Arab, Muslim, Woman

Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film

Lindsey Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134138777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Given a long history of representation by others, what themes and techniques do Arab Muslim women writers, filmmakers and visual artists foreground in their presentation of postcolonial experience?

Lindsey Moore's groundbreaking book demonstrates ways in which women appropriate textual and visual modes of representation, often in cross-fertilizing ways, in challenges to Orientalist/colonialist, nationalist, Islamist, and 'multicultural' paradigms. She provides an accessible but theoretically-informed analysis by foregrounding tropes of vision, visibility and voice; post-nationalist melancholia and mother/daughter narratives; transformations of 'homes and harems'; and border crossings in time, space, language, and media. In doing so, Moore moves beyond notions of speaking or looking 'back' to encompass a diverse feminist poetics and politics and to emphasize ethical forms of representation and reception.

Aran, Muslim, Woman is distinctive in the eclectic body of work that it brings together. Discussing Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, and Tunisia, as well as postcolonial Europe, Moore argues for better integration of Arab Muslim contexts in the postcolonial canon. In a book for readers interested in women's studies, history, literature, and visual media, we encounter work by Assia Djebar, Mona Hatoum, Fatima Mernissi, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nawal el Saadawi, Leila Sebbar, Zineb Sedira, Ahdaf Soueif, Moufida Tlatli, Fadwa Tuqan, and many other women.

1 Historical contexts

‘Layer after layer’

The protagonists in absentia of Ayesha Rafaele’s documentary Veil (2000) are young British-Asian Muslim women who have decided to observe strict

and decline to appear on either the visual- or soundtracks of the film. Their personal scripts about life in Britain and their veiled bodies are represented by proxy. The film purveys imagery of Muslim women from the past and present generated in Europe, the United States, and the Arab and Muslim worlds that culminates in footage of the burning of televisions in Taliban-run Afghanistan, an act intended to combat ‘idolatrous imagery’. The substitute narrator (Parminder K. Nagra) concludes in one woman’s words:

Layer after layer, image after image, all repeating the same old story. In every place around the world there are people at the top, the people in control … they want to leave you no place to hide, they want to get inside you … How can you judge? Who can you believe? How can you ever know what the true story is …? They say they have authority. But it means nothing to me.

(Rafaele 2000)

Although Rafaele’s protagonists are not Arab women, the film signals a highly contested visual and discursive field of representation closely related to the one which this book takes as its purview. Veil raises issues pertaining to an individual’s capacity to self-represent, contrasting surface with depth and exterior production with experience, but disarticulating first-person testimony from visual and oral presence. I will discuss many more instances in which testimony, ventriloquism, translation, (in)visibility, and oppositional looks are deployed in feminist projects that are sometimes, as here, wary of the act of representation itself. But first, we should remind ourselves of some of the historical layers of production of ‘the Arab, Muslim woman’.

Colonialism and orientalism

Colonial intervention in the Maghrib and the Mashriq was both direct and took on less tangible forms, including finance imperialism, missionary activity, and ‘the enormous collective effort known as “Orientalism” ’ (Melman 2002: 106). Colonial hegemony suited European nations for a number of reasons: strategic positioning against European rivals, protection of already-existing colonial borders and trade routes, the opening up of new markets, commodity production, settlement, and the provision of manpower for armies. However, the Arab world was primarily important for Europe as a source of raw materials, the most important of which would eventually be oil.¹

The first major European conquest after Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt began when the French navy landed in Algeria in 1830. By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was in radical decline, allowing France to intervene in Tunisia in 1881 and Britain in Egypt in 1882, extending into the Sudan in 1884. A French protectorate was established in 1912 in Morocco, with the North and the southern Sahara under Spanish protection, while regions in the south and the Rif remained outside of centralized control for another twenty years. The extent to which colonial control became embedded in the Maghrib varied. The most extreme case, Algeria, has been described as ‘one of the most ignominious examples of systematic colonization that the world has ever seen’ (Stone 1997: 31). There, despite sustained resistance from the indigenous population, a vigorous policy of settlement and assimilation became entrenched. More than a settler colony, l’Algérie française (French Algeria) was embedded politically, economically, and imaginatively in the structure of France itself. Colonial penetration was deep but la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission) largely rhetorical. Under the 1881 Code de l’indigénat (Indigenous Code), Algerian Muslims had to renounce their religion in order to acquire French citizenship, civil rights, and local suffrage; the vast majority of the population hence had no legal, political or constitutional protection.

