End of a Beautiful Enmity

Jeeran was fickle, and I was lazy. When using free host pages as jotters there's much to be said for the low-maintenance basics. So that was the beginning of a beautiful enmity. Now geocities demise means I will have to think about the arduous process of moving, can't say I'm seething with anger.

On the Blacklist

In the occupation corner
of my passport
there is a small small sentence saying
writer and poet.

Once upon a time
I thought it was a magical phrase,
that it would open doors
and make guards bow to me
intoxicate officers and soldiers.

Then I discovered
it was my greatest shame,
the greatest accusation,
the sword that swings
every time I travel.



My translation of Nizar Qabbani's poem.

The Time That Remains

I've been reading reviews of "The Time That Remains," which Robert Ebert describes as a "a deadpan Palestinian comedy".In another review the film is described thusly: "the never-ending Story between Arabs and Jews gets another wryly humorous workout." It is the third of Elia Suleiman's films dealing with the thorny subject of Israeli-Arabs and the place of Palestinians in the state of Israel, following Divine Intervention (2002) and Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996).

"The Time That Remains" is a semi biographic film, in four historic episodes, about a family--my family--spanning from 1948, until recent times. The film is inspired by my father’s diaries of his personal accounts, starting from when he was a resistant fighter in 1948, and by my mother’s letters to family members who were forced to leave the country since then. Combined with my intimate memories of them and with them, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained in their land and were labeled "Israeli-Arabs," living as a minority in their own homeland. [synopsis from the director]

In the film's framing device, Suleiman takes a taxi from the airport as he arrives in Israel, and is caught in a sudden thunderstorm. The film itself is composed of vignettes which jump back and forth in time and are separated by fadeouts: "a succession of small events, running jokes and ironic observations in the director's Tati-esque style". This succession of events document 1948 Nazareth, Suleiman's father's involvement with the ragtag resistance movement, and his transformation into the old man in the cafe who drinks endless cups of coffee.

But paralleling these sequences is young Elia's own political coming-of-age story, "from young conformist to political activist, and ultimately to mute observer", as he attends a school where students sing patriotic Hebrew songs, is reprimanded for describing the US as colonialist, and as a teenager rips an Israeli flag. Later the film returns to the present, as Suleiman returns to his home town to visit his widowed mother.

"The character played by Suleiman, satire linked with autobiography, a solemn, silent figure with dark shadows under his eyes, is poker-faced and never speaks. He simply stands and regards all that happens for 60 years."

Suleiman explaination of the title of the film seems more like an exlanation of this witness figure: "The [title] of this film is a political term that describes the Palestinians who remain on their own land, who are insiders and absentees, while they remain on their own land," Suleiman continued, "It's a very political term which I appropriated...from my personal context being present and absent, someone who is an outsider and an insider, someone who does not live in one place but always departs."

The film is obviously a fusion of the political and the personal, but what does jar me reading all these reviews is that other approving comment often tacked on, reassuring the reader that the film is more personal than political, or that it is not at all overt in its political commitment, and would not be out of place in European arthouses.

In this case, surely the political is personal, and vice versa?

scene from the film

Just Belligerent Today Okay?

A while ago I came across this photograph someone had taken of a Muslim woman and her child. The woman is dressed in black. Her hair is covered with a headscarf. She has a pensive expression on her face.

The photograph had the sort of title that reminds me of a certain kind of poetry, and the photographer admitted to not being brave enough to approach the woman in some form other than through the zoom lens of the camera.

But it inspired some interesting responses, which included words such as "heart-breaking" and "thought-provoking". Commentators applauded the photographer's social commentary, and pointed out the ironic contrast between the two figures and the happy colours of the children's play area. Both photographer and commentators also spent quite a bit of time pondering what possible reasons the woman could have for looking so forgetful of joy. The potential reasons went from a nameless fear to racism to the Lebanon war, and then one person poignantly added that not knowing the true circumstances actually made it even more emotive and unsettling and evocative.

It exasperated me. I have been told that's just peevish, since these people are clearly wonderful, caring, compassionate intelligent souls, and it is cantankerous beyond belief to find fault with Good Samaritan instincts.

