December 2007 The Newsletter of

The Newsletter of
Middle East Studies Center, American University in Cairo
December 2007
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 3
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
4
FROM THE DIRECTOR
JOEL BEININ
5
HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
JACK BROWN
8
ACADEMIA AND OCCUPATION
KRISTEN ALFF
10
STATE HISTORY AND ITS LEGISLATORS
RORY A. MCNAMARA
PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM IN LITERATURE
12
YASMINE NAZMY
MESC LECTURE: TECHNOLOGY IN THE COLONY
14
FRANCESCA RICCIARDONE
15
BOOK REVIEW: COUNTDOWN TO CRISIS
IVAN ROSALES
16
MESC CALENDAR
Cover Photo: Algerian Nationalist Monument, Algiers, 2005
Photo Courtesy Louiza Sid-Ammi
The views expressed here are those
of their authors and not necessarily
those of MESC, the editor, or the
Middle East studies program.
Faculty Advisors: J. Beinin, H. Sayed
Editor
Jack Brown
Asst. Editor
Rory A. McNamara
Asst. Editor
Catherine Baylin
WWW.AUCEGYPT.EDU/ACADEMIC/MESC/
Page 4
FROM THE DIRECTOR
JOEL BEININ
This is being written as I am
attending the annual meeting
of the Middle East Studies
Association of North America
in Montreal, Canada. Many of
my colleagues on the faculty of
AUC whose research and
teaching focuses on the Middle East are also attending
this meeting. Smaller numbers of us attend the meetings
of the British or German counterparts of MESA and many
other scholarly meetings. But
no other national meeting
gathers together such a large
number of scholars who study
and teach about the Middle
East. Why is the United States
such a powerful center for
Middle East Studies?
At one level, this is an expression of wealth and imperial
privilege. Great Britain was
the most powerful country in
the world in the nineteenth
century. Consequently, it was
the most important center for
the study of India: “the jewel in
the crown” of Queen Victoria,
who was also empress of India. British scholars were also
prominent in the study of
many other regions of the
British Empire, including parts
of the Middle East, among
them, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine,
the Arab Gulf, and Iran. When
the French empire occupied
Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia,
France was the leading center
for the study of the Maghreb.
Britain and France have remained important centers for
the study of South Asia, the
Middle East and the Maghreb,
long after decolonization.
However the colonial history
and social science of the nineteenth and the first half of the
twentieth centuries has been
superseded. Many British and
French scholars now engage in
dialogue with scholars of both
their former colonies and
those from other countries.
So the high profile of the
Middle East Studies Association of North America is, in
good part, a consequence of
the expanding imperial role –
at first indirect, now increasingly direct – of the United
States in the Middle East
since the late 1960s. Does
it, therefore follow, that all or
much of the scholarship that
is presented at MESA serves
American imperial interests
or reflects the hegemonic
position of the United States
in the Middle East?
That is not the view of Martin
Kramer, whose book, Ivory
Towers on Sand: The Failure
of Middle Eastern Studies in
America, excoriates MESA
and some of its most prominent members precisely because their scholarship does
not serve the national interests of the United States as
he understands them. For
Kramer and his co-thinkers,
the situation has become so
bad that they have established a new Association for
the Study of the Middle East
and Africa, which they claim
will restore objectivity and
high standards to the study
of these regions.
The students who have taken
Middle East Studies 569, the
required introductory seminar
for the M.A. program, will
have learned to be suspicious of claims to objectivity.
An association whose leadership includes Bernard Lewis
and Fouad Ajami is no less
political than one whose past
presidents include Rashid
Khalidi and Zachary Lockman
(to name only two of those
Martin Kramer disapproves
of). The question should
never be whether scholarship
has political implications or
not. It always does. The
proper question is how the
ever-present relationship
between power and knowledge is configured in any
particular instance.
How then, did MESA come to
have such an “oppositional”
character, in the sense that
Edward Said would have
used the word? This is a long
story that should be carefully
researched. I would suggest
that one element of the answer lies in the Janus face of
American democracy. On the
one hand, the United States
has a long history of undemocratic behavior, at home and
abroad, from AfricanAmerican slavery to the invasion of Iraq. On the other
hand, it is the very ideals of
democracy, flawed in their
implementation as any ideals
must be, that allow Americans to rethink their political
and cultural assumptions,
criticize their leaders, and
call them to account (even if
belatedly). In the contested
space between an expanding
American empire in the Middle East (in the guise of promoting democracy) and the
desire of at least some
Americans for a truly democratic engagement with the
peoples and cultures of the
region, a fair amount of excellent critical thinking, teaching, and research about the
region has developed. It is to
participate and contribute to
this that AUC faculty members go to MESA.
Joel Beinin
Director of Middle East
Studies
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 5
HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
JACK BROWN
This brief essay will ask some
hopefully disturbing questions about human rights in
the Middle East; not as they
are enacted by local governments, but as they are
viewed and enacted by Western governments. I will suggest here that while rhetorically Western governments
continue to emptily call for
the enactment of human
rights in the region, practically they treat the region as
a convenient zone of exception to liberal legality and
human rights. Three disparate phenomena suggest this
position: forced ‘rendition’ of
criminal suspects, the extension of the European border
zone into the Middle East,
and the confounding behavior of Western aid organizations.
Rendition
When Hassan Mustafa
Osama Nasr was picked up
on the streets of Milan, Italy,
by American and Italian intelligence agents in Feb., 2003,
suspected of being an AlQaeda operative, he was not
charged or accused of any
crime; he was instead bundled into a white van,
wrapped in masking tape,
and driven several hundred
kilometers to Aviano airbase,
where he was loaded onto a
plane and flown to Egypt.
Here, Nasr was turned over
to Egyptian authorities, whom
he had fled for political asylum in Italy some 15 years
earlier. According to Amnesty
international and his own
testimony in a British documentary, he was then tortured for months by foreign
intelligence and state security agents. “He alleged its
operatives had stripped him
and given him constant beatings with bare knuckles,
sticks and electric cables.
