Cultural Journeys into the Arab World

A Literary Anthology

Dalya Cohen-Mor, Dalya Cohen-Mor

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471167
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Cultural Journeys into the Arab World provides a fascinating window into Arab culture and society through the voices of its own writers and poets. Organized thematically, the anthology features more than fifty texts, including poems, essays, stories, novels, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and life histories, by leading male and female authors from across the Arabic-speaking world. Each theme is explored in several genres, both fiction and nonfiction, and framed by a wealth of contextual information that places the literary texts within the historical, political, cultural, and social background of the region. Spanning a century of Arab creative writing—from the "dean of Arabic letters" Taha Hussein to the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the celebrated poet Adonis—the anthology offers unforgettable journeys into the rich and dynamic realm of Arab culture. Representing a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and socioeconomic backgrounds, the characters speak of their conditions, aspirations, struggles, and achievements living in complex societies marked by tensions arising from the persistence of older traditions and the impact of modernity. Their myriad voices paint a vivid and intimate portrait of contemporary Arab life in the Middle East, revealing the common humanity of a region of vital significance in world affairs.

1

Self and Identity

Numerous scholars, both Arab and Western, have struggled with the question: Who is an Arab? The prevailing view considers the linguistic criterion to be the primary component of Arab identity: an Arab is anyone who speaks Arabic as his or her native tongue and consequently feels as an Arab. The historian Albert Hourani, for example, states that Arabs are “more conscious of their language than any people in the world” and that “most Arabs, if asked to define what they meant by the ‘Arab nation,’ would begin by saying that it included all those who spoke the Arabic language.”1 He emphasizes that a full definition would require additional information, specifically a reference to a certain process in history in which the Arabs played a major role, namely, the birth of Islam and the Muslim conquests. The sociologist Halim Barakat suggests a broader definition in which the sense of Arab identity of the majority of citizens of Arab countries is based on “what they have in common—namely, language, culture, sociopolitical experiences, economic interests, and a collective memory of their place and role in history.”2 At the same time he takes into account the diversity of affiliations that characterize Arab identity, such as religion (e.g., Muslim, Christian), sect (e.g., Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, Alawites), ethnicity (e.g., Berbers, Nubians, Kurds), tribe (or kinship), and region. In his view, a proper definition of Arab identity necessitates a simultaneous examination of both the forces of unity and the forces of divisiveness in relation to each other.3

That an Arab can possess a set of overlapping and conflicting identities is exemplified by the figure of the literary scholar Edward Said. Born into an affluent Palestinian Christian family whose primary place of residence was in Cairo, he received his higher education in the United States and subsequently became a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Said’s father emigrated to the United States in 1911, when he was sixteen, and volunteered for service in France during World War I, which earned him American citizenship. Returning to Palestine in 1920, he became a successful businessman, called himself William to emphasize his adopted American identity, and in 1929 moved to Cairo, where he established a prosperous company for office equipment and later married an Arab Christian woman from Nazareth. Edward, the couple’s only son and the eldest of five children, was named after the Prince of Wales. In his autobiography, Out of Place, Said writes that he always lived with a divided identity. Even as a child, he realized that his first name was British, his last name was Arabic, and his nationality was American. Adding to his sense of confusion was the fact that his parents were “two Palestinians with dramatically different backgrounds and temperaments living in colonial Cairo as members of a Christian minority within a large pond of minorities.”4 Linguistically, he was split between Arabic, his native language, and English, the language of his formal education. Geographically, he was caught between four locations: Palestine, the home of his extended family up to 1948; Lebanon, where he spent every summer for twenty-seven years; Egypt, where he lived and attended school up to the age of sixteen; and the United States, where he eventually settled down. Consequently, he developed a feeling of “always being out of place.”5 As he acknowledges: “I have retained this unsettled sense of many identities—mostly in conflict with each other—all of my life, together with an acute memory of the despairing feeling that I wish we could have been all-Arab, or all-European and American, or all-Orthodox Christian, or all-Muslim, or all-Egyptian, and so on.”6

In this section, the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, in her essay “Why Keep Asking Me about My Identity?,” adds another dimension to the complex question of who is an Arab by challenging the terms “the Middle East” and “the Third World,” which have been coined by the global powers. “Identity is a discourse,” she cautions, “and it is essential to know who is using it, who decides, who labels me, what all this interest in ‘cultural identity’ means, where does it lead.” It is pertinent to note that El Saadawi is a physician, Marxist, and militant advocate of Arab women’s rights. She was Egypt’s director of public health, until summarily dismissed for her political views and activities. These activities also landed her in prison under the Sadat regime. Here she is expressing a leftist criticism of American-led globalization.