But, when someone says they want to "reach out" to "people like this" and then proceed to castigate themselves for not doing so, my eyes roll of their own accord.

One person compared the feeling the photograph evoked to wanting to "reach out" to disabled people, and then finally deciding not to "reach out" to them due to the troubling thought that it may make them feel they are "different."

Then there was one person who interjected that she may just have been feeling tired. Yes! What if she was just tired? What if she was remembering the death of her pet goldfish? What if she didn't want to smile because she has very crooked teeth? What if she was just feeling blue? Surely there is quite a wide spectrum of normal human emotion available that could cause apparent joy forgetfulness?

Seriously, though, perhaps Muslim women should walk around policing their facial expressions in case they seem like they are projecting an image of subjected to prejudice/oppressed/fearful/marginalised womanhood. Maybe they should beam, constantly, and festoon everything they own in little badges with those silly little messages, like Proud 2b Muslim, I Love My Hijab and I Hug Random Hijabies.

There's the other side of this. I Love My Hijab badges have their place I'm sure, but that place is as far away from me as possible. I find such bouncy positive energy exhausting.

It's not that I don't see the point. I can see why a happy-looking Muslim woman might help to project a positive image of Muslim women, which might in turn help fight the truly very bizarre assortment of images that come up when you google the phrase Muslim women.

But in the interests of everyday facial expression shifts and the spice of life, I'd argue that belligerence is sometimes quite as human as beaming.

Narrative as Travel in Arab Women's Writing

If You've Ever Been Anywhere You'll Know the Scene*

The conception of narrative has always been closely tied to the experience of travel, and the journey - quests, odysseys, and adventures - have always served as powerful masterplots. This chiasm of "travel as writing and writing as travel," is one which Michel Butor outlines in his essay "Le voyage et l'ecriture" ("Travel and Writing") where he argues that "to travel is to write (first of all because to travel is to read), and to write is to travel." Working from this conception of narrative as travel allows for a re-investigation of the quest for personal identity and the motif of the journey in the literature of Arab women.

Orientalism and Travel Literature

In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote that “excursions into the literature of a foreign country much resemble our travels abroad” and that “in our desire to get at the heart of the country we seek out whatever it may be that is most unlike what we are used to, and declare this to be the very essence.” This desire to “get at the heart” of a country features significantly in the travel literature examined in Edward Said’s Orientalism which argues that Western knowledge of the East was created in a discursive environment.

Orientalist narratives of travel such as Gerard de Nerval’s Journey to the East or Eugene Fromentin’s Between Sea and Sahara, An Orientalist Adventure are landmarks in the story of the West’s fascination with "The Orient." Much has been written about the interconnection between such travel writings, the colonial relationship, and the representations of native women as metonyms for the exotic lands they describe: as women and country become interchangeable, to conquer one is to conquer the other, and to know is to conquer, a dynamic of the colonial resolve which is concisely described in Fanon’s phrase “we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil”.

This colonialist interest in finding the women behind the veil cannot be separated from its interest in and hostility to Islam. Casting women as victims to be rescued from male violence, the colonial fixation on the veil, the harem, and polygamy turned women into symbols of a region and a religion that were at once exotic, violent, and inferior.

Explorations Beyond the Veil

This “finding” of the Other has found renewed expression in recent years, as "Fundamentalist Islam" became the number one enemy for a post-cold war West, and especially in the post 9 /11 period, which has seen a proliferation of texts promising to “unveil” the hidden world of Muslim women. Many of these texts fall under the genre of the travel narrative, and these include the personal accounts by journalists reporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One example is The Bookseller of Kabul, by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. Another is Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between (2004), an account of his experiences in Afghanistan and a New York Times bestseller, which was followed by The Prince of the Marshes And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq . Tellingly, in a Time article, Stewart is dubbed Stewart of Afghanistan.