One method involved handcuffing his leg to his hands,
so he was forced to stand for
hours on the other leg, while
being beaten.”1
In a similar case, in Sept.,
2001, American and Swedish
agents in Stockholm seized
Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, asylum seekers
also from Egypt. They were
taken to Stockholm airport by
hooded American agents,
where they were handcuffed,
their clothes cut from their
bodies with scissors, apparently drugged with suppositories, and flown to Egypt. Here
as well, both claimed to have
been tortured extensively
while under interrogation;
Agiza was subsequently convicted of state security offenses after a trial that lasted
mere hours; al-Zery was
eventually released without
charges.2
Hundreds of such
“extraordinary renditions”
have apparently been carried
out in the past few years at
the hands of the American
government alone. The pattern which begins to emerge
seems to indicate something
strange: these are people
whom the Americans or the
Europeans would like to violate, would like to have tortured, but they are not willing
to amend their own liberal
legal systems in order to permit it. Instead, they maintain
the façade of liberal legality
at home, while sending their
victims outside to the Middle
East in order to have it done.
They are casting them over
the walls of the proverbial
city for the ‘barbarians’ on
the outside to deal with.
While Western
governments
continue to
emptily call for
the enactment of
human rights in
the region,
Border Policemen
Europe, meanwhile, is pushing its border fences south,
to the southern Sahara. In
bilateral and multilateral
agreements with the North
African states—Morocco,
Libya, Tunisia (of course) and
even the often intransigent
Algeria—these states now
function as the border policemen of Fortress Europe, pick-
Spain’s North African Border, at Ceuta
ing up sub-Saharan immigrants in their thousands and
shipping them further south
without the long delays of
hearings and court cases.3
practically they
treat the region
as a convenient
zone of
exception to
liberal legality
and human
rights.
WWW.AUCEGYPT.EDU/ACADEMIC/MESC/
An identical function is at
work here: the European
states have a legal apparatus
which requires them to treat
attempted immigrants who
land on European soil with a
certain minimum level of
respect. Even illegal immigrants have rights to legal
hearings, asylum applications, and appeals. Not so
the barbarians to the south,
and thus the solution is to
hire them as border guards,
to violate the human rights of
the immigrants by proxy, to
ship them off by the truckload and planeload and boatload with hearing, asylum
application or appeal; and
more often than not with a
good dose of beating and
torture to discourage the next
attempt.
To a lesser extent, Mexico is
carrying out a similar function
for the United States; applicants for a visa to visit Mexico4 are now asked if they are
in possession of an American
Green Card (the possession
of which makes the Mexican
visa a formality); thus while
Mexico watches in embarrassment at the construction
of the absurd border fence
along its northern border,
and the humiliating treatment of its nationals in the
United States, it simultaneously helps the Americans
keep other nationalities from
getting into the United States
through Mexico.
Aid Organizations
In 1997, former USAID manager Michael Maren published a savage and shocking
expose of the role of western
aid organizations in the coun-
tries they serve. In The Road
to Hell: The Ravaging Effects
of Foreign Aid and International Charity, he showed
how aid workers at all levels
knowingly colluded with the
Somalian tyrant Mohamed
Siyaad Barre in the destruction of the country during a
decade of food aid and refugee assistance. In Maren’s
expose of the way food aid
destroyed the social and
political system of the country, the most surprising finding was that Western aid
workers became almost immediately aware of the damage their ‘assistance’ was
doing to the country, and
generally didn’t care.
Page 6
gees from Darfur, there were
few orphans to be found;
moreover, adoption is illegal
in both countries. So, according to the available evidence,
and the charges laid by the
Chadian government, the
NGO workers went to remote
villages and, essentially, stole
children from lower-class
families.
Going door-to-door in small
villages, they told families
that the organization would
take their sons and daughters to the regional capitol for
free French and Islamic
schooling: there was, according to Chadian news reports,
no mention of trips farther
than the capital, let alone
France. Foolishly, however,
Last summer, a French charity called
Zoe’s Ark
(l’Arche de
Zoe) announced an
‘operation’
to ‘evacuate’
10,000 orphans from
Darfur to
Europe and
the United
States, and
asking families in
France to
ready themselves to
take charge
of the children.5 Three
hundred
families
signed up,
paying as
much as
$3,400
each to the
organization;6 a troubling proxMaren’s Book ruffled many feathers
imity to baby
trafficking
in the Aid Industry
was already
apparent.
the aid workers relied on the
However, when Zoe’s Ark
same local fixers for the enshowed up in Chad, the temtire operation: as translators
porary home of many refu-
The most
surprising
finding was
that Western
aid workers
became
almost
immediately
aware of the
damage their
‘assistance’
was doing to
the country,
and generally
didn’t care.
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 7
in telling the parents about
the nonexistent Quranic
schools in Abeche, and as
drivers for the trip to the
Chadian capital; it was there
that the fixers informed authorities and the apparent
kidnapping was stopped.7
The protesters were, of
course, the people the
UNHCR was allegedly here to
protect and serve but only
insofar as they did not inconveniently ask to be treated as
human beings with human
rights.
Endnotes
Something in the alleged
behavior of the Zoe’s Ark
employees calls to mind the
attitude of the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees here in Cairo a couple of
years ago, when several thousand Sudanese refugees had
the temerity to stage a threemonth sit-in protest under
the UNHCR’s offices on
Gam’at al-Duwal al-Arabia
street. The only detailed investigation into the events
that followed was carried out
by AUC’s Forced Migration
and Refugee Studies program, which found that from
the beginning of the sit-in,
the agency “adopted a hostile and confrontational attitude toward the protesting
asylum seekers,” accusing
them of rumor-mongering, of
deceiving the public about
their status, and of being
economic migrants. It refused to allow staff members
to visit the protesters in
Mustafa Mahmud park
(directly in front of the
UNHCR office); and it repeatedly asked the Egyptian government to remove the protesters. Finally, after delivering an ultimatum to the protesters, the UNHCR sent a
letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requesting that
the Egyptian government
“end the protest.”8 Days
later, in the middle of the
night, thousands of security
personnel moved into the
park from all sides, wielding
clubs and water cannons.
