The Things I Would Tell You

by Sabrina Mahfouz

  Similar effects can be seen in every ‘third world’ country that bought into American promises or had them forced upon it. And still the media burble on about the ‘peace process’ and bringing ‘democracy’ to the Arabs. Almost 300 years ago Giambattista Vico pointed out that the first symptom of the barbarisation of thought is the corruption of language. The media has a clear duty here: the US administration and the British government should be made to define very precisely what they mean by ‘sovereignty’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘stability’, ‘peace’ and ‘terrorism’. These people are not vague idealists; they are lawyers and businessmen, they know all about fine print and defining terms. They run democratically elected governments answerable to the people and their representatives. The media should demand that they spell out the fine print in their pronouncements to their electorates. We could even limit the question and ask what do the British and the American governments mean by these terms in the context of their dealings with the Arab world? Then, depending on how the definitions agree with those in the OED, say, we could find different terms for the commodities Bush and Blair are so keen to export to the region.

  And since the western media is now blithely using Arabic words it would be useful if they could demonstrate their understanding of those too. They can start with ‘jihad’, ‘fatwa’ and ‘shaheed’, all of which are far more layered and subtle than you would guess if you just came across them in English.

  The whole question of Islam and the West needs to be examined honestly. The current pieties that say ‘we know so little of each other’ or, in the words of Lord Carey, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘we must get rid of the deep hatred we have for each other’, may be well-intentioned but they rest on untrue premises and are not helpful. The huge populations of Arab Christians and the Christians who live in Muslim countries know a great deal about Muslims and there is no evidence that they ‘hate’ them. In fact Arab Christians have fought side by side with their Muslim compatriots against the Crusaders and against the Western colonialists of more recent times. And Muslims are very well informed about Christians. Eastern Christians have been their compatriots, neighbours and friends for fourteen centuries. And Muslims have had to learn about western Christians if only because the West has been the dominant power in Muslim lives for the last 200 years.

  As for hatred, a ‘secular’ Muslim cannot, by definition, hate a Christian or a Jew on the grounds of religion. A ‘believing’ Muslim cannot hate a Christian or a Jew because of who they are since Islam is clear that Muslims must live in fellowship with people ‘of the Book’. There is, though, an important difference between Christians and Muslims in terms of belief. Since Islam came after Christianity and Judaism and saw itself as a continuation of their traditions, it is part of the faith of a Muslim to believe in Christ, Moses and the prophets of the Old and New Testaments. This is stated in the Qur’an and it is not open to choice. A believing Christian or Jew, on the other hand, can choose whether or not to believe that Muhammad was a prophet and, therefore, whether Islam too came from the God of Christianity and Judaism.

  A linked and recurrent theme is to claim that Arabs use Israel and the West as an alibi, an excuse for their passivity, that they should get on with fixing their lives, with developing. Here it is essential to differentiate between the Arabs and their rulers. The rulers will do nothing because their only interest is to remain in power. They have failed in their primary task of protecting their nations’ sovereignty and steering their countries’ resources towards providing the people with a decent life. Their positions are now so precarious that they dare not move one way for fear that their people’s anger will finally unseat them, and they dare not move the other way for fear of offending America. As for the people, they are doing plenty. First they are surviving – by the skin of their teeth. The poor are poorer then they have ever been. The middle classes are often running two jobs just to make a living: civil servants are driving taxis, lawyers are working as car park attendants, graduates are working on food stalls. Even so, local NGOs challenge governments on human rights, on trade union laws, on constitutional reforms. Citizens challenge government officers on corruption. They take cases to court and they win. Artists paint and musicians sing. Newspapers are full of analysis and debate. And this against a background of arbitrary detention, of torture, not just in prisons, but in police stations. Protests are organised despite the thousands of armed security forces the state puts on the streets. And despite the sullying of these terms, people still campaign for democracy and freedom.

  What does the western media report of all this? When the UNDP report on the Arab countries came out with its abysmal findings, where was the logical concern about the measly percentage of state budgets devoted to research and development and the trillions spent on importing western arms? Instead the headlines screamed about how 50 per cent of Arab women were still illiterate. But another finding was that in the last two decades Arab women outstripped every other group of women in the world in the advances they had made.

  Why was that not a headline?

  It should be said that representation in the western media is not high among the priorities of my friends in Egypt and other Arab countries. Nor should it be. But for those of us who live in the West this fashioning of an image that is so at variance with the truth is very troubling. As Jean Genet observed in Un captif amoureux, the mask of the image can be used to manipulate reality to sinister ends. And while it would not be correct to attribute malign motives to the media in general, it is not unreasonable to feel that by promoting a picture of the Arab world that is essentially passive, primitive and hopeless, a picture that hardly ever depicts Arabs as agents of action (except for terrorists and suicide bombers), the media validates the politicians’ dreams of domination.