Even when these texts are not literal travel narratives, they can be said to follow a similar dynamic in providing the reader with the impression that the book will strip away a veil of mystery to “get at the heart” of an alien world, that the reader will emerge with the knowledge of a traveler, or in other words, that to read is to travel. The effort to “reveal” this hidden world often, and perhaps inevitably, involves the positing of a dichotomy between non-western and western constructs, a dichotomy implicit in the vocabulary of East/West rhetoric itself. However while use of this terminology is to some extent unavoidable, the validity of vocabulary which divides the world into homogonous entities must be questioned to avoid the danger of falling into the superficiality of essentialist characterization. The limitations of this terminology are apparent in the way “Western culture” for example suggests that the West is a stable monolithic entity. Similarly, terms such as Arab and Islamic, which tend to overlap, often seem to be perceived as undistinguishable in the West’s cultural imaginary.

In this sense, to refer to Arab/Muslim women as one group is to some extent simplistic and problematic, conflating as it does a wide variety of ethnic, cultural, religious, national, and professional backgrounds, as well as overlooking differences of class. In this study, the focus would be on Anglophone Arab women, paying due regard to these differences. However, the study would also look at similarities in the strategies these writers employ in “writing back” to the West, examining these strategies against the context of representations of Arab women through history, and comparing modern Western representations with the self-representations of Muslim women.

Stasis and Movement, Victim and Escapee

In recent years, a globalized discourse of the Muslim woman has emerged, which has propagated the neatly packaged image of the veiled oppressed victim and served to provide a justification of wars as the exportation of freedom and democracy. This naturalized category of “victim,” and its wholesale attribution to Muslim and Arab women often relies on a portmanteau of stereotypical images which have dominated Western representations of Muslim women since the 18th century.

Mohja Kahf has argued that the existing “spectrum” for stories about or by Muslim women consists of two Eurocentrically slanted slots: Victim and Escapee. The story of the Victim relies on images which are characterized by their stasis. Whether portrayed as a veiled, silenced victim or as an odalisque, the stereotypical Arab woman is immobile, with the Oriental harem and the Islamic veil synecdochically standing in for her. As the veiled submissive wife, she is a mute shadow at the edges of a portrait, as an odalisque, literally ‘the woman of the room’ she is confined to an enclosed space, as represented in Orientalist paintings such as Matisse’s Odalisque with Left Knee Bent, where as Darraj notes “the woman portrayed sits in one of the rooms of the harem, lounging idly, forming part of the colorful background but not performing any action.” In this storyline, the sequestered victim is immobile; it is the reader/spectator who travels into her room.

In the plot of the Escapee, this is reversed. The heroine flees the restrictions of her country of origin, her religion, or her family in an archetypal travel narrative. However, she is often portrayed as a passive object of violence, and an innate culture, religion and patriarchy are invoked to explain the violence she experiences, historical and political circumstances are obscured and Islam is derogated as a pre-modern and barbaric religion.

Quest for Personal Identity

Given the long history of representation by others, what strategies and techniques do Arab Anglophone women writers utilize? What do they foreground in their presentation of postcolonial experience? How do they negotiate encoding Arab meanings within an alien discourse? This project aims to undertake a study of the trope of the journey in the writing of Anglo-Arab women writers, exploring the efforts of Arab women to reclaim their identities, to write themselves as something other than victim and escapee, to escape the restrictions of a limited repertoire and to correct a historically maligned portrait. The aim is to examine the different ways Arab women represent themselves, and how these representational artifacts are presented to the West.

Life Writing and Cultural Commodification

In recent years, the increasing interest in the stories of Arab women has been accompanied by a proliferation of both fiction and nonfiction by Arab women writers, especially memoirs and autoethnographies. Much has been written about the rise of the Muslim woman’s memoir, and more widely about the autobiographical elements in the writing of Muslim women in general. The increasing popularity, dynamism and ubiquity of writing in this genre by Muslim women has in part been attributed to the characteristics of autobiographical work, which essentially invite the reader into the writer’s private world, promising to reveal what is often unseen and unheard. This quality, it could be argued, can be traced in both fiction and nonfiction, present both in Saadawi's early novel, “Memoirs of a Woman Doctor” and the later nonfiction, “Memoirs from a Women's Prison.”