The short story “The ID Card,” by the Kuwaiti author Layla al-Uthman, shows how in times of crisis and intra-Arab conflicts (such as the 1990–91 Gulf crisis), local identities tend to prevail at the expense of Arab national identity. As noted by Halim Barakat, even artificially created Arab countries such as Jordan, Kuwait, the Gulf states, and Lebanon have managed to shape separate identities, and citizens of these countries increasingly define themselves in terms of their local identities.7 In this narrative, which is set against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the heroine sees herself first of all as a Kuwaiti and stubbornly refuses to identify herself to the Iraqi guard in terms of her clan and tribal affiliations. The story demonstrates that, under occupation, the element of regionalism or patriotism (wataniyya) takes precedence over other elements that make up the Arab sense of identity.

The excerpt from Ahmad Amin’s autobiography, My Life, deals with his conception of the self and how it is constructed. Describing his parental home and family life as the central arena for his self-development,8 he sees himself as having been shaped by his particular upbringing and the laws of genetics, which he ascribes to God. A progressive thinker who sought to reinterpret Islam in a way that would be congruent with modernity, his statement that “to a great extent every man is the outcome of all that he inherits from his ancestors and acquires from the environment around him” is an affirmation of the modern, widely accepted notion that man is the product of both nature and nurture. Beyond this generality, the importance of his account comes from the contrast that emerges between the assertions “God made me by the way of the laws He prescribed for heredity and environment” and “I am a world by itself as each man is a world by itself.” This contrast places the focus on the individual and provides the justification for writing his self-narrative (i.e., his autobiography), an endeavor that, according to Georges Gusdorf, who is regarded as the dean of autobiographical studies, requires a pervasive notion of individualism, or “a conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual life,” as a cultural precondition.9 It is important to note that at the time that Amin wrote My Life (1950), autobiography was a relatively new genre in Arabic literature.10 Like Taha Hussein, who was his contemporary, Amin is the author of writings that reflect a desire to work out a synthesis of Arab-Muslim tradition and Western science and modernity.

From My Life

Ahmad Amin
(Egypt, 1886–1954)

I am but the inevitable result of all that had happened to me and my ancestors. Matter is indestructible and so are immaterialities. A bird may die, and so may insects and vermin; but they disintegrate in the soil and nourish plants and trees which will be transformed to coal; the coal will turn into fire which will be converted to gas. But nothing of that is destructible, even the rays of the sun which make forests and cause trees to grow: they are stored in the dark so that when fire is set to them they change into light and heat, and return to their first way of being.

Similarly, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and fantasies remain forever and act forever. Since his birth, even since the moment he was an embryonic clot, nay, since the days he was in the blood of his ancestors, all that man encounters in his life abides in the depth of his self and dwells at the bottom of his sensation whether conscious or unconscious, whether remembered or forgotten, whether pleasant or painful. The barking of a dog that he hears, the flame of a fire that he sees, the scolding of a father or a mother that he gets, events of joy and pain that succeed one another in his life: all these accumulate and collect, mix and react. This mixture and this reaction are the basis for all actions that issue from him both noble and mean. They are also the reason why a man may become great or low, important or insignificant. All the events that we encounter in life, all our experiences, all that our senses receive or our minds ponder are the greatest factor in the formation of our character. If you see a sad man angry with life and bored with it, or a happy man pleased with life and opening up his heart to it, or if you see a brave adventurous man who is good-hearted and magnanimous, or a cowardly cringing man who is indolent and niggardly, or the like, then look for the chain of his life since the day he was formed in the loins of his ancestors. An event may even happen of which a person does not take notice and it may pass before his eyes like lightning; or he may hear a passing statement on which he does not dwell; or he may read a sentence in a book rapidly; all these things will lie quietly in his soul hidden in his unconscious world. Then, for one reason or another, they move at a certain moment and become the motive for a great deed or the source of an important action. To a great extent, every man is the outcome of all that he inherits from his ancestors and acquires from the environment around him.

