, with a variation of this cliched line: ‘Technology is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, it is how you use it.’ Technology is anything but neutral. The popular line I frequently hear is that a knife can be used to cut vegetables or stab a human being, but this weary trope overlooks the subliminal reality that the mere sight of a knife, let alone holding it, has already altered the moral climate in a room. The knife’s very presence is already biased, the thought of a knife is heavily loaded with potential consequences. Similarly, social media is not neutral in a world of algorithms that push politically charged content and echo chambers that purge pluralistic voices from the discussion. Martin Heidegger would argue the neutrality thesis in technology poses ‘the highest danger’ as it puts us at risk of seeing the world through technological thinking, misleads us to believe that technology is an instrument rather than a worldview, and technology being a human activity rather than a grave matter developing beyond human control (Heidegger, 1977)
Published in the European Institute of the Mediterranean (Barcelona). The article (PDF) is open access.
This paper focuses on the concept of techno-fundamentalism which side sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. The article provides an analysis of the opportunities and backlashes that can emanate from the use of modern digital technology as a political tool in the context of the Mediterranean basin. Based on its historical and philosophical legacy, the Mediterranean, seen as a spatial geographical entity, has the potential to become a hub for the development of a new political imagination. This paper examines how Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, among others, have engaged with the problem of techno-fundamentalism and why there is a need to draw on politics and the humanities to imagine a better future, a new Mediterranean social contract.
In 1993, Ahmed Khaled Tawfik began a series of sci-fi horror books that would change the lives of millions in the Middle East. Now translated into a new Netflix series, Paranormal is set to bring Egyptian storytelling to the world
Ahmed Khaled Tawfik knew that it would happen after his death. The big fame, that is, the fame that translated from 15 million copies shifted of 81 best-selling novels in a genre that was quite frankly non-existent in the Middle East up until he and his work arrived. Now, as Netflix prepares to drop Paranormal (you’ll likely know it better as Ma Waraa al-Tabeea), a series based on his revolutionary sci-fi horror novels, you get the impression that he might just have been right.
It may seem ironic that a region with more than its fair share of real-world horror is so lacking in the storytelling genre, but that’s not because the stories would be hard-pressed to keep up with the news. Chalk it up instead to misunderstanding. Analysts would often ask the late Egyptian novelist why Arab youth resorted to reading his gothic horror stories if their own lives were already steeped in pain, anxiety and uncertainty? Exactly what type of escapism could books like these possibly provide? Tawfik knew only too well.
“The idea of reading horror is that you approach death without dying.”
“Horror provides a nominal escape from your problems because, no matter how bad your life is, the horror story can show us that it could be much worse,” he once said. “The idea of reading horror is that you approach death without dying.”
Tawfik’s enormous readership and success with the pocket novel series featuring the cynical, dark-humoured Dr Refaat Ismail was proof positive that it was exactly what the region was looking for. And the character’s resurrection via Netflix is set to be nothing short of groundbreaking – in more ways than one.
The production has attracted award-winning heavyweights. Paranormal is directed and produced by Amr Salama (Sheikh Jackson, Excuse My French, Asmaa), and co-produced by Mohamed Hefzy (Clash, Yomeddine, You Will Die at Twenty). It’s the third Arabic and the first Egyptian Netflix Original production and, as Ahmed Amin, who plays Dr Ismail, rightly exclaims, “The series will hopefully open a window to the world and exclaim that there is an original and influential horror genre happening in Egypt.”
For those who have never touched the books: Ismail is an aging haematologist who encounters a world where logic and scientific reason are replaced with local mythology and global folk tales. Ismail takes on a “journey of doubt” – battling numerous health problems with a ready supply of medicines rattling in his pockets as he goes. He is an anti-hero so ordinary and frail that he came to be loved. Unlike previous heroes in Arabic literature, Ismail mirrored the torrent of failings and contradictions in Arab societies. Regional publication ArabLit painted him as a breakaway from “the squeaky clean image of the hero in Arabic writing”. Arabic folklore has usually favoured “knights on horseback” and moral absolutisms. Ismail was plain, yet imaginative enough to draw the reader into his animated world. This meant something to the young people in Mubarak’s Egypt, where you could argue imagination was overshadowed by a prevailing zeitgeist of mediocrity.