However, life writing can be easily commodified, packaged, and co-opted into propaganda, as it is manipulated to meet the expectations and assumptions of Western readers. An example of this packaging can be seen in the way the memoirs of the Egyptian feminist Huda Sha'rawi, originally titled My Memoirs, were given the title "Harem Years" when translated into English. However, it would be simplistic to imply that Arab women writers are simply pawns to the demands of a Western market, particularly as some Arab women writers have themselves been accused of limiting their novels to the victim and/or excapee plot, and playing into Western prejudices.

The rapid commodification of life-writing by Arab women is a topic which has recently been the focus of much critical study, examined in books such as Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, by Gillian Whitlock and Nawar Al-Hassan Golley’s Reading Arab Women's Autobiographies, which examines writing for women as, in Golley’s words, “a process and a quest for dialogue, social change, and the possibility of saying "we" as well as "I."

Time, Space, and Adventures of Everyday Life

This area of research intersects with the scope of this project, in so far as it examines the metaphor of "the path of life" as a central feature of narrative-as-travel in the work of Anglo-Arab women, from narratives such as Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of The Dovewhich is motivated by an actual journey, to the metaphors of travel and quest motifs in narratives such as Ahdaf Souief’s In the Eye of the Sun, which urge the reader to “walk a mile” in the narrator’s shoes, following the story of an Egyptian woman from secondary school through graduate school in England.

Many of the plots of such novels partake in the genre Bakhtin refers to as the adventure novel of everyday life, which has been described as a temporal sequence of metamorphosis linked with identity as part of an idea of development presenting moments of crisis that “unfold[s] not so much in a straight line as spasmodically, a line with knots in it” constituting “a distinctive type of temporal sequence” In this plot, transformation is central, and there are typically two images of the individual – a 'before' and 'after' that are both “separated and reunited through crisis and rebirth”. This analysis suggests that metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individual’s life in its important moments of crisis, showing how an individual becomes other than what she was.

This synopsis argues that Anglophone Arab women’s writing can be usefully read through theories of travel narratives as texts which are dependent on the projection and experience of a world from a particular perspective, a person moving through space in a certain time, with space becoming meaningful as, in Bakthin’s words, “time becomes endowed with the power to bring change.” The fact that these narratives are characterized by their concreteness, by the level of detail through which they convey the narrator’s experience of the world they move through to the reader underscores the way narrative invites the reader not only to read but to travel outside their world and into another.

Hyphenated Identities

Reviewers of Arab women's books often seem to read their novels as sociological and anthropological texts that "reflect" the reality of the Middle East. Rifaat's Distant View of A Minaret for example, is described on the blurb as being able to "admit the reader into a hidden private world." Carrying the suggestion that the Arab world is a homogenous entity which can be understood through reading a single text, this involves an abnegation of the ambivalent, borderland position of many Muslim women both in the diaspora and in countries caught between Western and Islamic values.

The dual position of many Arab women writers is complicated by the fact that as Golley argues, many of them write both “to the West and…to Arab patriarchy.” Novelists such as Soueif and Aboulela work to dismantle notions of Arab female subservience and dispel the myth of the sequestered Arab woman. For example in Soueif’s first novel, In the Eye of the Sun, the heroine, Asya, is disturbed by the fact that she is perceived as “exotic,” seeing nothing exotic about the fact that she is Egyptian. Similarly in Leila Sebbar’s Shérazade trilogy, the main character befriends a Frenchman with a passion for Orientalist art. However, Shérazade soon recognizes the fantasy he projects onto her and refuses to be framed in a stereotype, declaring: “I’m not an odalisque”. In essence, both Asya and Shérazade refuse to be defined.

At the same time however, as Arab women writers challenge the representations of Muslim women in the West and de-familiarize Western culture, they avoid the romanticization of the East. In their examination of controversial and contentious topics such as honour killings, oppression, women’s rights, and the veil, the work of Arab women writers can be said to be susceptible to “The Color Purple” syndrome, the debate raised by the publication of the eponymous Alice Walker novel over whether and how a black woman writer should address the sexism of black men in the midst of a racist mainstream climate. This aspect of Anglophone women’s writing is amplified by the language they choose to write in, a choice which in some cases leaves them vulnerable to the criticism that they have “forgotten their roots”, a criticism Hind Wassef makes of Souief in her article "Unblushing Bourgeoisie”.