Twenty-eight protesters were
killed in the removal, and
hundreds remained in detention for weeks afterwards.
Torturers for ‘rendered’ suspects. Efficient border policemen not hindered by legal
formalities. Naked recipients
of ‘aid’, whether helpful or
deadly. These are roles assigned to the people of the
region, even as western governments continue the empty
discourse of human rights.
2. Whitlock, C., A Secret Deportation Of Terror Suspects,
available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/
ac2/wp-dyn/A11976-2004Jul24?language=printer
Fifty years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote that the concept
of human rights tends to
break down exactly in the
context when it is needed,
when we are faced with people who have nothing left but
their quality of being human.—political refugees and
stateless people. “If a human
being loses his political
status, he should, according
to the implications of the
inborn and inalienable rights
of man, come under exactly
the situation for which the
declarations of such general
rights provided,” she wrote.
“Actually the opposite is the
case. It seems that a man
who is nothing but a man has
lost the very qualities which
make it possible for other
people to treat him as a fellow-man.”9
1. Grey, Stephen, Precis for Dispatches, Kidnapped to Order,
available at
http://www.stephengrey.com/
2007/06/preacher-seized-by-cia-tells-of-torture.html
3. De Haas, Trans-Saharan Migration to North Africa and the EU:
Historical Roots and Current Trends, available at
http://www.migrationinformation.org/
Feature/display.cfm?id=484
4. Visa requestors from the Middle East, at least.
5. Arche de Zoe communiqué,
available at http://www.archedezoe.fr/
pdfs/communique_28_avril.pdf
6. United Nations IRIN, Chad: French NGO Accused of Trafficking
Children, available at http://allafrica.com/
stories/200710261368.html
7. Tchad Actuel, Un convoyeur dont le camion a été loué par
« Children Rescue» raconte, available at
http://www.tchadactuel.com/main.php?2007/10/28/
300-un-convoyeur-dont-le-camion-a-ete-louepar-children-rescue-raconte
8. Azzam, F., and AUC FMRS,
A Tragedy of Failures and False Expectations, pp 51-54
http://www.aucegypt.edu/ResearchatAUC/rc/fmrs/
reports/Documents/Report_Edited_v.pdf
9. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 300
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Page 8
ACADEMIA AND OCCUPATION
KRISTEN ALFF
Since the beginning of the
Iraq war, the Pentagon has
sought the “objective’ opinions of anthropologists in its
fight against counterinsurgencies. This is not a new
strategy. In times of war and
military occupation, intelligence and military agents
have called upon scholars to
compliment state-building
and military operations in the
Middle East, Europe, Latin
America and Central Asia.
The Pentagon’s Human Terrain Teams represent the
most recent instance of occupation and the academy,
employing academics’ expertise to decrease combat operations and increase understanding of the societies and
cultures of Afghanistan and
Iraq. The academic presence
in combat zones has given
rise to debates about profession ethics. I will argue here
that the question is not only
ethical; it is also epistemological. That is, there is more
at stake than academic reputation, the so-called
“objective” knowledge produced by social scientists in
these positions is also problematic.
In the last three years, officials at the Pentagon have
questioned the efficacy of
conventional military training
and doctrine in fighting counterinsurgencies in Iraq and
Afghanistan. From that time,
senior leaders in the U.S.
Department of Defense began suggesting new strategies, which included a cultural component as a necessary adjunct to standard
combat operations. In July of
2004, retired Major General
Robert H. Scales, Jr. called
for a reordering of priorities
in Iraq in the Navel War College’s Proceedings magazine.
He argued in his article and
elsewhere that the military
units in Iraq and Afghanistan
required “an exceptional
ability to understand people,
their culture, and their motivation.” The untraditional
‘insurgencies’ that faced the
U.S. military abroad also led
the director of the Office of
Force Transformation , Arthur
Cebrowski, to conclude that
“knowledge of one’s enemy
and his culture and society
may be more important than
knowledge of his order of
battle.” The development of
Human Terrain Teams is the
Pentagon’s response to
Scales, Cebrowski, and others’ suggestions. Consisting
of least one professional
anthropologist and one translator, this five-person team is
just one of the Pentagon’s
seven “pillars” of the cultural
awareness program – an
obvious invocation of T.E
Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of
Wisdom. Some others include cultural education for
military personal, and compellations of databases on
the cultural ‘facts’ of certain
locales.
According to the U.S. Military
Review, the civilian “cultural
analyst” and his or her Area
Studies counterpart will provide “commanders with an
organic capability to gather,
process, and interpret culturally relevant data.” The most
vocal of these analysts in
Afghanistan, “Tracy,” told the
New York Times of the value
that the civilian expert brings
to the operation. According to
“Tracy,” her position allows
her to view the situation as
an omniscient third party.
She says, “In most circumstances, I am the ‘third’ gender” – in the view of the Afghani community, she is ex-
ternal to all social systems.
She is neither an Afghani, nor
a woman, nor a U.S. soldier.
This allows her to contribute
to the U.S. effort to interpret
cultural phenomenon and,
unlike in pervious attempts,
“to get it right.”
The military, media, and academics have often called for
the application of social science “knowledge” to occupations in the past. Roberta
Wohlstetter’s 1962 study on
Pearl Harbor, for example,
attributes the U.S. military’s
inability to anticipate the
attack on the headquarters
of the U.S. Pacific fleet to this
‘subjectivity’ – what she calls
‘ethnocentrism.’ According to
her, despite decoding Japanese cables, following ship
movements, and interpreting
Japanese conversations between military officials, the
U.S. Government did not give
meaning to these signals
because of their shortsightedness; they could not dispel
their understanding of the
Japanese soldier as wholly
rational. To remedy future
mistakes, she says, the military needs social scientists to
critically interpret the code
from an informed perspective
of an outsider.
