The Things I Would Tell You

by Sabrina Mahfouz

  I reasoned that this must be the experience of every ‘alien’ everywhere and that it shouldn’t be taken personally. But it was a constant irritant – and world geo-politics meant that interest in where I came from was growing. Lebanon was suffering the tail end of both the Israeli invasion and its own civil war (which was the direct result of the troubles in Palestine). Afghanistan became the crucible in which thousands of disaffected, young – mainly Arab – Muslim men were being transformed into a fighting force pitted against the USSR. Then the Soviet Union imploded. The Gulf War came and with it the imposition of sanctions on Iraq, the basing of US troops in the Arabian peninsula and talk of a New World Order. In the run up to the Gulf War, Israelis and Palestinians were summoned to negotiations in Spain and Norway and the world applauded while a perceptive few foresaw the mess for which the Oslo accords laid the ground plan.

  It was impossible – apart from a few notable exceptions – to find in the media of the West coherent interpretations of all this that did justice to the people of the region and their history. If the New World Order was a mechanism to control the Arab and Muslim worlds then I felt that the media of the West was complicit in it; for they always represented those worlds in terms that excused or even invited the imposition of control.

  Was this misrepresentation reciprocal? If I were an American or British person living in Egypt, and if I knew Arabic well enough to read the mainstream Arabic press, would I constantly be brought up short by skewed accounts of my history and culture? Would I switch on the television to find a doom-laden voice intoning about how the Celts worshipped the massive stones placed on Salisbury Plain by astral beings? Would I switch on my car radio and hear an account of yet another outbreak of ‘Christian paedophilia’, with a background theme of church bells and Christmas carols? Would I wander into the movies and come face to face with an evil American character bent on destroying the ‘third’ world so the cinema audience cheers when the Arab hero kills him? I have to say the answer is a resounding no. Where the Arab media is interested in the West it tends to focus on what the West is producing today: policies, technology and art, for example – particularly as those connect to the Arab world. The Arab media has complete access to English and other European languages and to the world’s news agencies. Interpretive or analytic essays are mostly by writers who read the European and American press and have experience of the West. The informed Arab public does not view the West as one monolithic unit; it is aware of dissent, of the fact that people often do not agree with policy, of the role of the judiciary. Above all, an Arab assumes that a Westerner is, at heart, very much like her – or him. Many times I have heard Palestinian village women, when speaking of the Israeli soldiers who torment them, ask ‘Does his mother know he’s doing this?’

  Living in London, I know that I am not alone in the experience of alienation; there are hundreds of thousands of us: people with an Arab or a Muslim background living in the West and doing daily double-takes when faced with their reflection in a western mirror. I felt upset and angered by the misrepresentations I encountered constantly and I felt grateful when a clear-eyed truth was spoken about us. And then again, who was ‘us’?

  I went to school in London briefly when I was thirteen. Mayfield Comprehensive in Putney. There, the white girls thought I was white (or thought I was close enough to white to want to be thought of as white) and the black girls thought I was black (or close enough to black to make identifying with the whites suspect). But that did not mean I could associate freely where I chose; it meant that I had to make a choice and stick with it. And whichever group I opted for I would be despised by the other. After three months I refused to go to school. Thinking about it now, I see this as my first serious exposure to the ‘with us or against us’ mentality; the mentality that forces you to self-identify as one thing despite your certain knowledge that you are a bit of this and a bit of that.

  Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties meant growing up Muslim / Christian / Egyptian / Arab / African / Mediterranean / Non-aligned / Socialist but happy with ‘Patriotic Capitalism’. On top of that, if you were urban/professional the chances were that you spoke English and/or French and danced to the Stones as readily as to Abdel Halim. In Cairo on any one night you could go see an Arabic, English, French, Italian or Russian film. One week the Russian Hamlet was playing at Cinema Odeon, Christopher Plummer’s Hamlet at Cinema Qasr el-Nil and Karam Mutawi’s Hamlet at the Egyptian National Theatre. We were modern and experimental. We believed in Art and Science. We cared passionately for Freedom and Social Justice. We saw ourselves as occupying a ground common to both Arab and western culture, Russian culture was in there too, and Indian, and a lot of South America. The question of identity as something that needed to be defined and defended did not occupy us. We were not looking inward at ourselves but outward at the world. We knew who we were. Or thought we did. In fact I never came across the Arabic word for identity, huwiyyah, until long after I was no longer living full-time in Egypt. Looking back, I imagine our Sixties identity as a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions.

  This territory, this ground valued precisely for being a meeting-point for many cultures and traditions – let’s call it ‘Mezzaterra’ – was not invented or discovered by my generation. But we were the first to be born into it, to inhabit it as of right. It was a territory imagined, created even, by Arab thinkers and reformers, starting in the middle of the Nineteenth Century when Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt first sent students to the West and they came back inspired by the best of what they saw on offer. Generations of Arabs protected it through the dark time of colonialism. My parents’ generation are still around to tell how they held on to their admiration for the thought and discipline of the West, its literature and music, while working for an end to the West’s occupation of their lands. My mother, for example, who had fallen in love with the literature of Britain at school, and who could not be appointed to teach it at Cairo University until the British had left, did not consider that rejecting British imperialism involved rejecting English literature. She might say that true appreciation and enjoyment of English literature is not possible unless you are free of British colonialism and can engage with the culture on an equal footing. This is the stance that Edward Said speaks of when he describes how ‘what distinguished the great liberationist cultural movements that stood against western imperialism was that they wanted liberation within the same universe of discourse inhabited by western culture.’