The show’s director and executive producer, Amr Salama, has waited years to realise his vision
It pays to be clear. Perhaps no Arab author has been as underrated as Tawfik. Born in the Egyptian city of Tanta in 1962, he became a physician and professor of tropical medicines at Tanta University, eventually diverting a slice of his attention to fiction writing. “My English was not yet good enough to read horror literature, so I started writing it myself,” he once said. Cut-off from the literary influences of the English-dominated fiction book market – and with Arabic horror novels non-existent – he began to construct his own world based around the turbulent experiences of Egyptian life. “If I had read Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Stephen King, [and Mary Shelley], I would never have written,” he said. “I would have just been satisfied with what I was reading.” But there was influence there. Only rather than Anglo-fiction, it ended up being the works of Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy that would silently mentor him.
If you would really like to see a measure of what young people in Egypt thought of Tawfik, you need only to look at his death in 2018. Attracting thousands of young mourners to his funeral, the footage sent shockwaves through the Cairo establishment, bewildered at how a dead novelist who they had barely registered as a legitimate cultural influence could so effortlessly draw more Egyptian youth than an election.
In the early 1990s, a young Amr Salama went hunting for a book that came from Egypt – any book – at the one store he frequented while growing up in Saudi Arabia. He stumbled upon a section titled “Egyptian Pocketbook Novels” and it filled him with excitement, addressing the void in a boy longing for his home in Cairo. His purchase was from the Paranormal series – the first books he would ever read outside of his school curriculum – and they would stay with him for life. Years later in 2006, while still a budding director, Salama contacted Tawfik with an idea to turn Paranormal into a TV series. They struck a warm, long friendship. “He was like a father to me,” Salama would later say.
Bit by bit, the pair made plans both precise and ambitious, building a vision that would not be compromised. One of the agreements: they would not straitjacket the novels to fit the 30-day Ramadan series schedule – a time when television in the Arab world is sacred. “Not doing the 30 Ramadan episodes allowed for a certain slowness and quality,” says Majid Al Ansari, the second block director for the series. And that liberation is quite telling. The first scripts appeared in 2006 and have been reviewed word-by-word on a regular basis ever since. Filming was undertaken in sections to foster synchroneity and flow, and authenticity was demanded in everything. Salama did not want to rely on tropes imported from abroad. “We want to give an Egyptian voice and sound it to the world,” he says.
Nothing was spared when it came to remaining true to the story. Even though the Abu Rehab palace, located in Cairo’s El Manial district, was constructed in the 1940s, production designer Ali Hossam felt that they needed to bring it in tune with the villa in the novels that was built in 1880. And that included efforts to give it a rural grassy surrounding to mimic the belle époque villas and mansions that once stood in Nile Delta cities like Mansoura in the colonial era.
Walking through the house early in the production, it’s clear that the set designs were thoroughly considered to meet the exacting standards of not only Netflix, but Salama – and indeed, the late Tawfik – too. After all, this is meant to be a haunted house, so there’s an abundance of dust, chandeliers with broken strings of crystals, peeling wallpaper, torn curtains, old portraits, gloomy staircases, and a wealth of cobwebs all over. It dawns on me that most Egyptian homes, if left unattended for a few years, actually look somewhat like this. Elsewhere, the special effects and makeup team, Donia Sedky and Eslam Alex, explain the steps of transforming a child actor into a hideous demonic character (apparently the children have more patience and stamina for this laborious process than adults).