It is important to note, however, that Japanese studies
in the United States was only
a small field of study before
World War II. It grew during
and after the war in response
to the government’s need for
linguists and strategists during the post-war occupation
of Japan. Out of these
schools came Ruth Benedict’s 1946 work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword:
Patterns of Japanese Culture,
The Human Terrain
Teams represent the
most recent instance
of occupation and
the academy,
employing
academics’ expertise
to decrease combat
operations and
increase
understanding of the
societies and
cultures of
Afghanistan and
Iraq.
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 9
which examined the Japanese ‘national psyche’ as
collective and distinct from
the American one. Commissioned by the Defense Department, Benedict’s book
was, at that time, the primary
example of the kind of anthropological “study of culture at a distance” that the
military outsourced to the
academy. It is also important
to mention that Benedict’s
other works, those commissioned by British historian,
George Taylor, were completely ignored, especially the
one published with Taylor
and his staff in 1945, which
made a convincing argument
that the Japanese were ready
to surrender.
The Pentagon’s
new policy of
embedding social
scientists as
interpreters of
‘culture’ will never
produce the
objective
knowledge that
they are hoping for.
Benedict’s successors, like
Roger Bowen, later criticized
her and the progenitors of
Japanese Studies for presenting their politicized work
as “disinterested scholarship” calling them
“occupiers-cumJapanologists.” Bowen and
his new breed of
‘Japanologists’ claimed that,
in contrast to their predecessors, by extricating traditional
language training in military
schools from the curriculum,
Japanese Studies would be
able to dispel the
‘subjectivity,’ which stemmed
from the relationship between the academy and politics. They claimed that by
promoting a diversified study
of society, politics, and history, the outcomes of their
research and study would not
conflict with political opinion,
Japan’s occupation or ideas
emerging from the Cold War.
Later schools, however, such
as those led by Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian
found that Bowen’s generation also “mobilized their
expertise to differentiate
Japan from the hegemonic
West: [and that] this cannot
be described in any other
term but ethnocentrism”[2].
The proponents and members of the Human Terrain
Project, like in Japanologists
during World War II and after,
claim to produce objective
knowledge for the occupation
from an omniscient position
outside of it. But, what
makes current Near and Middle Eastern specialists
‘objective?’ Can “Tracy,” in
her role as cultural advisor in
Afghanistan, indeed, “get it
right?”
From the Japanese model,
we find that epistemology, no
matter who constructs it –
the military or the academy –
is relational: academics in
occupation situations do not
inhabit a more elevated
‘objective’ position than the
military, but are instead, in
constant dialogue with it and
with its developments. As
“Tracy” interprets the thinking of Afghani men and
women, she is not a member
of a “third-gender.” She holds
the powerful position of interpreter of Afghani ‘culture,’
whose purpose is to gain
“knowledge of one’s enemy.”
This affects the way that she
interprets data; it also affects
the actions and reactions of
her subjects. This so-called
objective knowledge becomes even more opaque as
the U.S. government selects
the anthropologists it wants
to employ and chooses certain findings based on how
well it fits into the government’s overall plan.
There is no doubt that the
anthropologist makes an
important, informed, contribution to the discourse on
social and cultural subjects
of all varieties; it is indeed
through this wide debate that
we can arrive at some understanding of the world, however limited. It is also important for military success and
cultural sensitivity that deployed military personnel to
gain a cultural understanding
of the occupied territory prior
to their deployments. However, if we accept that studies of Iraq and Afghanistan
have obvious parallels with
Japanese historiography from
World War II, the Pentagon’s
new policy of embedding
social scientists as interpreters of ‘culture’ will never produce the objective knowledge
that they are hoping for.
Endnotes
1. Roger Bowen,
"Japanology and Ideology:
A Review Article," in Comparative Studies in Society
and History 31 number 1,
1989, p.185.
2. Masao Miyoshi and
H.D. Harootunian, Japan
in the World, ed. Masao
Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p.
69.
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Page 10
STATE HISTORY AND ITS LEGISLATORS:
THE ARMENIAN “GENOCIDE”
RORY A. MCNAMARA
When she proclaimed in late
October on ABC’s “This
Week” Sunday morning news
program that Ottoman Empire
culpability
in
the
“Armenian Genocide” was
not up for dispute, Speaker
of the House Nancy Pelosi (DCA) could perhaps be forgiven for so vigorously adhering to her reading of the massacres of thousands of Armenians during the final years of
the Empire’s existence. After
all, many historians would
likely have agreed with her
had ABC been so unconcerned with ratings as to
allow them the chance to
appear alongside Madam
Speaker and host George
Stephanopoulos. In her selfassuredness, however, Pelosi, like scores of politicians
was of course completely
discounting the scholarly
assessments of academics Justin McCarthy and Eric
Zürcher not the least among
them – refuting the notion of
the Ottoman Government’s
connivance with the massacres’ perpetrators. But Pelosi
and her Washington counterparts’ greatest blunder was
not necessarily their questionable grasp on Ottoman
historiography – heck, even
Bernard Lewis has seemingly
pulled a complete 180 from
his earlier interpretation of
the massacres – rather it was
their temerity to claim the
ability to legislate history
which deserves the most
skepticism.
Indeed, whether or not
House Resolution 106 accurately reflects the historical
record is in many ways unimportant to the subject at
hand. What is more important is the intersection of
state interests and scholarship – or, at least, what is
presented as historical fact.
For as intensely as politicians
may deliberate and debate,
there is no escaping the fact
that they are essentially state
employees – indeed guardians of state interests – sworn
to promoting these interests.