On the Arabian peninsular and in the Levant, colonialism assumed less direct forms. While the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire entered World War One on the side of Germany and Austria, a group of Arabs revolted and were supported by Britain (as memorialized in the West through the story of T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’). This group was repaid not with the Arab homeland promised, but by the establishment of spheres of influence in the Pykes-Sicot agreement (1916), followed by the Balfour Declaration (1917) which created a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the formal recognition of mandates by the League of Nations in 1922. Syria’s Christian-majority coastal area became Lebanon, both proclaimed French protectorates. Iraq and Palestine were British-mandated, with half of Palestine split off to become Transjordan (later Jordan). The remaining half of Palestine also came under the control of Britain and a sharp increase in Jewish immigration was permitted. The small states of the Gulf were British protectorates and Iraq was under British supervision. Only parts of the Arabian peninsula remained independent: Yemen and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the latter established in 1922 and ruled by a British ally.

Overall, Britain dominated the Mashriq; France, the Maghrib. While colonial practice was heterogeneous on the ground with, for example, France exerting a tighter grip on Algeria than its Maghribian neighbours, a broad contrast can be drawn between British policy, on the one hand, that left indigenous institutions relatively intact and, on the other, French settlement and assimilation. One effect can be perceived in linguistic structures: while Arabic was the language of education and government in the Arabian peninsula and emerged as such in Egypt and the Mashriq, French was more assimilated and within a deeper class structure in the Maghrib. Women’s education was prioritized at an earlier stage in the Mashriq than in the Maghrib or the peninsula.

The tendency in all contexts since independence has been to Arabize. Arab nationalism and the

(cultural renaissance or ‘awakening’) emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century as much in response to the crumbling Ottoman Empire as to encroachments of European power (Hourani 1991: 309–10). The discourse of modernity then took on an anti-colonial colouring which, in different ways, drew upon Muslim and Arab identity to express cultural integrity. However, due to the complexity of national cultures and the influence of Europe, nationalism tended to be secularist and constitutionalist (343–4). Emerging in the early years of the twentieth century, nationalist politics across the region varied between calls for reform, resistance, power sharing, and ousting of the colonial power. However, European nations did not formally or fully relinquish control of the Arab world until after World War Two.

The ‘Orient’ is a construct inseparable as an idea from the proximity of a large portion of the Arab Muslim world to Europe.² In 1978, Said posited Orientalism as an episteme, a self-fulfilling ‘imaginative geography’ that rationalized European colonial incursions into North Africa, the Levant, and beyond avant la lettre. Fundamentally Foucaultian, but attentive to ways in which European power/knowledge categorized its external Others as meaningful spaces, Said’s model posits a productive discourse: ‘The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental’ (2003: 5–6, original emphasis). Said’s analysis of the massive scholarly and artistic production of the Arab Muslim world from the late eighteenth century has a double function. First, through attention to ‘the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes’ and the way that it speaks on behalf of the Orient (20), he engages culture as a set of representations that underwrite hegemony. Second, he identifies classic ‘signs’ of Oriental presence (some of which I discuss below) and relates them to narrative practices performed by Europeans as part of their self-elaboration. In other words, he considers what Orientalism’s putatively veridic discourse reveals and conceals about European power and Europeans’ conceptions of themselves (6). This necessitates attention both to the idioms and doctrines of Orientalist discourse (that Said calls its manifest content) and to its structuring economy: a latent set of fears, desires, repressions, and projections. For example, Said argues that the Arab, Muslim world was conceived as terrain beyond the heimlich of one’s own territory, frozen in archaic time (54). This exemplifies what Trinh describes as territorialized knowledge: ‘a mastery which I exert over areas of the unknown as I gather them within the fold of the known’ (1991: 327).