Many of the characters in the novels of Anglo-Arab writers are pulled between the polar forces of East and West, and can only achieve balance when they have carved out a place for themselves in the midst of that cultural intersection. Anglo-Arab writers themselves inevitably move between two worlds, infusing their Anglophone novels with the essence of their native languages and cultures, setting up a dialogics that extends from language to broader issues of cultural contact and creating a transcultural literature which subverts cultural and linguistic identities through the intervention of other models grafted onto older identities, creating not a "synthesis of cultures," but new structures which open up new ways of thinking. This can be seen, for example, in Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad, subtitled A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran, and which in a New York Times review was described as “giv[ing] the reader a guided tour through the underground youth culture in Tehran."

In a sense, this can be related to Bhabha’s description of hybridity as “the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal” which “unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but re-implicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of the power”. The novels of a writer like Ahdaf Soueif for example, can resist submission to neo-colonial hegemony by subverting the hierarchy of the colonizer/colonized, turning her Egyptian postcolonial eye on England’s colonial past and postcolonial present.

Aspiring to an authentically dialogic, hybrid consciousness, and dealing with themes of exile, transnationalism, doubleness, communal identity and cultural dichotomy, the literature of Anglo-Arab women suggests that East/West is often an oversimplification of modern mobility, and that identities themselves are never fixed or isolated, but rather cultural constructs, or to use Miriam Cooke’s term, “speaking positions.” According to Cooke, “[i]f identity is the recognition of sameness with some difference from others, then we have many identities. To retain a sense of wholeness, we usually assert only one of many possible identities, the one that gives authority at the moment of its assertion. This speaking position is not an identity, but rather an ascribed or chosen identification.”

The work of writers such as Soueif and Aboulela not only gives women a voice, but influences literary landscapes, as they describe Arab women who seek to find their own voices, tell the story of their own journeys and take control of their own narrative. As Fadwa Malti-Douglas' observes, “woman's voice is more than a physiological faculty. It is the narrative instrument that permits her to be a literary medium, to vie with the male in the process of textual creation. To control the narrative process, however, is no small task. Shahrazad demonstrates to her literary cousins and descendants that an intimate relationship must be created between writing and the body.” Writing themselves and their characters into the global community, Arab women writers often take the journey as a first step, duplicating, questioning, rewriting or subverting the plots of the Victim/Escapee.

*Working title taken from Zeina B Ghandour’s "Omega: Definitions," in Hikayat: Short Stories by Lebanese Women, Roseanne Saad Khalaf (Editor) Telegram 2006.

(still incomplete) references

Suzanne Tamim

Egyptian buisnessman Hisham Talaat Moustafa has been sentenced to death for the murder of Suzanne Tamim, who was found dead in a hotel room in Dubai in 2008. The buisnessman's relatives fainted upon hearing the news, and the police had beat up the journalists to stop them taking pictures of the elite looking unelite.

Coverage of this story has, from the start, revolved around the fact that Moustafa is a member of "the elite", but also, the "lurid fascination" with the "troubled private life" of the victim.

It was interesting to see how western media introduced the subject, the sort of background given to this tale of a murdered Arab pop princess. This article in Spiegel Online for example, ventured into economy, cultural anthropology, dialectology and the Arab Mind in its bid to educate the reader.

Lebanese singers are one of the main products this small Mediterranean country exports to the Arab world. Lebanese women are considered unreserved and many find Levantine accents attractive. Singers from Lebanon are the equivalent of French acts in the eyes of Germans: sexy, playful, and a little raunchy.

Tamim's disturbingly plastic looks are also frequently mentioned, although all you really need is a picture. As the article puts it, "Tamim did what was necessary for success in the high rolling Arabic music business." Like Nancy Ajram, Haifa, Elissa et al. There's a rule somewhere. All female singers of cheesy songs must have bloated lips, implanted cheekbones and eyebrows climbing towards their overly-dyed hairline.