Amin says that he is confident that audiences will come to see a series that was made with “sincerity, detailed attention, and responsibility” – and that Tawfik’s world of Cairo in 1969 is captured in piercing detail. It reflects the mood of a public that had long outgrown political rallies and anti-colonial exhilaration and now walked despondently in the shadow of Nasser’s Egypt. Reeling from defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, there was an ambivalence with the quasi-socialist experiment and a shattering of pan-Arabist dreams, only to perhaps find comfort in the inordinate amount of trees lining the streets. This is a long-forgotten version of Egypt that operated in a poetically slow mode: from the Cadillacs to the iconic black and white Fiat taxis roaming in second or third gear. High pressure capitalism was yet to make its mark in Cairo and life was set at a much more gradual pace.
Lebanese-British actress Razane Jammal – whose previous projects are as varied as Djinn and Kanye West’s Cruel Summer – plays scientist Maggie McKillop
Salama admits that capturing the true essence of the book’s various time periods was a sizeable challenge. “The more you went back in time, the more difficult it was to portray the details.” While 1969 might have been relatively easy to establish costume, casting, and setting, 1941 was much more difficult, and 1910 even more so.
There was also initial controversy surrounding the casting of Amin in the starring role as Ismail, largely due to the actor’s longstanding association with comedy. Just how could the man that made his name in 30-second viral videos on Facebook play the austere and introspective Ismail? Thankfully, it turns out that Amin had long been a fan of the series, and is well-read on Tawfik’s other works too. As a result, he was able to create a multi-dimensional, compelling character that even the most ardent of Tawfik’s fans will likely appreciate. And while Salama naturally took some creative licence in adapting Paranormal to the screen, it was done with Tawfik’s blessing and is largely faithful to the spirit of the novel.
The series raises broader questions, too, about just how this project can resonate in the current climate of entertainment saturation. While lockdown has amplified our reliance on streaming services, it’s a trend that has been gaining momentum for years. Popular culture that was once drip fed to us over weeks is now drilled straight into our veins. “Before the pandemic I would watch a season per month,” admits Salama. “Now I watch a season per day, and if you asked me what I watched yesterday I wouldn’t even remember. The side effect now could be that one show gets talked about for two days instead of a month.”
“If we achieve this, it will be a breakthrough for Egypt and the Arab world. It will raise the standard of what we can provide for the world.”
Amin’s casting has raised eyebrows, but he’s long been a fan of the series
But Paranormal is highly unlikely to suffer a fate of irrelevance, given it can count on a large fan base that has steadily grown since the early ’90s. It has influenced multiple generations of readers, producing a readymade demographic built on a love of literary quality and the essence of a sublime, horrifying story. The team stress that this is what they are taking to the Netflix table. “Human values are quite consistent when it comes to the idea of a good story,” says Amin. “People love a good storyteller, and in a beautiful tale there are meanings connected to the human being in every place – irrespective of geography and language.” As a result, they hope the project will be a watershed moment for the region, offering mass exposure to Middle Eastern storytelling in much the same way that Money Heist shone a light on talent from Spain. “If we achieve this, it will be a breakthrough for Egypt and the Arab world,” says Salama. “It will raise the standard of what we can provide for the world.” Aya Samaha, who plays Ismail’s embittered fiancée Huwaida, argues that the screen version has a longevity and even stronger effect than the book, enabling it to provide a holistic picture. “We are in a win-win situation, as the novels are already a success, and the fans are everywhere. But now they will see it as a clearer picture. If we give it depth and detail it will complement the longevity of the novels themselves.”
On a TV programme in 2014, viewers were invited to call in and ask questions of that episode’s guest, Ahmed Khaled Tawfik. One of the callers was Salama, who delivered a touching message to his friend. “I want you to know that as long as I live, I promise I will fight until Paranormal comes to light in the best shape and best quality to be competitive on the global stage,” he said. Later conversations between the pair would see Tawfik explain his regret that he may never see the day Salama’s promise came true.
