by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
An obvious development that illustrates the limited extent of the categories such as “Middle East” and “Middle Eastern” is the very successful deployment by political opposition in the Maghrib of a discourse on Islam. For these opponents, the term “Middle East” has meant very little. Their oppositional discourse posits a completely different map of the world, with its own categories. The participation of supporters of this political movement in conflicts far away from the Maghrib as fighters and organizers connected them and, given their popular appeal, a great number of Maghribis to Muslims who were not necessarily in the Middle East. Indeed, this pan-Islamic discourse was even successful in explaining the closeness between banlieusards of Maghribi and West African origins in France itself. By becoming Muslims in this new way, Maghribis did not need to think of themselves as Middle Easterners. The category was simply alien to the vocabulary of that political movement.
In contrast, the political claims made by Berberists in Algeria and Morocco tend to focus on the difference between Berbers and Arabs. These claims are based on the idea that the Berbers are native North Africans whereas Arabs are conquerors who came from the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, Berber nationalism functions in ways that seek to distance the original Maghrib from the Mashriq. However, its ambivalence vis-à-vis Christianity, another Middle Eastern religion, and its pride in figures such as Augustine of Hippo, may lead some to believe that it still operates within French colonial discourse. For, as I have explained above, one of the arguments used to legitimate French colonialism was to bring North Africa back to its place in the Western Christian world. In addition, French missionaries never ceased to try to convert Berbers. Recently, Christian missionaries operating in the Algerian region of al-Qabā’il (Kabylia) have attacked the sacrifice of sheep during ‘Īd al-Adhā as a barbaric act, eliciting violent reactions among the population.
Given its francophone, and not always francophile, orientation, it is possible to see reference to Middle Easterners (moyen-orientaux) in Berber nationalist discourse. Noticeably, none of these activists ever use the Arabic term (sharq awsatiyūn), which is outside of their discourse. Instead, one mostly finds a Moyen- Orient tied to Arabs and cast as the other of the Maghrib and its native Berbers. All these factors explain why it is in French that one finds the greatest number of references to Middle Easterners in the Maghrib. However, there is no sense that some Maghribis are Middle Easterners in the same way as those living in the Arabian Peninsula.
In fact, references to the Middle East are used to produce an alienating effect. A militant would say, “We have nothing to do with the Middle East and Middle Easterners, and we want nothing to do with them.” This politics of ethnicity sometimes reverts to colonial racialist reflexes and distinguishes between the Arab (Middle Easterner) in the Maghrib from the “European” Berbers.31 Although it is rare to find serious academics who continue to propound racialist ideas about Middle Easterners, it is striking that most Maghribis refer to Africans as if they were not themselves African. Although explaining this would illuminate the evolution of colonial ideology after independence, it is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is worth exploring the conditions that support the absence of Africans from the Maghrib.32
POSSIBILITIES
Whether they express themselves in French or Arabic, Maghribis do not believe they are Middle Easterners. Moreover, Maghribis seem familiar enough with the realities of the Middle East and its peoples to refrain from using a concept so devoid of the specificity and nuance afforded by terms such as “Arabs,” “Egyptians,” “Turks,” “Iranians,” and “Kurds.” They tend to express their commonsense knowledge about the Middle East by using national categories. One should not assume, of course, that because Maghribis have other categories at their disposal that they are in fact knowledgeable about these societies. Modern conditions of mass education, pop culture, and travel restrictions militate against that. However, their familiarity with the Arab world, which is comparable to the knowledge Mashriqis have of the Maghrib, allows them to differentiate between countries and to name a few leaders and some popular singers, past and present. This makes the Mashriq a special region for Maghribis, distinguishing it from Southeast Asia, for example.
Unlike Mashriqis, Maghribis have had regular access to Mashriqi media for the last two decades. Satellite dish technology and Arabic-language channels from the Mashriq have become standard in the Maghrib. Maghribis have found in them new outlets for news and entertainment programs. However, these new media have not changed their basic conceptions about the Middle East and Middle Easterners. On the contrary, they seem to have merely reproduced, perhaps even reinforced, the distinction between Maghrib and Mashriq, even when operating within a diluted version of Arabism supported by the commonality of language. It is important to note here that the Mashriqi media channels, such as al-Jazeera and al-‘Arabiya, do not refer to Mashriqis as sharq awsatiyūn either. Because their market is linguistically based, these media use the term “Arab world” (al-watan al-‘arabī) more readily than they use the term “Middle East”—although the latter is not unheard of. Actually, it is also hard to find sharq awsatiyūn in the Mashriq, and these media outlets do not use the term to describe people. Naturally then, Maghribi mass viewers do not get to hear about sharq awsatiyūn from them. If they do, the term would again not include Maghribis.
