Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East

Nelida Fuccaro, Nelida Fuccaro

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780804797764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Oriente Medio

This book explores violence in the public lives of modern Middle Eastern cities, approaching violence as an individual and collective experience, a historical event, and an urban process. Violence and the city coexist in a complicated dialogue, and critical consideration of the city offers an important way to understand the transformative powers of violence—its ability to redraw the boundaries of urban life, to create and divide communities, and to affect the ruling strategies of local elites, governments, and transnational political players.

The essays included in this volume reflect the diversity of Middle Eastern urbanism from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, from the capitals of Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad to the provincial towns of Jeddah, Nablus, and Basra and the oil settlements of Dhahran and Abadan. In reconstructing the violent pasts of cities, new vistas on modern Middle Eastern history are opened, offering alternative and complementary perspectives to the making and unmaking of empires, nations, and states. Given the crucial importance of urban centers in shaping the Middle East in the modern era, and the ongoing potential of public histories to foster dialogue and reconciliation, this volume is both critical and timely.

Part 1

RETHINKING VIOLENCE IN URBAN HISTORY

1

URBAN LIFE AND QUESTIONS OF VIOLENCE

Nelida Fuccaro

To see like a city is to focus on what happens between people, what enables urban life, what questions arise within it, what solutions are developed, what conduct develops, and to what effect. To see the political in these terms is to refer back to these practices rather than to the ones by which the people are ostensibly “ruled.”

Warren Magnusson, Seeing like a City¹

SINCE 2011, Middle Eastern and North African cities have been at the center of political unrest and popular uprisings leading to the fall of dictators, protracted civil wars, and in some cases authoritarian revival. The Arab Spring and its aftermath have pushed the predicament of the city to the forefront of Middle Eastern politics. Yet, until recently, media coverage and academic analysis have often overlooked the urban nature of these uprisings. While it was recognized that violent disorder was performed in cities, popular mobilization was presented as part of national and transnational spheres of public contention. Media analysts and academics tended to treat the cities of the Arab Spring as stage sets—parade grounds for popular anger and state repression—depicting mass protests as a new twist in the ongoing struggle between governments and people. The result was that spaces and places of conflict, the stakes associated with them, and the specifically urban dynamics of crowd mobilization were often taken for granted, not analyzed as constitutive of social and political struggles.

Although recent studies of the Arab Spring have started to fill this “urban” gap,² the general lack of attention to cities as localities able to shape patterns, ideas, institutions, and practices of social and political life (including conflict) is symptomatic of a broader trend affecting our understanding of past and present landscapes of violence in the Middle East: the tendency to simply consider violence as located in cities (often through the prism of states) rather than being of cities.³ It is in this spirit that we should take up Warren Magnusson’s invitation to “see like a city,” which, in his understanding, refers to a new reading of contemporary politics not as the exclusive domain of sovereign authority but as the result of the cumulative practices of urban life. Seeking solutions to current urban problems at a global scale, Magnusson also reminds us that latent urban tension and unrest are not confined to the Middle East or to the Arab Spring but are a worldwide phenomenon that demands urgent attention, precipitated by sprawling urbanization and the relentless expansion of transnational capital and social inequality.

WRITING, DEBATING, AND NORMALIZING VIOLENCE

While Magnusson singles out the city as an identifiable field of action and organization, violence is a slippery concept and a category of academic knowledge with a contested ethical profile. There is still no consensus among historians and social scientists on how to define and theorize violence, what counts as violence, or how (and why) it should be conceptualized. Adding further controversy, recent interdisciplinary debates have even questioned the usefulness of taxonomies of violence, advocating the adoption of more flexible concepts that can accommodate its protean nature.⁴ At a basic level, the great variations in the manifestations, actors, intensity, and visibility of violence add to the predicament. Violence can burst out episodically as conflict, be chronic or intermittent, unfold unnoticed as a pattern of inequality, and be performed as a symbolic threat. Individual or collective, organized or spontaneous, physical and/or structural,⁵ violent acts are not only a preserve of power holders but are also deployed as a strategy of resistance. While there is some consensus on the instrumental nature of violence—on how it ultimately serves particular ends—the reasons why violence occurs and the correct way to interpret it are matters of extensive debate.⁶