If any man inherited what I did and lived in an environment like mine, he would have been me or very nearly so. My formation has been influenced to a great extent by what I inherited from my forefathers, the economic life that prevailed at our home, the religion that dominated us, the language that we spoke, the folk literature that was related to us, and the kind of upbringing that was in my parents’ mind though they could not express it or draw its outlines, and so on. I did not make myself: God made me by way of the laws He prescribed for heredity and environment.

How strange this world is! If you look at it from one viewpoint, you will see it homogeneous in the formation of its atoms, in the structure of its parts, and in its obedience to the same laws. If you look at it from another viewpoint, you will see every detail of it uniquely different by special characteristics not shared by others. Even the leaves of the selfsame rosebush are almost different from one another. On the one hand we can say, “How similar man is to man.” On the other we can say, “How vastly different man is from man.”

On the strength of the second viewpoint I am a world by itself as each man is a world by himself. Events impress my nerves and so I am affected by them in a particular way and I evaluate them in a manner more or less different from any other creature. An event may make one man cry and another laugh, while a third man may neither cry nor laugh at it, as if it were the strings of a lute on which each artist plays a unique distinctive tune unequalled by any other artist.

Thus I relate the events by which I was influenced. I narrate them as my eyes saw them and I interpret them to the extent of their effect on my feeling and my thought.11

—Translated by Issa J. Boullata

The ID Card

Layla al-Uthman
(Kuwait, b. 1945)

The guard gestured for me to stop. I looked at him from behind the windshield as he extended his hand with its yellow nails and nervously tapped the glass. I rolled down the window. His bad odor invaded the interior as he pushed his face into the car. In dismay I asked myself, don’t they ever bathe? I remained still, looking straight ahead.

“Who the hell are you?” he barked at me.

I turned and gave him an icy look. “What do you think? Am I human or animal?”

“Quit fooling around. I’m not joking. Who the hell are you?”

I looked straight into his eyes and said, “I’m a Kuwaiti.”

“Is there a Kuwait anymore? Or Kuwaitis?”

I drew out my national ID card and shoved it in his face. “Look, my ID says so.”

He threw it back into the car. “I don’t care about the ID. Just answer me.”

Taking firm control of my nerves, I asked him, “What do you want me to say?”

His shouting subsided. “Which tribe are you from? One of the main ones or a lineage that has branched off?”

“I’m a tree,” I said, smiling.

“You bitch!”

I was surprised I had agitated him so.

“Don’t call my family names,” I responded, trying to keep my composure, but his words enraged me. Under my breath I said, “May Allah curse you and your family. And your president!”

He said, “Now, tell me, what do you mean you’re a tree?”

“I mean that my main tribal origin and branch affiliation are the same.”

“Then what in the hell is your tribal origin?”

“Kuwaiti.”

He banged on the car with his fist. “You may tell me you’re a Kuwaiti. However, now you are an Iraqi.”

“That may be what you say,” I replied quietly. “But we aren’t necessarily convinced of that.”

“Then when will you be convinced of it?”

“Never. Unless we die and are reborn.”

“Let me see your ID again,” he ordered.

I bent down to where it had fallen beneath the gas pedal. Finding it, I handed it to him, avoiding touching his hand.

Glaring at me, he said, “Now you’re an Iraqi, whether you like it or not.”

My heart wept over the memories of the time before they invaded my city, swarming in like rats. I didn’t care then whether someone was Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, or any other nationality. I was an Arab, with all the Arab blood mixed in my veins. But now I wanted to be nothing but a Kuwaiti national. This feeling tore me apart. I wished that he could understand and leave me alone. Instead, he clenched his te...