A few years ago, some Algerians who took part in international nongovernmental military actions, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan, formed the organization Middle East Warriors (muhāribū al-sharq al-awsat), which has not been recognized by the government.33 The name of the organization may suggest that the term “Middle East” is gaining some use in Maghribi political life. However, this new development still maintains the Middle East as a faraway place that does not include the Maghrib. This sharq al-awsat is an indisputable “over there.” The reason it is a useful category is that it encompasses those who fought in Arab Iraq as well as those who fought in non-Arab Afghanistan. Because almost everyone in the Maghrib knows that there are non-Muslims in the Mashriq and that these “warriors” fought in these faraway places under the aegis of Islam, neither the Mashriq nor Muslim world fit. Furthermore, given American influence in those countries, these fighters picked up a category that is widely used by the governments and in the media.
Although I have only hinted at it, it should be clear that the integration of the categories of “Middle East” and “Middle Eastern” in the public discourse in France has to do with institutional mechanisms that guarantee it a sociohistorical existence in that country. These include, but are not limited to, the educational system, the mass media, and various social organizations and parties.
The impact of French public discourse on the way Maghribis conceive of the Middle East and Middle Easterners does not stem only from the experience of immigrants. It stems also from the continued influence France has had on those Maghribis who do in fact use the category. Maghribi rulers, officials, managers, and administrators read French dailies, watch French newscasts, and listen to French radio on a regular basis. Most acquire their information about the world, sometimes including their own country, from French outlets. They send their children who show promise to French schools and universities, and some have French in-laws. The Maghribis who think of Middle Easterners in French, and who translate the term into Arabic when convenient or expedient, are also integrated into the class of international bureaucrats and technocrats. Because nationalist policies have been producing increasingly Arabophone bureaucrats, however, usage of the term is bound to evolve. It is possible that sharq awsatīyūn will appear more often in the Maghrib. Nothing, however, suggests that the category will one day include Maghribis.
ENVOI
Categories and terms such as “Middle East” and “Middle Easterner” are not important because they are analytically more useful or precise, or because they more accurately describe social, economic, political, and cultural realities. In this volume, a number of exam
ples of the difficulties that present themselves because of logical inconsistencies and vagueness make this point. Instead, such categories are important because those who use them are important. As such, they become more coherent, or at least they appear to be, thanks to the work of highly educated people who participate in building up conceptions that emanate from centers of power. These intellectuals have done so primarily by expanding the usage of “Middle East” well beyond the strategic circles that originally produced it. Using vehicles including lectures, conferences, articles, and edited volumes such as this one, intellectuals, from scholars and journalists to marketing agents and sportscasters, have made the “Middle East” and “Middle Easterners” intellectually viable, if not coherent, concepts. One of the most important ways they have supported the transformation of the Middle East into a thing—an object of study and a unit of analysis—is by projecting the category back and applying it to a period when the category did not even exist. This anachronistic practice produces the impression that the Middle East has always existed and that it makes sense to analyze various historical periods utilizing this category. Although it is difficult to defend the intentional use of anachronisms intellectually, scholars who commit it do not even try. They just take it for granted.
In another register, and much like train tickets, airplane food, brand names, and industrial pollution, “Middle East” and “Middle Easterners” are artifacts of arrangements in support of which Maghribis have expended much effort and about which they have had little say. Those who use the terms are primarily followers even if they lead their societies in directions, according to conceptual maps, and for reasons they do not choose or even understand. They are mid-level managers in the vast supply chain they are now told to identify as global. Their primary intellectual contribution to the “global community” resides in finding ways to translate and relay the latest directions and orientations.
I end this essay with two anecdotes. Recently, I was at the mechanic waiting for my car to be fixed when a customer who was chatting up one of the mechanics suddenly said, “Well, you know what they say: knowledge is power.” I had not followed their conversation up to that point and, just as I was preparing myself to think ill of clichés and those who propagate them, the mechanic replied, “Oh yeah? How come I know so much about cars and all kinds of other things and I still have no power?”
A few months earlier, I used the opportunity of attending a conference to ask Maghribis who were present what they thought about the Middle East (al-sharq al-awsat). With a puzzled look in their faces, they all asked, “You mean the newspaper?” (Al-Sharq al-Awsat is an Arabic-language daily published in London and controlled by the Saudi royal family).
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF IDENTITIES AND NARRATIVES IN THE REGION REFERRED TO AS THE MIDDLE EAST
Part II
5
WHEN DID THE HOLY LAND STOP BEING HOLY?
Surveying the Middle East as Sacred Geography
Daniel Martin Varisco
My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positive a localized focus.