Nadine Labaki of Caramel, who has directed Nancy Ajram’s videos, reportedly once commented on the new phenomenon in the Lebanon pop music scene, pointing out the strange contradiction of having plastic surgery to look as though you've had plastic surgery. As though looking plastic was the sign of success. Suzanne Tamim was a perfect example of that. Though a relative unknown, she probably felt she had reached the peak of stardom when she got a Michael Jackson nose.

In more ways than one, her story has all the elements of, as the Spiegel article puts it, a fairy-tale gone dreadfully wrong, and all fairy tales, even the Grimm no happy ending ones, have morals. So what's the moral to this fairytale gone wrong?

According to the writer, Arab parents and teachers will utilize it to ruin their daughters lives, stifle natural talent, and lecture young women on the fate lurking in the wings for insubordinate little girls who want to flout convention and cavort in the spotlight.

And many see the story's moral lesson as difficult to ignore. Indeed, the singer's life history has already passed into the annals of modern Arab myth. A young woman gets a big break, flouts convention, puts herself in the spotlight and dies as a result.

For parents and educators from the Persian Gulf to the Nile Delta, this is a potentially useful tale. They can use it to teach young women that insubordinate girls don't end up marrying the prince. Instead they meet a much darker fate.

There's an assassin for every insubordinate Arab pop princess out there.

Egyptian President's 12-Year-Old Grandson Dies

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's grandson died abruptly, the president's office said Tuesday, declining to give a cause of the 12-year-old boy's sudden death.

Mohammed Mubarak passed away Monday after a "health crisis lasting two days," the presidency said in a brief statement. State media reported he was flown to Paris for emergency treatment, where he was joined by his grandmother, Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak. His body was flown back to Egypt Tuesday for burial.

Aisha and The Allure of Taboos

Qantara has an interview with Sherry Jones, talking about her novel about the Prophet Muhammad's wife Aisha, The Jewel of Medina. The book and the various attempts to publish it generated enough controversy to generate a supportive audience; the sort of readers who retaliated by buying the book on principle, then posting defiant messages on forums in support of western freedom and the right to write anything whatsoever. Then they read the book. Thats when some readers seemed to realise they were holding a Mills & Boon style story, very thinly veiled in the allure of taboo.

Portraying Aisha is useful on several levels. The image used on the cover of Geneviève Chauvel's book sums up a lot of them. The reader sees events unfolding through the eyes of Aisha, at the same time as Aisha is constructed according to the author's idea of her. Telling the story from the point of view of a woman also of course allows the author to talk of purdah, child brides, polygamy, harems and all the rest of it. All that takes up so much space that there is little left to consider Aisha as a historical figure, scholar, and politician.

Sherry Jones did refer to purdah in her book, which is an interesting and adventurous thing to do, seeing as purdah is an Indian sub-continental concept, hardly indigenous to Arabia. But that was not the greatest authorial license she took.

Sherry Jones defends the book against the charges it has faced in the interview, and succesfully makes her novel sound like exactly what it is: a turgid romance aspiring to a lofty combination of fashionable feminist transgression (my novel presents a bold Aisha) and brave Islam marketing (I hope to promote a greater understanding of Islam). As far as I can see, the controversy was a sign of success, tangible evidence the author had hit her mark and got her publicity. She seems to think so too:

What's exciting is that this incident has sparked a worldwide discussion over censorship and free speech," says Sherry Jones when asked about the difficulties of getting her novel published.

Aïcha, la bien-aimée du prophète by Geneviève Chauvel, didn't receive half as much critical attention when it was first published, slipping by without controversy or much violent wave-making at all. And Chauvel was left rather lamely lauding the open-mindedness of France as opposed to the brave new world.

Kamran Pasha has also written a novel with Aisha as the main character, entitled Mother of Believers. On Amazon, it is lumped together with the Jewel of Medina, and Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen by Lesley Hazleton. Kamran Pasha served as a co-producer and writer for Sleeper Cell and was also apparently involved with a 50 Cent video game in 2008. Uhm. He too sometimes seems to be courting controversy and styling himself as a taboo-breaker in his article, but he also talks about all those aspects of Aisha's life that are usually ignored in historical fiction.