  They believed this was possible because they recognised an affinity between the best of western and the best of Arab culture. ... Generations of Arab Mezzaterrans had, I guess, believed what western culture said of itself: that its values were universalist, democratic and humane. They believed that once you peeled off military and political dominance, the world so revealed would be one where everyone could engage freely in the exchange of ideas, art forms, technologies. This was the world that my generation believed we had inherited: a fertile land; an area of overlap, where one culture shaded into the other, where echoes and reflections added depth and perspective, where differences were interesting rather than threatening because foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities.

  The rewards of inhabiting the Mezzaterra are enormous. At its best it endows each thing, at the same moment, with the shine of the new, the patina of the old; the language, the people, the landscape, the food of one culture constantly reflected off the other. This is not a process of comparison, not a ‘which is better than which’ project but rather at once a distillation and an enrichment of each thing, each idea. It means, for example, that you are both on the inside and the outside of language, that within each culture your stance cannot help but be both critical and empathetic.

  But as the Eighties rolled into the Nineties the political direction the world was taking seemed to undermine every aspect of this identity. Our open and hospitable mezzaterra was under attack from all sides.

>   Personally, I find the situation so grave that in the last four years I have written hardly anything which does not have direct bearing on it. The common ground, after all, is the only home that I – and those whom I love – can inhabit.

  As components of my mezzaterra have hardened, as some have sought to invade and grab territory and others have thrown up barricades, I have seen my space shrink and felt the ground beneath my feet tremble. Tectonic plates shift into new positions and what was once an open and level plain twists into a jagged, treacherous land. But in today’s world a separatist option does not exist; a version of this common ground is where we all, finally, must live if we are to live at all. And yet the loudest voices are the ones that deny its very existence, that trumpet a ‘clash of civilisations’. My non-fiction, then, from the second half of the Eighties, through the Nineties, rather than celebrating Mezzaterra, became a defence of it, an attempt to demonstrate its existence.

  Throughout the Nineties the world was treated to the spectacle of the Iraqi people suffering under sanctions because their dictator had invaded Kuwait, while next door the democratically elected Labour government of Israel speeded up its theft of Palestinian lands and resources under cover of the Oslo peace accords. Neither process could have taken place without the backing of the United States, the world’s one remaining superpower. The effect was to radicalise Arab opinion and expose the weakness and complicity of Arab rulers. In the West, public opinion was slowly starting to shift towards a more balanced view of the Palestinian-Israeli issue. For a brief moment at the end of the Clinton administration it seemed that a solution with which both sides could live was within reach. It is said that Arafat was willing to accept the offer Clinton put to him at Taba but was advised to wait until after the American elections. The reasoning ran: Clinton is on the way out, he can’t do any more good. George W. Bush is our man; his Arab oil connections go back a generation. Let him be the one to sign the peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. But before this could happen Sharon had gone for his promenade through the Noble Sanctuary, the Intifada had erupted, Barak was out and a Likud government was in and all deals were off. True to form, most of the UK and the American media presented the Intifada as essentially a religious protest to Sharon entering the Haram. Hardly any mention was made of the fact central to the preceeding seven years of collective Palestinian life: that the Oslo accords had been a new screen behind which Israel could continue to dispossess the Palestinians. It was as though a simple-mindedness descended on the media when it reported on matters to do with Arabs, Islam and, in particular, Palestine. No, it’s a bit deeper than that: it is that the media attributes simple and immediate motivation to Arabs and Muslims as though they were all one-celled creatures. Watching the news on the BBC or CNN on the one hand and Al Jazeera on the other was like seeing reports from two different planets.

  As we now know, the New World Order announced at the beginning of the Nineties was – by the beginning of the new millenium – mutating into the Project for the New American Century. An extreme strand of American ideology deemed the omens propitious for America’s ‘manifest destiny’ to be actualised: it was time for America to dominate the world. The key to this would be strategic control of geography and of the main energy resource of the planet: oil. Dominance in central Asia and the Arab world would both control the oil and prevent those parts of the world from forming alliances with China or Russia.

  But the US could not underwrite Israeli policies and ambitions in the region and at the same time be regarded by the Arab people as a friend. The Palestinian issue was largely at the heart of this, but so also was the Arab reading of Israel’s desire to become the local superpower. Apart from the questions over the Syrian Golan Heights, the Lebanese Shab‘a Farms and the never-quite-renounced expansionist ‘Eretz Israel’ idea, Israel’s footprint was to be found in many issues critical to the wellbeing of its neighbours such as the debate over Egypt’s share of Nile water, the surreptitious introduction of GM crops into the region’s agriculture or the growing drug trade. America, therefore (and this is before September 11, 2001), could not seek to secure its interests in the region through a positive or mutually beneficial relationship with the Arabs.