Said conceptualizes Orientalism as a masculine epistemological structure, highlighting Gustave Flaubert’s representation of the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem (whose Turkish name can be translated as ‘little lady’) as a prototype of ‘impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity’ that is located outside progress and can be possessed and spoken for (Said 2003: 187).³ However, while Kuchuk Hanem and a feminized Orient seemed spectacularly graspable, the latter actually presented an epistemological barrier to the European for which the discipline of Orientalism attempted to compensate (189). Gender was therefore not a sub-domain of Orientalism; it was fundamental to the structuring of an epistemology of the Other and ontology of the Western self (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 2–4). The gendered organization of social space in Arab and Muslim urban culture was a particular focus of European prejudice, largely because of the resistance female domestic space implied for hermeneutical investigation.

The upper-class/imperial ‘harem’ produced in paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, and many others immortalized a languid and desirable Oriental odalisque (from the Turkish oda, or room), typically presented partially or wholly nude and with a narguileh (pipe) and eunuch or female slave. Such representations can be interpreted as compensatory productions of a reality to which, with very few exceptions, European men did not have access. Women sometimes produced similar images as Spanish painter Mary Fortuny’s Odalisque (1861), for example, attests. Jananne al Ani discusses an album of prints, Femmes d’Orient (1893) produced by one Comtesse de Croix-Mesnil, that commends the status of women in Islam, but is littered textually and visually with stereotypes. She suggests that ‘the Comtesse’ might have been a ruse to exploit the demand for women’s travel narratives (2003: 94), which I shall discuss shortly.

We may first extrapolate three key implications. First, Gregory argues, drawing on Said, that an intrinsically colonial modernity

produces its other, verso to recto, as a way of at once producing and privileging itself. This is not to say that other cultures are the supine creations of the modern, but it is to acknowledge the extraordinary power and performative force of colonial modernity. Its constructions of other cultures—not only the way in which these are understood in an immediate, improvisational sense, but also the way in which more or less enduring codifications of them are produced—shape its own disposition and deployments.

(2004: 4)

Second, as Sarah Graham-Brown suggests, the

performed a set of psychological functions for the European:

The first was to indulge in the excitement of an exotic sexual fantasy beyond the reach of the constraints and taboos of European culture. The harem, pictured in this way, was identified with complete male domination over women’s lives and the apparently untrammelled sexual pleasures of four wives and unlimited numbers of concubines. The strict control of women’s appearance and behaviour in public was assumed to be the corollary of unbridled license within the harem. The other reaction to this vision of promiscuity and indulgence was one of disapproval or disgust, and the denigration of a culture which could permit women to live in conditions apparently akin to those of a brothel.

(2003: 503)

Third, female space defied the scopic regime of European modernity which defined visibility as prerequisite for mastery. The imaginative purchase of the Arabo-Islamic female social world should be understood as politically informed, representing as it did the negative of the transparency deemed necessary to colonial control of territory, urban space, and indigenous populations (Grewal 1996: 26). The production of ‘the harem’ brought together two economies, political and psycho-sexual, around two key Orientalist topoi: an exotic and deviant sexuality and a despotic, even violent system of governance (Melman 1992: 60).

Orientalism identifies ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’ (Said 2003: 3).⁴ However, staying for now within the parameters of enquiry that Said sets up, we can problematize his idea of the ‘average nineteenth-century European’ by illustrating that Orientalist discourse was not homogeneous.⁵ Women’s travel writing provides representations of the Arab, Muslim world which, while suggesting an internalized Occidental/Oriental dialectic, are also informed by the gender, class, education, and political affiliations of individual writers and changed over time. Orientalism was, moreover, a reciprocal process (see Lewis 2004).

A founding representation of Muslim women by a European woman is found in the Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, née Mary Pierrepoint (1689–1762). The (unsent) letters were written in 1716–18 in Ottoman Istanbul, where her husband was English ambassador, and published in 1763 (see Montagu 1965: xiv—xvii). Montagu infamously de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration
• List of plates
• Introduction
• 1 Historical contexts: ‘layer after layer’
• 2 Visibility, vision, and voice: Algerian women in question (again)
• 3 Melancholia in the Maghrib: mother–daughter plots
• 4 Heterotopias: reimagining home
• 5 Border crossings, translations
• Endnotes
• Works cited
• Filmography