Comparing the three Aishas in these three different books would be most interesting.

Sick Children Pay the Price of Gaza Seige

Firas Mazloom was born in Gaza just as Israel started its siege on the territory two years ago. Like others in Gaza, Israeli restrictions prevented him from getting the medical treatment he needed. Al Jazeera's Casey Kauffman reports on the race against time to save two-year-old Firas.

Political Awareness is Jejune Now

There's a very interesting article here about homegrown Muslim superheroes, in comicbooks and videogames. Apparently, they are members of the army of the light, fighting the good fight, battling terrorism, radicalism, hijabism and the rising tide of Arab ennui.

Because the devil makes work for idle hands, but not if they're holding a video game controller.

And as the article notes, there is a healthy market due to "sluggish economies". Apparently said sluggish economies "do not provide nearly enough jobs to keep up with fast-growing populations." In an aside, the article continues: Clearly, heroes in games or comics won't offset all the problems that stoke radicalism - anger at corrupt Arab regimes and at Israel over its treatment of Palestinians...

Oh, clearly. But if we can herd the idle Arab masses away from regrettable ramifications of the war on terror and towards Arab Warcraft, let us by all means exert every possible effort to applaud comical Arab videogame ventures.

By these means they shall begin to join the civilised world and consume war as entertainment. They will put down their worrybeads and pick up their comicbooks. They will turn from Al Jazeera to the Adventures of Jabbar. Everyone benefits.

Optimally, all such enterprises should restrict themselves to alternate universes and fantasy worlds. Young and impressionable minds may be led down the jihadist path if the videogame/comicbook at hand does not avoid all mention of real world Middle East geopolitics, past or present. Which is is why the Bab el Hara videogame, set back in a French-occupied Syria, is troublesome to one Haaretz reader.

"ANYTHING postive to deflate the madness of jihadi radicalism is good; especially the young Muslim cleric in Canada in the news recently, who is teaching the importance of moderation and coexistence. But, as this article paints, there is this weird Arab pre-occupation with occupation. Colonialism was colonialism and the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian intelligencia all benefitted from the educational system the French brought. It`s a far cry, shall we say, from the Wahabi madrasa system that teaches disdain for the Jews and Christians and incited violence. Resistance such as that shown by the American Revolution, the Czech and Ploand and Hungary, India`s Gandhi or by the Jews against the British in Palestine in 1947 merits respect. The "resistance" of a Hizb Allah or Hamas is the glorification of taking life; the glorification of suicide if it takes another`s life and the usurpation of your own people`s rights in the pursuit of the killing of others. The Arabs need a different occupation."

I simply adore this paragraph. Colonialism was colonialism. The intelligencia benefitted. And the clever, clever little pun rounding it all off. Pure genius.

Nakba Stories

Other Thousand Words

Why Women Watch Bab al Hara

I just read a semi-positive article about Bab el Hara in the Guardian. I say semi-positive, because compared to the cringe-worthy coverage of Nour-mania and the other gaggle of vomit-inducing Turkish series invading Arab TV, it seems like a glowing accolade.

I watched Bab el Hara the first year. The second year, it lost all sense of plot. The third year, by all accounts, was a travesty. I dread to think what the fourth year will bring. But one of the most interesting aspects of the Bab el Hara phenomenon has been the discussion of the portrayal of women. Opinions on that much-discussed subject have ranged from "sexist, stereotypical, misogynistic rubbish" to "a thought-provoking reflection of gender roles at the time."

Some would argue that it would be anachronistic if Bab al Hara were to portray the women of the time as staunch feminists, others say that there are "fiesty" women characters dealing with the situations they find themselves in, and remember that time Mu'taz ventured into the kitchen?

Unlike El Hout Bab al Hara did not feature a woman who goes around disguised as a man outwitting the baddies in order to rescue her husband, but then in El Hout the cross-dressing woman returns gratefully to her role once the situation is resolved.