How, then, as historians, should we write the violence of Middle Eastern cities? The multiple angles from which we can read the city and urban life, and the path set by literature in other parts of the world, suggest that traversing disciplinary and regional boundaries is essential in order to tackle this complex and value-laden subject. Writing about violence requires engagement with literature that varies in scope and theoretical orientation—from historical sociology, anthropology, and political geography to urban and post-colonial studies. This scholarship has made great strides in broadening the methodological and conceptual horizons of the historiography of violence. Historians, usually concerned with events, have been particularly concerned with easing the tension between “eventful” histories of violence and long-term political change.⁷ Anthropologists have brought to bear on violence an attention to meaning, symbolism, and ritual and a consideration for discursive and cultural representations as subjective and collective conditions of violence. Political scientists have looked at violent lives as forms of politics and elaborated on the crucial distinction between violence and force in the actions of states—a theme also cherished by historical sociologists, from Max Weber to Charles Tilly. Urban specialists have explored acts of violence in relation to urban spaces and experience as particular moments in the material and cognitive production of the city as a space of social and political engagement.⁸

The prolific literature on South Asian communalism in the colonial and post-colonial periods illustrates the interdisciplinary breadth that has characterized the study of collective violence, prompting Middle Eastern specialists to use a comparative approach to think “outside the box” and to use violence as a tool to study different aspects of political and social life. The interpretations of civilian and religious riots that have emerged from this literature are diverse—depicting communal violence as anything from the creation of state discourses to a reflection of either forms of institutionalized grassroots politics central to the preservation of the state or ritualized moments of subaltern action structured by particular symbols, temporal and spatial settings, or affective ties.⁹

The elusiveness of violence clearly has a flip side, which makes it a flexible and effective analytical concept, particularly in combination with categories such as power, space/place, language, and modernity.¹⁰ The violence-power nexus, in particular, introduces an important ethical dimension to the study of social life. This nexus has served as a tool to explore the limits of—and interstices between—acceptable and unacceptable, moral and immoral. Critical studies of the violent profile of the liberal state, for instance, have served to denounce its illegitimate nature and that of colonial domination exercised by European regimes overseas and to underscore how state collusion with violence has tarnished the civilizational project of modernity.¹¹ Writing about violence has also acted as a means to denounce oppression, inequality, and murder; to disclose the communicative and symbolic worlds of human interaction; and to add nuance to strategies of coercion and resistance. Since the 1960s, struggles against domination, dispossession, and poverty have informed a strand of critical thinking about violence as resistance to oppression: from Hannah Arendt’s impassioned advocacy for the powerless and Frantz Fanon’s liberating violence of the “wretched of the earth,” to the concerns with the socially deprived and with the powerlessness of individuals articulated by Ted Gurr and James C. Scott, respectively.¹²

In the Middle East and North Africa, academic debates about violence have started to create new spheres of civic and public engagement. Recent studies on the memorializing and mnemonic function of monuments, cemeteries, and commemorative spaces have shed light on urban narratives of war in order to foster dialogue and reconciliation. Samir Khalaf’s discussion of Sahat al-Burj (Tower Square) in downtown Beirut, for instance, has emphasized its role as an open museum of tolerance, evocative of both the horrors of the Lebanese civil war and of the more recent assassination of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.¹³ In retelling public histories of war, revolutions, massacres, and uprisings, the central squares of Middle Eastern capital cities stand as the simulacra of nations. Tahrir Square in Cairo, Marjeh Square in Damascus, Place de Martyrs in Algiers, and Azadi Square in Tehran evoke to viewers the violent making of citizens as modern subjects and embody a nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacy of colonial and imperialist oppression, economic exploitation, and revolutionary heroism.¹⁴ Studies that revisit key violent episodes in the history of the French colonial empire in Algeria have prompted broader reflections on society and politics in contemporary France. In Algeria, where national history has inscribed violence “not as strategy but as structure,” memories of colonial and post-colonial brutality have engendered rich and varied public debate.¹⁵