Hence they largely accept the
state formation myths inherent in all nationalist projects.
Indeed, it is this very convergence of state interests and
keenness to write the historical record to reflect positively
on one’s own country and
allies’ countries which suggests the difficulty – if not
impossibility – of writing history outside the discourse of
the state.
So it was no surprise that
anti-Resolution 106 rhetoric
was couched in concerns for
U.S. strategic interests, access to the Incirlik air base,
and over concerns about
Turkey’s increasing saberrattling over the Kurds in
northern Iraq. Republican
and Democratic opposition to
the resolution was indeed
unconcerned with the historical veracity of the potential
legislation and altogether
focused on how its ratification might strain relations
with Turkey. This state-first
sentiment was echoed in the
mainstream Turkish press:
the widely circulated daily
Milliyet Istanbul published a
prominently placed article
entitled “Turkey’s Bargaining
Chips,” detailing the possible
diplomatic steps Ankara
could take in order to pressure the House to refrain
from ratification of the resolution. The country’s most
widely-circulated paper, Hurriyet Istanbul , joined the din of
Turkish opposition to the
resolution, running an editorial by Oktay Eksi blasting the
Turkish government for not
adopting a “war logic” able to
successfully counter what
Eksi deemed to be the Arme-
nian diaspora’s propaganda
campaign with its own aggressive Turkish-tinged version of the massacres. Seemingly no one thought to question the logic of making history subject to statist contingencies; it was if the obvious
conflation of state interests
with the (re)writing of history
was somehow nothing extraordinary – a readily accepted domain of state hegemony.
Such unquestioning acceptance of state’s right – if not
duty – to intervene in the
historical record indicates the
near-thorough inculcation of
societies with the nationalist
histories and foundation
myths upon which their
states are created and sustained. With the centrality of
an “imagined,” to use Benedict
Anderson’s
term,
“collective history” to the
project of nationalism, the
state seems to be both keen
to prevent distortions of its
official discourse and most
citizens seem unwilling to
question the state’s monopoly on history so long
‘national interests’ or national honor is perceived to
be threatened. That the
“cultural systems” of nationalism - history among them cannot be directed without
the participation of a receptive audience is clearly indicated
by
this
latest
“genocide” issue.
For all the state-interest
grandstanding witnessed in
the U.S. over recent discussion of HR 106, in Turkey the
issue
of
Ottoman/
Republican/Turkish historiography has a cultural relevance more deeply ingrained
than simply the rationalchoice models of grand diplomacy as such were bandied
about the halls of Capitol Hill
Whether or not
House Resolution
106 accurately reflects the historical
record is in many
ways unimportant
to the subject at
hand. What is
more important is
the intersection of
state interests and
scholarship
WWW.AUCEGYPT.EDU/ACADEMIC/MESC/
The accepted discourse of
“Turkishness” as
defined by a selective reading of
‘national’ history is
both a product of
and a factor in academic accounts of
history.
in October. In a recently delivered lecture at the American
University in Cairo, Ottoman
Historian Dr. Selim Deringil
noted that it would be
“difficult to find a country
where history is as politicized
as it is in Turkey.” Indeed, the
list of “taboo subjects” in
Turkey is long – yet perhaps
gradually (and belatedly)
shortening: Article 301 of the
Turkish Penal Code, for example, has made insulting
“Turkishness” a crime. Turkish Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk was
charged with violation of Article 301 after he made public
comments about the massacres and the lack of discussion they received in public.
Though charges against Pamuk
were
eventually
dropped, they have gone
forward against perhaps dozens of others – mostly writers, journalists, and intellectuals. The Armenian-Turkish
journalist Hrant Dink was not
as lucky; his brutal assassination, perpetrated by a
young Turkish nationalist,
came after Dink’s repeated
and vociferous criticism of
Turkey’s denial of the massacres. This matter is not simply an issue of “free speech”
under law as it is often portrayed by international press
rights organizations sympathetic to the plight of outspoken Turkish intellectuals; it is
a battle with a discourse that
is very much part of the national psyche of everyday
Turkish citizens.
Indeed, this same discourse has found its way into
Turkish academic circles; at
his Cairo lecture, Deringil
spoke of how writing about
Armenian “troublemakers” in
the late Ottoman provinces
seems to be a “free ride” to
associate
professorship
within the Turkish national
university system. A selfdescribed “document fetishist,” Deringil also lamented
how the state has further
Page 11
moved to solidify its grasp on
the historical record by publishing collections of documents which best project its
own version of history – the
alleged massacres included.
This accepted discourse of
“Turkishness” as defined by
a selective reading of
‘national’ history is both a
product of and a factor in
academic accounts of history. It is thus perhaps not a
coincidence that Eric Zürcher’s textbook Turkey: A
Modern History, a book in
which the author refutes the
designation of the massacres
as “genocide,” has been
translated into Turkish and
reportedly has gone into multiple prints in order to satisfy
intense demand in secondary
and advanced-level Turkish
classrooms. Likewise it is not
surprising to find that vigorous opponent of the genocide
appellation
Justin
McCarthy was in 1998
awarded the Order of Merit of
the Turkish Republic by the
Turkish President for his contributions to Ottoman/Turkish
history. Of course, such popularity and acclaim should not
necessarily impugn the veracity
of
Zürcher’s
and
McCarthy’s work, yet they do
reflect the uneasy place of
historical study as a possible
tool for the reification of received nationalist discourses.