—Edward Said, Orientalism
BEFORE THE EAST HAD A MIDDLE, or even nearsighted and far-fetched stretches, it was in principle a convenient relational marker for a world in which some directions were more significant than others. There was nothing absolute about it; as in all perspectives, the view to the east depended on where one was looking from as much as at the object of one’s gaze. Of course, as literary critic Edward Said reminded us in his seminal polemic Orientalism, it also depended on what one was looking for. For Said, an Anglican Palestinian who wore his crossing-the-border east-to-westness proudly on his rhetorical sleeves, the “Orient” was “almost a European invention.”1 In a loose Foucauldian sense, a discursive tradition that “can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx” is easily imaginable as an easterly ill-wind of the will to dominate given that many men and women looking east considered themselves superior.2 Rhetoric aside, a shared and power-prone notion that can cross so many centuries, languages, and political contexts must be wholly a European invention, even a phantasm, for how else can it be justified as a unified Western gaze at an inferior Eastern other?
Said’s Orientalism thesis, which has achieved sacred status in a secular, literary sense, has received extensive countercriticism even by admirers of the overall thrust of his argument.3 This criticism centers on two fundamental stumbling blocks that fall out of Said’s polemical excess. First, his notion of Orientalism lacks a worldly orientation to the ways in which historically real others in a knowable geographical space have represented themselves. As numerous postcolonial writers have cautioned, there were voices crying out in that discursive wilderness, even if Said chose not to hear or read them. Second, it is arguable that not everyone who looked east did so through the hegemonic lens of a despotic Orientalism writ large. There is more to the gaze than the deconstructable rhetoric of novelists, philologists, and famous travelers. My concern is with this second fault line: the critically acute sine qua non of Said’s traveling theory does not account for actual and virtual traveling as a sacred act in which the East as the Holy Land is in fact and devout fancy superior to all other lands and thus to all other directions.
The binary East-vs.-West or Orient-vs.-Occident, given its tropic relevance in many literary texts, the media, and many parts of academia, is indeed problematic, as Said and many other scholars have demonstrated. Such an either-or explanation elides the inevitable nuance that drives all intellectual progress. This is especially the case for analysis of the ways in which a much politicized geographic territory is overlaid with sacred dimensions. The problem with Said’s textual genealogy of Orientalist discourse is that he fails to provide a methodological escape from the polemic bind of the binary itself. This results in what Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm pointed out just after Said published his argument: an “Ontological Orientalism in reverse.”4 Dueling essentialisms, no matter what directional marker carries the political spin, mire us in a perpetual battle of counter vs. counterpoint, thesis contra antithesis, which prevents arrival at a working synthesis. Said knew this when he warned that the answer to Orientalism was not an equally distorted Occidentalism.5 To find that answer, or at least to ask the kinds of questions that lead us away from the problems well articulated in Said’s Orientalism, we must think outside the binary.
I know of no contemporary scholar who would dispute the fact that many Europeans over time created a false idea of the Orient through misrepresentation, but such powerful notions do not arise ex nihilo. It is useful to examine what the term “orient” originally meant to the Greeks themselves. The classical origin of the term “orient” points to an astronomical role: to speak of the orient is to designate where the sun rises or mark a nodal point for coordinating the stars.6 Greeks used “orient” for the direction of the rising sun rather than a space, real or imagined, for some surrogate other. Later, Roman administrators (those who no doubt would have grown up believing that all roads lead to Rome) spoke of an oriens-occidens orientation, but not in the later Christian sense of a civilizational clash of divinely fired proportions. It is highly dubious that a notion of the “Orient” as an inferior other captured a meaningful geopolitical reality for either the phalanxes of Alexander or the legions of Pompey.
The idea of a uniform and inferior “East” was too superficial even for Greek historians. In writing his omnidirectional history, Herodotus described the customs of numerous peoples outside Greece, but those toward the rising sun as he saw it were geographically Asiatic (Asiatikos) rather than oriental. The relevant term used in classical Greek to define and at times denigrate the collective pool of non-Greek others is barbaros, from which various European languages derived the highly pejorative sense of barbarian and by which the indigenous North Africans were later grouped by outsider logic as Berbers. The origin of barbaros as a philological trope is
generally accepted as a reference to anyone who could not speak intelligible Greek and thus produced sounds that came across as nonsense, a kind of barbarbarbarbaristic stuttering.7 This had not been an important designation in Homer’s day, when the Trojans inhabited a joint Grecocentric sphere, even though modern-day geography would locate them in what Said labels the “Near Orient.” Usage of barbaros appears to have coincided with the sense of a unified Greek people or Hellenes, their joint koine-ing facilitated in part by the invasions of the Persians. As historian James Romm explains, “Once Greeks had faced foreigners in a life-or-death struggle and soundly defeated them, they began to speak of barbaroi as peoples naturally or culturally inferior to themselves, not simply ‘non-Greek-speakers’ but ‘barbarians’ as well.”8 But, someone did not have to be from some imagined space called an Orient to be a barbarian. The civilizational divide was not determined according to fixed geographical directions but was concentric; Greece was the ethno-concentric focal point for everything, and all others spiraled out as barbarians. As Denys Hay long ago noted, barbarians bothering Greeks were “particularly troublesome in Europe itself.”9