  This, also, is where a certain breed of Arab intellectual plays a crucial role. Decrying the political oppression rampant in their countries of birth and exposing the atrocities that take place there, these intellectuals (the majority of whom are to be found in Washington DC) will implicitly widen their critique to discredit the very culture and people of these countries. They therefore provide the ideological justification to ‘save these people from themselves’. This has been seen in action recently in the writings of Arab intellectuals embedded with the US administration encouraging it into its disastrous Iraqi adventure.

  It has become commonplace to say that the world has never known such dangerous times. It’s possibly true. The givens we live with at the moment are well-rehearsed: the absence of a world power alternative to that of the United States, the US’s umbilical links with the global ambitions of capital and corporatism, and the reach and power of contemporary weapons.

  I would add to these that the identification (despite the efforts at blurring) of Islam as ‘the enemy’ is particularly dangerous. When the West identified the USSR as ‘the enemy’ it had to construct ‘the Evil Empire’ from scratch. But with Islam, the idealogues and propagandists of the West need only revive old colonialist and orientalist ideas of Islam as an inherently fanatical, violent ideological system that rejects modernity. They can play to deep-seated fears and prejudices with roots stretching back into the Middle Ages. When, at the height of the Troubles the IRA launched a bombing campaign on the mainland, the suggestion that this was a manifestation of ‘Catholic fanaticism’ was a marginal one. However repellent their bombing of civilians it had to be regarded and dealt with as a politically motivated act. A similar reaction was afforded the African National Congress’s bombing campaign – no reasonable person suggested that this was ‘black fanaticism’. From 1970 to 2000 the United States has been directly implicated in creating and nurturing Islamist groups to counter secular national liberation movements in Palestine and other Arab countries. It, and the Arab regimes, have succeeded in pushing most political opposition into the cloak of Islamism. Now that the most militant of the Islamist extremists, whose lands are the ‘objects’ of Western policies, are
no longer content for the battles to be fought exclusively on their home ground and have brought a sample of the carnage into the territory of the West we hear a ready-made discourse on ‘nihilistic Islamic fanatics’ who are on the rampage because they hate the democracy, freedom and prosperity of the West. One does not have to condone the murder of civilians to admit the political demands behind it. In fact denying the existence of these political demands guarantees the continuation and escalation of the conflict and the deaths of yet more innocents.

  The role of Israel here needs to be clearly acknowledged, for Israel has always predicated its value to the West on the premise that there is an unresolvable conflict between the West and the Muslim hordes. Today, allied to the American Christian right, its role is to exaggerate and escalate the conflict.

  A bleak, bleak picture. And yet there is still hope. Hope lies in a unity of conscience between the people of the world for whom this phrase itself carries any meaning. We have seen this conscience in action in the demonstrations that swept the planet before the invasion of Iraq, in the anger of Americans and Europeans at the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in the brave stand of the Israelis refusing to serve the Occupation, and in the private citizens from every part of the world who have tried – and some have paid with their lives – to stand between the Palestinians and their destruction. We see it every day in the writings of the brave and dogged few in the mainstream media and in the tireless work of the alternative and fringe media. It expresses itself in a myriad grass-roots movements that have coalesced into a world-wide effort to influence and modify the course of global capitalism.

  For all these voices, these consciences, to be effective, however, western democracies have to live up to their own values. It is shameful that on questions of international politics there is so little to choose between the governing parties and the opposition in the US and Britain. Democracy presupposes vigorous opposition on matters of national importance; it also presupposes a free and informed media which sees its task as informing the electorate of the facts. The current attacks on civil rights on both sides of the Atlantic, the drive to place security concerns before every other concern, the attempts to tamper with education and the law to serve a political agenda remind me of nothing so much as the activities of the ruling regimes in the Arab world for the last several decades; activities that have now brought the Arab world to what Arab intellectuals argue is the lowest point in its history.

  The question of Palestine is of paramount importance not just because of humanitarian concerns about the plight of the Palestinians. It matters that, now, in full view of the world and in utter defiance of the mechanisms the international community has put into place to regulate disputes between nations, a favoured state can commit vast illegal acts of brutality and be allowed to gain by them. If the world allows Israel to steal the West Bank and Jerusalem and to deny the history of the people it dispossessed in 1948 and 1967 then the world will have admitted it is a lawless place, and the world will suffer the consequences of this admission. The question of Palestine is also where the influence of the USA on world affairs is most sharply in focus. If there is no just solution to the Palestinian problem, if the ordinary citizens of Palestine and Israel are not permitted the conditions which would allow them to live their daily lives in a human way, then the influence of the world’s only superpower will be proved to be irredeemably malign.

  Globalisation is happening. It is driven by economics, economic ideology and communications. But does this have to entail the economic, political, cultural annexation of chunks of the world by whoever is the most powerful at any given moment? Surely that is the path to constant conflict, to grief and misery.

  There is another way, and that is to inhabit and broaden the common ground. This is the ground where everybody is welcome, the ground we need to defend and to expand. It is to Mezzaterra that every responsible person on this planet now needs to migrate. And it is there that we need to make our stand.