Turkey and the United
States are certainly not alone
in this phenomenon. The
case of ethnic Kurdish Turkish citizen Yektan Turkyilmaz,
a then PhD candidate at
Duke University who was
arrested, detained, and eventually deported from Armenia
in 2005 after his research at
the National Archives in Yerevan offended the nationalist
sentiments of the Armenian
intelligence services. Only
after the personal intervention by former U.S. Senator
Bob Dole on his behalf was
Turkyilmaz released. Even
examples less dramatic than
that of arrest and detention
reveal the direct influence
states often exert over academics within their borders:
in Egypt, universities cannot
admit or give a forum to
scholars and students from
certain countries from which
Egypt denies citizens visas
for political reasons. This
state of affairs differs only
slightly from that in the
United States where the state
essentially holds the right to
deny visas to individuals such
as Tariq Ramadan with whom
it finds fault, U.S. visa requests are handled on a case
to case basis unlike Egypt’s
blanket country bans irregardless of individual merits
– a difference only in tactics,
not policy.
Yet it is perhaps the
less obvious instances of the
maintenance of state-led
nationalist histories which
are more significant in that
they carry with them the
weight of citizens’ nationalism, patriotism, and concern
for national interests. Indeed,
as is evident by the social
struggles of Armenians and
Kurds in present-day Turkey
and minorities elsewhere, the
social realities these discourses produce and reproduce maintain structures of
power for better or worse
depending on one’s place
within nationalist history. In
many respects, then, not only
is history itself not an accurate record of the past, but
nationalist histories have
also preserved, in some
cases, the power structures,
grievances, and conflicts of
the past. Once again in the
words of Selim Deringil, “the
past is not history.” Whether
or not the past can ever be
history is in fact a struggle for
historians against whom are
often stacked the resources
of state nationalism.
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 12
Student Research in the Middle East Studies Program
PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM IN LITERATURE
YASMINE NAZMY
How have the images
of the home/land and
the construction of
This month we begin what will
be a regular feature in the newsletter: examples of the kind of research students at the Middle
East Studies Center are doing.
The following is excerpted from
the Masters Thesis abstract submitted by Yasmine Nazmy.
This is an attempt to examine the Palestinian nationalist narrative as expressed
through the literature/arts.
Essential to the narrative are
the concepts of 'home' and
'home-coming' expressed
through literature, art, and
even politics. Palestinian
memory, as is the case with
any nation, has been subject
to turbulent geopolitical
realities that reflect on the
imagination. In this case,
however, there are two conditions that make this narrative unique. In the first
place, it is one the few narratives that has not been realized in the modern institution of the nation-state; in
the second place, it continues to reflect the on-going
struggle of a peoples, most
of whom live in exile and are
unified only by a collective
vision of 'home'. Finally, this
narrative and the struggle
associated with it has mobilized and charged the entire
socio-political state of the
Middle East for almost 60
years. This paper seeks to
examine the changes in the
concept of 'home' over the
past 60 years as portrayed in
Palestinian literature and art
(fiction and memoir), using
both as a means of constructing and transmitting
the memory of a nation.
In beginning this project, I
pose the following questions: as essential components of the nationalist narrative of the Palestinian people(s), have the concepts of
'home' and 'home-coming',
reflected in the literary
imagination, changed from
the time of their inception to
date? How have the images
of the home/land and the
construction of 'home' interacted with the geopolitical
changes over time? Is it possible to create a literary map
of Palestine that would reflect those changes? Or have
the constant changes in the
geopolitical map determined
the borders of the literary
imagination? In this project,
I intend to examine selected
Palestinian literary texts in
an attempt to identify the
changes in the narrative over
time and through space, and
the interplay between political reality and the literary
imagination. The principal
concepts used in this paper
will relate primarily to the
relationship between literature/art and nationalism.
The study will examine the
ways in which Palestinian
nationalism (as relates to the
home-coming narrative) is
constructed and the factors
that contribute to that construction, as well as those
that instigate its change. As
this is a survey of literature, I
intend to identify themes
that have resonance in Palestinian literature and the ways
in which the narrative
changes, or stays the same,
over time.
Approach
The study will
incorporate a review of various sources (primary and
secondary) produced on the
literature, art and nationalism as pertaining to the Palestinian narrative. Secondary
sources are comprised of
literature that will provide
the theoretical framework
for analysis; primary sources
are selected works of Palestinian literature (the selection
is subject to modification)
that will be used for analysis.
The literature in the primary
sources has been cited in
English; however, works will
be read in the original language and not in translation
(whether they are in English
or Arabic). A close reading
of literary texts will attempt
to relate the texts to the geographic and political space
created by and for the literature over time. If the opportunity arises to conduct interviews about the oral literary tradition among Palestinian communities, that will
also be incorporated into the
study.
'home' interacted
with the geopolitical
changes over time?
DECEMBER, 2007
In order to successfully
conduct this study, a means
of categorizing the material
must reflect a coherent and
consistent logic. One can
divide/ categorize the literature vertically in time and
horizontally in space into the
various regions populated by
Palestinians-in-exile. In other
words, selections of literature may be made according
to place of residence of the
writer, the perceived home
of the writer, or over generations. For the purposes of
this research, a periodization
of the narrative, and by extension the history and literature of the nation, have
been identified as best serving the objective of this
study. Whether or not it is
possible to create a literary
map over the course of the
time span covered that may
or may not coincide with
changes in the geopolitical
map of Palestine over time
remains dubious, though it
may be a useful approach.
Many factors will have to
be accounted for in the
study, though they escape
the scope and focus of it:
whether Palestinian identity
has been altered, affirmed or
re-created due to the lack of
finality on their status and
the respective communities
for whom that has relevance;
whether the dislocation of
the movement from Cairo or
Beirut or Tunis due to political/ ideological reasons has
had resonance in the literature; the impact of the proliferation of mass media on
the narrative and identity;
and the impact of the changing leadership and associated
symbols on the narrative and
the conception of 'home' are
all questions that will have to
Page 13
be accounted for in the
process of categorizing the
literature and analyzing it.
The Literature
A vast body of
scholarship has been produced examining the interplay between literature and
nationalism(s). Joseph
Cleary's study of the Irish,
Israeli and Palestinian narratives and the similarities
between them creates a matrix of home and opposition
of narratives that reveals the
potency of the imagination
in conceiving and reconceiving home. Other
literature produced on the
construction of nationalism
(s) through the conception
and re-conception of the
nation in popular memory
and the imagination includes, amongst many others, Benedict Arnold's Imagined Communities. Scholarship
specific to Palestinian identity will also be useful, but a
full bibliography of sources
is yet to be compiled.