But success for Paranormal is about more than mere posthumous fame. While only one of Tawfik’s books has so far been translated into another language (Utopia, 2008), Salama believes that this great eulogy via Netflix could be the moment that changes everything. The moment that Middle Eastern stories are told to the world, and the moment that Dr Refaat Ismail once more comes to life. Tawfik, you know, would have heartily approved.
“In this podcast episode, AGYA member Dr. Amro Ali from Egypt and AGYA alumnus Dr. Kalman Graffi from Germany discuss Coronavirus warning apps, delving into their advantages, disadvantages and effectiveness from both a technological and ethical point of view.”
My book review of Will Hanley’s work “Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria” has been published in the Mashriq & Mahjar journal (Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, North Carolina State University). The PDF article is open access.
WILL HANLEY, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). Pp. XIV+391. $65.00 cloth, $64.99 e-book.
REVIEWED BY AMRO ALI, American University in Cairo
“Who are you?” is an all too familiar question
in everyday life, one that is neither bound by time nor place, but can carry
extraordinary consequences for the person being asked, and for history itself. It
is a question that is central to Will Hanley’s outstanding book, Identifying
with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria, which
illuminates Alexandria as a key sociolegal laboratory in the making of our
modern world, covering the decades between the early 1880s and the outbreak of
World War I in 1914. In this short pivotal span of history, Hanley telescopes
into an enriching fusion of people from different countries who crossed each
other’s paths on the streets, sidewalks, trams, trains, cafés, restaurants, and
theatres. For many, the idea of personal identity revolved around timeless
identifiers such as birthplace, religion, and marital status. They also had a
nationality label but this, particularly until the 1880s, was usually a dormant,
if not meaningless, category. That is, nationality suddenly meant everything
when it became both a formal and informal requirement by the authorities or
offered social and legal advantages.[1]
That realization would bring people, and hence cement their cases on paper, to
the police stations, consulates, and courts of Alexandria. The “wrong”
nationality, like a Cypriot, could be a burden on the individual, while a privileged
nationality, such as French or British, could mean protection from prison and
access to wealth.[2]
Egyptians, for whom the idea of nationality was yet to gain any social and
legal coherence, were disgruntled at the nationality scourge that not only
disadvantaged them compared to other nationalities, but the questionable court
sentences and dubious acquittals also served to prove that the “outward garment
of nationality concealed the domestication of the rule of difference.”[3]
Hanley’s book is divided into
three parts, containing twelve chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. In section
one, “Settings,” Hanley illustrates the organizing concept of “vulgar
cosmopolitanism” in chapter one. This concept drives the book’s key theme that shifts
our familiar notion of Alexandria from a romanticized understanding and
elite-centered cosmopolitanism to the mundane everyday life of Alexandria. The
latter is where the matrix of passing, ignoring, jostling, and arguing occurs
with habitual frequency until it crosses into legal territory, such as breaking
the law, often lubricated by liquor and fomented by misunderstanding. Chapter
two fleshes out keywords: national, citizen, resident, foreigner, and subject.
The chapter aims to map out the book’s conceptual topology and the placement of
individuals and their identities in the making of the emerging world at the
turn of the twentieth-century.
In the second section,
“Means,” Hanley scrutinizes the mediums of identification in the daily lives of
society through the chapters of —“Papers,” “Census,” “Money,” and “Marriage” — which
taught the population to identify with new labeling practices and familiarize
themselves with a new vocabulary. The chapter “Papers” explores how passports
and identification documents became the portable and impersonal means for the
authorities to manage the mobility of individuals. While the chapter “Census”
looks at the product of the state’s appetite to amplify its state-building project,
negotiate disputes with diplomatic authorities over nationalities, and
centralize the certification of identity. [4]
The chapter on money fleshes out how currency became symbols for the emerging
political and economic order and, hence, it required that tokens be honored. In
light of this, counterfeiting was seen as an egregious crime, as it challenged
the official order and the state’s power to circulate and monopolize symbols of
value. The standardization of currency and material advantages sharpened the
ability for nationalities to gain access to benefits and favorable rulings from
judicial institutions that were predisposed towards wealthy national
communities. [5]
Finally, the last chapter of the section, “Marriage,” was a site of
administrative anxiety given that nationality was largely a gendered practice
by how easy it was for women to switch to their husband’s nationality or retain
their father’s nationality through marriage, remarriage, separation, or divorce.