  Seema Begum

  Uomini Cadranno

  Tick Tock Tick Tock. 4 seconds. A person is going to die.

  1, 2, 100, 500, 1000, 1 million.

  Just one weapon devouring souls, good, evil, does it matter?

  Tick Tock Tick Tock. 4 seconds. A person is going to die.

  Tell me who is the king of mass murder, the devil who writes the list of people who will die but at the wrong time?

  Tell me if in this endless cold, endless storm,

  endless torture, endless war, endless genocide,

  a sweet beauty will blossom from the seeds of this endless cold,

  endless storm,

  endless torture, endless war, endless genocide.

  Tell me if men are the true seeds of greatness, the brains of the body,

  the strength of life, the ones who possess natural intelligence?

  Then tell me, oh great man bound for greatness, why do the innocent suffer the fate of the guilty?

  Tick Tock Tick Tock. 4 seconds. A person is going to die.

  And within this midst of darkness,

  there are flowers desperate to bloom, pure and spirited.

  But they are weak. They are fragile. They are a mistake because they are girls.

  You men in power have the audacity to prevent a woman from achieving great ambitions.

  How are you able to say ‘I foresaw her fatal outcome’ yet you’re not aware of her potential?

  Tell me, will her humanity cause her country to crush

  the way bombs crunch up cities,

  spill innocent blood and break bodies?

  The news of a baby girl reaches the father.

  The news of a daughter born into the family.

  The shame, how can the father bear the shame?

  Cradles his anger in his heart but the anger is endless.

  The shame is endless.

  Closes his eyes, closes his thoughts, closes his mind, closes his heart to the world.

  Because the shame is endless.

  ‘Oh my daughter, mistake of my life, use your seduction skills, use your beauty,

  weave a spell and charm a man into bearing sons, sons who

  will bring us prosperity.

  Wrap your beauty and fragile humbleness around men

  and you might just be forgiven for being you.’

  Tick Tock Tick Tock. 4 seconds. A person is going to die.

  Tell me, what must I do?

  I’m told to dream but am limited,

  must have manners and be disciplined,

  can’t have an ambition and stay committed,

  being higher than a man is prohibited,

  sit neatly be quiet and not spirited,

  get married and stay typical.

  The art of a woman is no excuse to limit her potential.

  Don’t tell me I need a man to be complete.

  Don’t tell me marriage is the purpose of my life.

  Oh man of my life, must I stand before you with a beautiful gown and lower my gaze?

  Must I stand under the great sky in solitude and silence and curtsy before you?

  No. I’m a girl who’ll save endless lives, bring endless happiness, inspire endless people,

  and protect endless innocents, be a shield to endless people,

  challenge endless stereotypes and be a leader with endless humanity.

  If men don’t understand the significance of women

  Uomini Cadranno –

  men will fall and ladies, we will rise.

  Tick Tock Tick Tock. 4 seconds. A person is going to survive.

  Editor’s Note: I met Seema Begum in 2016 when I facilitated a poetry workshop at Central Foundation Girls’ School in East London. This was for the Poetry Society’s SLAMbassadors project, which encourages teenagers to write and perform poems about identity. The workshop culminated in an award ceremony and showcase. The class were one of the most engaged I’ve ever taught and their feelings regarding freedom, social justice and equality were
palpable and inspiring. Seema, who was in Year 9 at the time, and was just fourteen years old, wrote the above poem as a response to the question, ‘Who am I?’

  Leila Aboulela

  The Insider

  Author’s Note

  My play is linked to a new dramatisation of The Outsider, to celebrate the centenary of Albert Camus. The instinctive, visceral Arab response to this classic set in Algeria is not ‘Where are the Arab characters?’ because they actually do exist and they are central to the plot. But the thing is that they have no names. They are never ever named. So in The Insider I gave them not only one name but two. Fatima and Fifi, Yusuf and Joseph – their original Arab name and a French version that they made up when they moved from the village to Algiers. Their cultural anxiety and their dual identity is a contemporary concern and one that I see often around me. This duality got me thinking in terms of the past and the present and I wanted to give a feminine, flouncy perspective in contrast to the masculinity of The Outsider. But there are still parallels between Fatima and Meursault, the protagonist of The Outsider. Her senses respond to clothes – specifically French fashion – as Meursault’s responds to nature. She is an outsider too, a prostitute in a conservative society. And at a certain point both of them find themselves alone in a confined darkness. But Fatima is also an insider because she is not a stranger to herself and because, through loving her brother, she eventually connects to a higher form of spiritual Love.

  One of my favourite novels is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys in which she tells the story of the first Mrs Rochester, Bertha Mason, the mad women in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea fills in the Creole, Caribbean world of Bertha Mason which Charlotte Brontë could not have had access to. The mad woman in the attic becomes a woman with a country and a family, her own complexities and voice. This is what The Insider does by extruding a slice of Camus’s novel. So ‘Raymond’s mistress’ and her brother ‘The Arab’ become main characters who have their own side to the story and exist well beyond it.