Exposure of the violence of authoritarian regimes has raised ethical issues about representations of suffering and of the many forms of violence produced in the Middle East. As Kanan Makiya (a.k.a. Samir al-Khalil), faced with the daunting prospect of the futility of unveiling the horrors of the Ba‘thist regime in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, puts it, “Description is the first and fundamental act of resolution: ruthless, relentless, unforgiving description. Even when their condition seems to utterly disintegrate . . . human beings are able to exercise a degree of control through the power of description. Telling horror stories is the first step towards dealing with the rule of violence.”¹⁶

Makiya’s use of description as a cathartic device to make sense of violence brings into sharp focus the ethical imperative of normalizing violence, particularly when dealing with its seemingly “senseless” and intense manifestations, such as war, torture, and mass murder. Labeling violence as “senseless” is what the anthropologist Anton Blok has called “avoidance behavior”—a refusal to engage meaningfully with the concept.¹⁷ Some historians of violence have recently pointed out the shortcomings of this behavior on the grounds that it disguises agency and individual responsibility. Mark Mazower has highlighted the apologetic stance and essentialist nature of studies of mass violence in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Proposing a similar line of argument, the African historian Jonathon Glassman has recently questioned interpretations of South Asian riots as premeditated and engineered by politicians or agitators. Adopting a subaltern perspective in reverse, he contends that this reading fails to account for the hideous acts committed by the crowds. Revisiting some of the prevailing assumptions on terrorism as a self-sacrificial form of violence, Hamit Bozarslan has noted how in the Middle Eastern context it has been used as a normative concept that obscures “the aims, motives, and minds of the people who have embraced violence.”¹⁸

Far from being separate from social life, violence creates intimate, albeit uncomfortable, bonds that elude the simplistic logics of victim versus perpetrator, ruler versus ruled. As a form of association that defines everyday encounters in the city, violence can be read as a building block of community. This is one of the main arguments transpiring from studies on South Asian communalism and from the seminal work on medieval Spain by David Nirenberg, who has shown how convivencia (the living together of Christians, Muslims, and Jews) was predicated on intolerance, hostility, competition, and bloodshed.¹⁹ Treating violence as ordinary, however, does not justify the presence of cultures of violence in societies with a high incidence of bloodshed. Gerard Martin’s insightful discussion of twentieth-century Colombia proposes that violence be thought of as a “tradition” expressed in a variety of ways but situated in specific historical contexts and taxonomies of social order. A similar argument emerges from Ussama Makdisi’s discussion of sectarian violence in nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon as a grassroots and multifaceted expression of modernization rather than the by-product of innate sectarian hatred.²⁰ Writing about violence with an awareness of its embeddedness in a specific historical time and place purges it of the primordialist and primitive aura that has surrounded it—an aura that has long tarnished our understanding of the Middle East.

VIOLENCE AND THE CITY

As a distinctive type of human, political, and spatial association, the city is an excellent vantage point from which to observe and make sense of violence. The distinctiveness of cities has long been recognized in the academic literature: from the medieval European commune and Mamluk cities studied by Max Weber and Ira Lapidus, respectively, to the modern nineteenth-century metropolis dissected by Georg Simmel and imagined by Walter Benjamin. In the fast-developing world of cities of the 1970s, Henri Lefebvre viewed urbanism as the motive force for historical change, with the city holding the key to future liberation from repression and exploitation.²¹ Arguably, the days of Lefebvre’s redemptive and optimistic vision of the city as the exclusive site of freedom are over—particularly when one thinks of the “cities of fear” created worldwide by the imposition of increasingly sophisticated systems of control and surveilla...