But their transition depended upon the usefulness of the nationality in
question, thus making marriage the “driving wheel of nationality litigation and
legislation.” [6]
Hanley’s third section,
“Other Nationalities,” spans six chapters: “Europeans,” “Foreigners,”
“Protégés,” “Bad subjects,” “Ottomans,” and “Locals,” which takes up the larger
essence of the book, as it seeks to map out the triumph of the nationality
category, even with its precarities, over other markers of identification. Yet,
Hanley takes us into a more complicated field beyond “powerful” Europeans and
“weak” natives, as colonial privilege could not be easily deployed as
distinctions were rarely obvious. For example, outside the small circles of
European notables whom clearly had brazen privilege, poorer Europeans found
themselves constrained by class, race, or gender.[7]
Similarly, non-European foreigners like Tunisians and Maltese, who were
imperial subjects, could exercise benefits in Egypt that were not possible back
in their home country.
The case against Alexandrian cosmopolitanism that privileges elites and pioneers is certainly not new and has been fashionable in academic circles for many years. The author, however, gives the subject matter justice as he makes a strong case for shifting from the elites and small literary circles that intended to leave a legacy of written accounts, to the ordinary Alexandrians who did not. Thus, the book’s outcome is a one-by-one pointillist tapestry that draws you into a different Alexandria. Hanley argues against the proponents of triumphalist histories, writing, “We are not obliged to grant the nation the epic imaginary proportions,” and in making the case for the everyday ordinary, ironically, gives his work a distinguished epic of its own.[8] All accounts ended up in court and consulate documents, much like the recorded banal exchange between two Maltese friends, reading, “Today is Saturday, let us go and have a walk,” and ends with one friend fatally stabbing the other. [9] The dizzying number of accounts reads like miniature dramas with an endless cast of actors straddling the turn of the century, dazzling the city, and animating the era in fascinating ways. Taking the stage is the Cypriot realizing his Ottoman-ruled origins offered no protection from torture in a police station; the Egyptian woman who fell in love with an Italian man causing a scandal; the British consular official rushing to stop a marriage between a British Christian woman and an Egyptian Muslim man; an Irishman pretending to be an irrigation inspector to get a tasty meal and “borrow” ten francs from a priest; a French winemaker surprised that he would be imprisoned after he overestimated his foreign privilege by beating up an Egyptian tram conductor; And, eyewitness testimonies by Austrian barmaids pronouncing Islamic oaths. What Hanley’s book does is it upends what may have been thought to be established and predictable about nationality.
The label of nationality—the ever-recurring
term that leads you through the book’s thematic kaleidoscope—creeps its way
into the realm of individual identity, which was traditionally reserved for
one’s name, occupation, place of origin, sect, and physical description. These
attributes had to compete with “colonialism’s will to categorize populations
and its pervasive expressions of power through small mechanisms and technologies
and its modernity,” all of which were recognizable through nationality (though
not the same as citizenship, which is a concept that would later become a key
aim in decolonization movements).[10]
This can be seen in Alexandria’s Maghribis up until the early 1880s, who were
considered by local Egyptians as different, but not foreign. This invention of
a nationality category, however, not only now made them foreign, but their
status from a French colony also gave them further layers of protection (still short
of the full legal protections that French nationals received) that unnerved
locals, especially when nationality departed from the ordinary practice of the
social into an exercise of its legality.