An equally vast literature
examines the concept(s) of
home-coming in the Palestinian narrative. The primary
themes that recur in Palestinian literature have been
re-constructed over time,
allowing changes in geography and politics to be reflected in conception(s) of
home. Images of home are
often polarized: the concept
(s) of 'home'/ 'homecoming' (or, by contrast,
expulsion and alienation) are
essential to the construction
of the narrative. The construction of that home is
strewn with images of nature/ the land; the suspension of youth in the space
identified as home (and the
loss of youth upon expulsion); the use of religious
iconography (in Al Quds, for
instance) is also used to immortalize in space and time
the image of home. Many
more themes are recurrent,
however this will be embellished further in the review
of the literature. The change
in the narrative can be perceived through the changes
that have occurred in the
works of specific writers (i.e.
Darwish), or over the passing of generations, whether
at home or in exile.
The questions specific to
issue of narrative are: how
has the 'modern' narrative
diverged from the original
narrative and themes essential to the consolidation of
that identity? What are the
characteristics of that
change? Is it still characterized by a solid conception/
image of home? Is it possible to see the migration of
the narrative from the original texts to a more mature
notion of self and community? Or have geopolitical
realities exterminated the
possibility of finding home
in the literary imagination?
Sources
I shall begin by examining
the constructs/ images essential to recurrent themes
in Palestinian literature and
memory: nature, homecoming, youth, loss of youth
(displacement as a coming-
A vast literature
examines the concept(s)
of home-coming in the
Palestinian narrative.
The primary themes that
recur in Palestinian
literature have been reconstructed over time,
allowing changes in
geography and politics
to be reflected in
conception(s) of home.
of-age). I will then proceed to
examine Emile Habibi's The
Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
as an essential text of the returning Palestinian anti-hero
and Mourid Barghouty's I Saw
Ramallah as a text of exile and
return. I will also examine the
poetry of Mahmud Darwish,
one of the primary figureheads
for Palestinian art and literature, and the changes that have
characterized his work over the
past 60 years. Other works will
be examined and selected according to relevance.
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 14
MIDDLE EAST STUDIES LECTURE:
TECHNOLOGY AND THE COLONY
FRANCESCA RICCIARDONE
Jennifer Derr, lecturer at the
Middle East Studies Center
and Ph.D. candidate from
Stanford University, presented her dissertation research at the American Research Center in Egypt on 24
October. The title of her lecture was “Technology and the
Colony: the construction of
the 1902 Aswan Dam and
the transformation of the
state.” By locating the construction of the early Aswan
Dam within a historical narrative of Egypt’s engagement
with modernity and colonialism and exploring the Dam’s
role in nation’s political and
economic development during the 19th and early 20th
century, Derr presents the
technological birth and agricultural results of the Dam as
manifestations of the modern
colonial project.
Derr argues that the Aswan
Dam, designed and bankrolled by Europeans, must
also be viewed as a project
emerging from the developments and accomplishments
of the 19th century Egyptian
state. This period saw the
introduction of the production
of long-staple cotton, the
shift from ‘basin’ irrigation to
‘perennial’ irrigation, and the
increased significance of the
Nile Delta to the Egyptian
economy. It also witnessed
the successful military and
political efforts of Muhammad Ali to consolidate the
Upper and Lower Egyptian
territories and administrative
control in Cairo. This demonstration of ‘modernity,’ a term
Derr uses to mean “the ability and the desire of 19th
century Egypt to organize,
centralize and supervise its
territory and its citizens,”
both laid the foundation for
the construction of the Dam
and guided the ways the Dam
would influence the structure
of the state; namely through
a new hierarchy of private
property landowners and the
establishment of a colonial
economy focused on the
production of sugar.
Integrated into the periphery
of the modern world economy
on unfavorable terms, Egypt
declared bankruptcy in 1875.
This prompted the formation
of an International Debt Committee, which forced the sale
of the Khedive’s personal
properties in Upper Egypt to a
class of elite Egyptians and
foreigners. These events
exemplify the connection
between the economic system of colonialism and the
encouraged development of
private property. They also
demonstrate the transfer of
authority from a public/state
center to a more opaque
private network where the
role of the state is in question and European ownership
is paramount.
The economic logic of colonialism did not support the
construction of infrastructure
in the colony, unless the project was to increase Egypt’s
profits for British benefits.
The construction of the Dam
resulted in the uneven allocation of water, prompting the
development of the North
agriculture through the underdevelopment of the agriculture of the South. Essentially, this produced two separate economies: a lucrative
cotton economy in the North,
and a supportive sugar economy in the South.
Because sugar brought a
lower price for the peasant
and landowner producing it,
the regulation of the production patterns of Central Egypt
sparked significant popular
resistance, evident in peasant petitions and violent attacks on foreign officials.
Derr broadens the definition
of what constitutes resistance to colonialism by connecting this popular resistance to the effects of the
colonial project of the Dam.
Despite the significance of
the Suez Canal in the conventional narrative, Derr argues
that the Aswan Dam project
characterizes the Egyptian
colonial experience as one
better described within the
tradition of ‘African colonialism’ than ‘Middle Eastern
colonialism.’ In the African
colonialism paradigm, colonial nations function as
Europe’s laboratory for science and technology. “It was
not an accident that the
world’s first dams were built
in the colonial world,” Derr
argues, citing examples from,
Iraq, India, and the American
West. The Aswan Dam shows
the pinnacle of the Nile as a
manipulated agricultural tool,
and its agricultural effects
demonstrate the colonial
economic logic.