"Why do Arab women watch shows like these?" is the question that is inevitably asked, and then there's all the philosophising about Arab women who really deep down like to be treated like delicate flowers, when not dealing with the consequences of "testosterone overdose."

I would say Bab al Hara's portrayal of women oscillates between the plotlines to be found in romance novels and all those "inspiring stories of domestic abuse survivors". Both those genres sell well, and the majority of the consumers are women.

But Bab al Hara's appeal, as even Bab al Hara devotees acknowledge, is summed up in the word escapism. It doesn't necessarily means people want to go go back to that time, but it is appealing to think that there was once an "order".

Switching over from the news and the depressing "situation in the Middle East" to a Bab al Hara where everything is well-governed allows the viewer to dream a self-indulgent dream.

Banning the Nakba

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's party wants to ban Israeli Arabs from marking the anniversary of what they term "the Catastrophe" or Nakba, when in 1948 some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in the war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators. "The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel and to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning," said party spokesman Tal Nahum.

The first time I read that, I was just struck dumb with rage. I mean, seriously, what more? What more can Israel possibly do?

Reading it again, what strikes me is how truly pathetic this idea is.

Yes, let's ban a day of mourning. Let's put a stop to remembrance. Because Israel can cause amnesia. Israel can stop people thinking. Israel can kill mourning.

Gaza100: World Record Run

IF is looking for 4000 participants to set the record for ‘the most people running 100 metres in a 12-hour relay’ (Guinness book of records official title) on 23rd May 2009. The money will be going to Save the Children’s Gaza Appeal.

A New Layout, and the Tautology of New Beginnings

I've changed the layout of the blog! Well, self-evidently.

This is actually something which I've been wanting to do for some time, but never got round to. I was more than a little bored with how it all looked...

And as luck or fate or coincidence would have it, I also got some long-awaited good news today, namely that my application for a Masters programme has been accepted. So I can wax very lyrical and pretentious and say this is the beginning of a new chapter in the general disorder of my life.

Hunting People For Jesus in Afghanistan

Soldiers In Afghanistan Given Bibles, Told To "Hunt People For Jesus": A U.S. church raised money to send Bibles, printed in the Pashtu and Dari languages, to American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a report on Al Jazeera documented Sunday night. It is against military rules to proselytize -- a regulation one of the soldiers filmed by the network readily acknowledged. "You cannot proselytize, but you can give gifts," says the soldier.

Inside Story on Al Jazeera covered this story, talking to both Greg Julian (spokesperson for the US forces in Afghanistan) and James Bays (Al Jazeera reporter). The discussion was rather repetitious. The US spokesperson approached each question as an opporunity to talk about irresponsible journalism, and Bays approached each accusation as an opportunity to advertise what was actually on the video, which was not actually made by Al Jazeera.

'Witness for Jesus' in Afghanistan


In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him".

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says. "Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

I could understand someone applying the word irresponsible to those words. But once again, it is not the actual actions or words which are the focus of the debate, the problem appears to be that there is an irresponsible video out there which documents them. I can only assume that Afghanis would be fine with being hunted for Jesus, as long as they don't happen to see a video about it.

Words like that, and ideas like that, and the bibles in Dari and Pashtu that were to be the tools of this evangelical mission, don't suddenly come into being, out of nowhere. If nothing else, from a purely practical point of view, doesn't the video draw attention to an existing problem that should be addressed?

Surcease of Sorrow

UN Blames Israel for UN Attacks, Israel Says UN Biased

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — A United Nations inquiry Tuesday blamed Israel for six serious attacks on UN buildings during its Gaza offensive, drawing fury from Israeli officials who accused the UN body of bias.

The report was drawn up by an independent commission of inquiry set up to investigate nine cases in which UN buildings in the impoverished Gaza Strip were damaged by bombardments or arms fire during the three-week war.

When Israel attacks the UN, and a UN inquiry finds Israel guilty of attacking the UN, all Israel has to do is point out that the UN is biased, because it was the UN which was attacked.

The circular logic is so painfully logical, I'm just speechless.