Identifying with Nationality is part of a trend that slowly crystallized in the mid-2000s and accelerated following the 2011 Egyptian revolution, which saw scholarship on Alexandria breaking the historical imperial-nationalist dichotomy that left little room for nuances. This shift took place amid a form of culture war between generations of Alexandrians, political positioning, and struggles to reconcile with the contradicting elements of the past. Perhaps beyond the book’s scope, it would have been worthwhile to give a brief analysis on modern Alexandria in the epilogue given the city was the ground zero and laboratory for the invented nationality category. Particularly because Hanley notes: “Alexandria was thus a bellwether for nationality changes that would spread worldwide in the twentieth century.” [11] As a resident of Alexandria myself, I wonder if modern Alexandria is a bellwether or troubling parable for the dysfunctions of nationality, as one sees the book’s longue durée projected into the present day as residents dwell on the debris left by nationality, nationalism, and an enduring colonial logic, which still scars Alexandria.
Hanley offers readers poignant
lessons for our times, particularly given the triumph of nationality after
World War I, which canonized smaller subsets of nationalities that we grapple
with today, such as the “stateless, refugee, colonial subject, foreigner, and
minority.”[12]
Egypt’s Muslim-Christian relations, for example, were not without strain before
the nationality category, but they were at least resolvable at the local level
because differences were clearly known, understood, and mediated through a
familiar pattern to the respective population center. Nationality, ironically, exacerbated
religious tensions as it papered over differences and paved the way for state
intrusion into local community matters. Even “Egyptian” did not hold much
meaning for many Egyptians prior to the 1880s. The category only became
important for bureaucratic reasons, not for membership of the watan (nation)
or for paying homage to some pharaonic ancestry.[13]
Rather, it was Egyptian elites who adopted the mantle of nationalism in order
to wield “the resources of the state in their own interest” and saw to it that
“nationalism expanded along the stolid avenue of self-interest.”[14]
For the rest of the non-elite Egyptians, it would take decades to adopt the
nationality label in any legal and nationalist sense. This reluctance can be
explained, as Hanley puts it, because “the benefits of local status were often
more obscure than its costs,” especially in terms of the burden of taxes and
ruthless conscription, from which foreign nationals were free from.[15]
In traversing over four
thousand cases, with over ten thousand individuals, and drawn from archives in
five different languages from six different countries, Hanley delivers a superb
piece of work in historical research, rethinking social history, and reevaluating
national taxonomies, rather than assuming them. This book makes a significant and
original contribution to the fields of transnationalism, citizenship,
cosmopolitanism, comparative colonial studies, international law, Egyptian
history, Alexandria’s urban history, and Mediterranean migration. It would
appeal to both graduate students and scholars, but also to the informed public
interested in these topics, as Identifying with Nationality, to its
credit, does not intimidate the reader unfamiliar with legal jargon. The author
has been merciful in making legal terms clearly legible, as well as subsuming
them into captivating miniature narratives and vignettes that animate the
sociolegal story of a bygone Alexandria. Therefore, it is not only a book that comprehensively
adds to scholarship, but is ripe with countless gems to inspire future plays,
poems, and stories.
NOTES
[1] Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 2.
The event on knowledge production took place at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on 18 January 2020. I argued that if we do not address the scourge of passport restrictions and visa regimes, then the pace and orientation of holistic, transnational, and interdisciplinary knowledge production in the Arab world will continue to be skewed.
AGYA blurb: “With its contribution, AGYA invites the visitors to a critical examination of established concepts and patterns of perception of the world, the other and the self from German and Arab perspectives. AGYA is proud to present a program ranging from a panel discussion on ‘Scientific Worlds: Critical Reflections on Knowledge Production’, over a book launch of ‘Insatiable Appetite. Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond’ edited by AGYA alumni and enriched by a tasting of different Hummus recipes, to a poetry slam and a photo exhibition on ‘Images of the Self and the Other in the Levant’”
Amin’s casting has raised eyebrows, but he’s long been a fan of the series