  This is never spelt out by the American media for the American public: that the discord between the Arab world and the USA is entirely to do with Israel. The International Court of Justice, environmental policies, globalisation problems – these are issues between America and the entire world, not just the Arabs. Between America and the Arabs specifically there is only Israel – or was until the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

  In the early months of 2001 the Intifada had unmasked the bankruptcy of the Oslo agreements, Israel was using increasingly violent measures against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, the people in Arab countries were agitating, collecting donations and demanding action from their unwilling governments. In the face of the Palestinians’ refusal to back down and accept their dispossession, and with world public opinion shifting to support them, the US was essentially left with four choices. It could:

  1. Dissociate itself from Israel, or

  2. Pressure Israel into a true peace deal with the Palestinians, or

  3. Pressure Israel into disguising or deferring its ambitions and pressure the Palestinan leadership into conceding more ground to Israel, or

  4. Accept the hostility of the Arab world and a growing part of the rest of the world and decide how to deal with it.

  The first option was unrealistic. US domestic dynamics precluded it. Every American President, presidential candidate and Secretary of State has felt obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to Israel in front of the powerful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The recruitment, in the late Nineties, of the Bible-belt right (now estimated to form 18 per cent of voters and 33 per cent of Republican voters) to Israel’s cause made it even more unlikely.

  The second option was not possible for the same reasons as the first.

  Options three and four have formed the basis of US strategy for almost forty years.

  Every American administration from 1967 to 2001 has tried to conclude interim peace deals which buy Israel time to create more facts on the ground. Since Richard Nixon’s visit to Egypt in the early Seventies, American tactics for dealing with Arab hostility to US policies were to increase the region’s (particularly Egypt’s) dependency on the US through USAID projects, to support corrupt Arab rulers and corrupt them further, to advise and co-operate with regimes in silencing opposition and to attempt to co-opt local élites. Regimes that have balked at the American line have been branded ‘rogue’ and sanctioned.

  Yet this unquestioning pro-Israeli stance was becoming problematic. Awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people had begun to increase in the US through the alternative media, the Internet and the efforts of second-generation Arab Americans. The day might have come when American taxpayers realised that the billions of dollars they were paying to subsidise Israel were simply buying them the anger of the Arabs and the Muslims and nudging them out of step with the rest of the world. They might have asked why this support continued to be necessary when Israel was the only nuclear power in the region and had the fourth strongest army in the world and was refusing to abide by international law even though it was no longer under any existential threat.

  The events of September 11, 2001 played straight into what would appear to be the Neo-con dream scenario. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the US no longer needed the Islamist fighters it had helped to create in Afghanistan. In fact they had become a nuisance since the US refused to cede to the demand of their leader, its one-time ally, Osama bin Laden, that American troops be pulled out of Saudi Arabia. The political groundwork for dealing with the Arab world in terms of pure power had been laid by the Neo-cons who were now in central positions in government. The ideological framework for a confrontation with ‘Islam’ had been fashioned by Samuel Huntington and his followers out of the anti-Is
lamic discourse prevalent since Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. Now the War on Terror was declared. Israeli politicians leapt to declare common cause with America, or rather to declare that their cause had always been the war on terror and now, at last, America had joined them.

  It was now possible to move the conflict from the political into the metaphysical sphere: a conflict with an enemy so nebulous as to be found anywhere where resistance to American or Israeli policies might lurk.

  It was within this rubric that the 2003 war on Iraq was started and it blazes on as I write. The old language of colonialism surfaces once again. Politicians and pundits insist on describing Iraqis in ethnic and religious terms although Iraqis describe themselves (in the Arabic media) in political and economic terms. The US insists on ramming a vicious form of global capitalism down Iraq’s throat...

  To date, the effect of American policies on the Arab world has been the complete opposite of their stated aims. In Palestine America defined itself as the ‘honest broker’ between the Palestinians and Israelis and proceeded to place matters in the hands of US Special Envoys almost every one of whom was a graduate of AIPAC. Today, after more than thirty years of an American-sponsored ‘peace process’, thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis have been murdered, Jerusalem is encircled by illegal settlements, the West Bank is decimated, an Apartheid barrier is in the process of construction and the President of the US has taken it upon himself to absolve Israel of any obligation to conform to past agreements, to international law or to the declared will of the world. Gaza and Rafah are seeing killings and demolitions of homes on a scale unparalleled since 1948.

  In Egypt, the late president Anwar Sadat invited the US to set up its stall promising peace, democracy and prosperity and his regime has toed the American line faithfully since then. The country now has unprecedented levels of poverty, huge disparities between rich and poor and a shattered middle class. What small intimations of representative government there were have been strangled; Egyptians have been ruled by Emergency Law for the past twenty-three years and the abuse of the citizens’ human rights has become endemic. So bad is the situation that Egyptians have reversed the trend dominant for some 6,000 years and now seek to emigrate from their land.