--------------------Derr’s academic interest in
the “Saidi” region of Egypt
and the “modern” historical
period drew her to the study
of the Aswan Dam. Her dissertation topic crystallized in
the fall of 2004, the beginning of her third year of
graduate school at Stanford.
In the fall of 2005 she came
to Egypt to begin her research
as a Social Science Research
Council and Fulbright-Hays
Commission Fellow. After nine
months of work in the Cairo
archives and Upper Egypt, she
spent four months in Europe
conducting research in the
British Royal Archives in London, the French National Archives in Paris, and the French
Consular Archives in Nantes.
From January through August
of 2007 Derr returned to the
Cairo archives as an ARCE fellow, completing her research
and beginning the writing process that summer. She currently continues the writing
process with the help of a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation.
Derr argues that
the Dam, designed
and bankrolled by
Europeans, must
also be viewed as
a project emerging
from the
developments and
accomplishments
of the 19th century
Egyptian state.
DECEMBER, 2007
Page 15
BOOK REVIEW: COUNTDOWN TO CRISIS
IVAN ROSALES
Kenneth
Timmerman’s
Countdown to Crisis rests on
the fundamental premise
that the Islamic Republic of
Iran is the embodiment of
the greatest threat to America. His book, geared towards
an American audience, attempts to instill a sense of
fear, by bringing to life what
he sees as Iran’s unrestricted
nefarious
plots
against America. Timmerman
unfortunately is a product of
the post 9/11 boom of scholarship that attempts to take
advantage of the presumed
anti-American
sentiment.
Countdown starts out by
outlining what Timmerman
believes to be Iran’s previous
roles in attacks carried out
against US posts around the
world: the 1983 strike on the
US embassy in Beirut, the
1985 hijacking of TWA flight
847, the 2001 attack on the
World Trade Center, and the
“possibility” that the TWA
flight 800 explosion just after
takeoff from JFK was concocted by the Iranian government. Although his claims of
Iranian-led or inspired execution of these events are
hardly universally (or even
widely)
accepted,
Timmerman retrospectively
connects them to further
construct his illusion of an
antagonistic Iranian state
bent on precipitating the
crisis he deems as imminent.
Aside from depicting the
“critical partnership” between Iran and North Korea,
resuscitating the partnership
that U.S. President George
W. Bush infamously identified in his State of the Union
Address
in
2002,
Timmerman cites Teheran’s
close relations with private
Russian corporations, suggesting that Russia has
played a role in Iran’s nu-
clear development. Such a
claim seems more like a
trumped-up reassertion of
Cold War balance-of-power
politics than a statement of
reality.
What is lacking from
Timmerman’s work is an
explanation as to how this
coming nuclear showdown, if
one accepts his prediction,
might be the product of more
than simply irrationality on
the part of the Iranian regime
and its backers. In other
words: if there is hatred
against the American people,
what is its cause?
Timmerman fails to even
raise the question.
Timmerman consequently
turns a blind eye to US involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, which
aimed to overturn the nationalization of Iranian oil, ensuring a continued supply of
Iranian oil to the
‘West’ (Operation Ajax). The
coup overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, a
nationalist politician some
have credited as being dedicated to the democratic
‘development’ of Iran. With
this in mind, it begs the question how, or in what capacity,
Timmerman sees himself
qualified to be the executive
director for The Foundation
for Democracy in Iran, an
organization he established
in 1995.
Timmerman is very critical
of US actions taken to alleviate the “escalating” tensions
with Iran. Nevertheless, he
only criticizes the US government during the Clinton administration, affirming that
the regime’s policies were
too lenient in attempting to
improve relations with Iran
and did not take decisive
action to prevent Teheran’s nuclear ambitions. That
Timmerman pins the
blame so squarely on
the Clinton administration comes as no surprise from an individual who, back in
2000, sought the Republican nomination
for candidacy in the
race for one of Maryland’s seats in the US
Senate.
At times it seems as
though Countdown to
Crisis belongs among
the ranks of action
thrillers. There are
meetings and events
that Timmerman meticulously describes,
right down to the
weather and facial
expressions of characters
involved. As someone who
was not physically present at
all the encounters he illustrates, and who relied on
second-hand information,
such elucidations seem dubious. Timmerman’s writing
clearly reflects his training in
literature and creative writing, which he undertook at
Brown University back in the
1970s.
Countdown to Crisis is a
horrid elucidation of the
‘current’ political situation
regarding Iran. If you are into
conspiracy plots and actions
thrillers, Timmerman’s work
will strike a cord. He feeds
off the current antipathies
between Iran and the US,
putting a fictional twist on
both the intricate details and
the overall context of the
political row. If anything,
what Timmerman does best
is to illustrate how unqualified
individuals selectively employ
certain political ‘facts’ and
perceptions to create a story
that feeds the ego of the new
socially acceptable ‘truth’. For
example, in his review of
Countdown, 9/11 Commission
member and former Secretary
of the Navy, John Lehman
gushes: “[w]ith so many amateur intelligence experts clouding the public dialogue, it is a
pleasure to read the work of an
author of real professionalism.
Timmerman adds texture and
clarity to the gross failures of
our intelligence establishment,
and new visibility to the role of
Iran in the Islamist war against
America”. Frankly, I do not
know what is more dangerous,
Timmerman's assessment or
Lehman’s praise of it.
DECEMBER
2007
SUN
MON
TUE
WED
THU
FRI
SAT
2-Lecture:
3
4
5
6
7
8
10
11-
12-
23
14
15
20
21
22
Hans Kung,
“The Challenge to Islam,
Christianity
and Judaism
in today’s
Colonial Crisis.”
9
Mohamed
Middle East
Sawwah Music
Studies Center
Night
Holiday Party
PVA Howard
Café, 7-9pm
16-Debate:
17
18
19
Annapolis and
Beyond,
6.30-8.30,
Blue Room
Coming up
February—Finding an Appropriate Job
MIDDLE EAST STUDIES
OFFICE
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