What happened to my utter joy at the Egyptian revolution? Where is my feeling that it was going to sweep away the injustices in the Middle East and American foreign policy, and ravish the U.S. too in a wave of Arabophilia? Well it’s still there.
Last night at the 92d Street Y in New York, a group of Arab intellectuals had a tremendous conversation about the cultural and political changes in the Arab world that are slowly but surely rocking the universe. I want to take my hat off right here to the 92d Street Y for staging the event. And Pen World Voices for setting up the panel. The 92d Street Y is a Zionist organization. It will brook no criticism of the Jewish state; and don’t worry, I will get to the horror of these intellectual conditions in a subsequent post, because even last night’s conversation plays a role in this destitution that is threatening all our lives.
But let’s not talk about Jews, let’s talk about Arabs, and let me celebrate the important ideas that were expressed last night. They were ideas about the universality of the human experience, the chain of ideas and spirit that unites western culture to the Arab world, and the incredible leadership that young Arabs have demonstrated in breaking all our minds out of horrible prejudice, the prejudice that has built an iron wall across the Arab world, from Palestine to Iraq.
And so let me get to the argument. I am going to quote four disputing Arab intellectuals, after Jake Weisberg, the deft moderator, got out of the way, and the intellectuals got to fight. The argument began over a simple issue: Why did we leave the Arab world? For three of the intellectuals had left. One lives in Holland, one in Paris, one in New York. Only Issandr El-Amrani, of the Arabist.net (and LRB on Libya), lives in the Arab world.
I will begin with Rula Jebreal, and her explaining why she left Palestine and Egypt.
She said that the Egyptians created files on cultural figures to use against them, and a great singer, who had been a lover of Mubarak’s son, the son threw her out of a second floor window and she broke her back and her career was blocked.
“This is the lever that they use, the regime uses, against intellectuals. If you notice, all of us live abroad. You have no choice. [pointing at the others on stage] He lives in Holland, he is in Paris, I live in New York…. For Arab intellectuals and journalists, you have no choice– disappear, be in jail, or leave. These are the choices. 100 percent of them.”
So during the revolutions, Jebreal said, the intellectuals were absent. They were dead or in jail or abroad. “So we watched our countries from abroad.”
And from there Jebreal got to the heart of the discussion, the anti-Arab feeling in the west.
“The prejudice it was very hard. It was very hard to talk about our countries after September 11…. But the truth– the prejudice against us–we have to fight our regimes, but abroad we have to fight the prejudice, the discrimination, and we have to fight something stronger, the idea that is in the head of the majority of the people in this room and in this country before Tahrir Square, this idea that most of us, we are not liberal. We beat our women, that we marry more than once, whatever, and we are terrorists. If we are not terrorists, then we are potential terrorists. This idea started changing in Tahrir Square.
“So I really would like to thank these women and men who stood for three weeks asking for freedom and dignity and asking for a better life. They convinced all of us that we have a right to that, but I ithink they changed somehow the opinion in the western world.”
There came a showering of applause for Jebreal, and then Issandr El-Amrani said that the analysis was “a little unfair.” He suggested that Jebreal was not in touch with the Arab world.
He said that in the last five or six years, Arab culture had changed. He spoke of an underground Moroccan gay magazine. The editor was not from an elite background. His family had not lived abroad. And the editor was not out to his family. “But slowly he’s creating room for debate, this is one of the most wonderful things about what is happening in Tunisia, Egypt.”
El Amrani said that when he went to Tunis in January after Ben Ali left, he heard people arguing in the streets about a parliamentary system or a presidential system. Some said, “We are Arabs, we need a strong president—and back and forth it went.”
And then the same happened in Tahrir. It was not just the secular elites. He saw a peasant, whose shoes were falling apart, who had come on a third class train from southern Egypt, unemployed, dirty, uneducated. And the man said, “I’m staying here either until Mubarak goes or I die.”
And bearded Islamists were participating alongside Christians, and women trading food. “It was a gasp of fresh air. People feel that they can have a conversation.” Yes it may take 25 years, El Amrani said, as it had taken 25 years after the French revolution for things to sort out. “It may be generations. But the conversation is now possible. The conversation wasn’t possible before because the public space wasn’t there.”
Then it was Abdellah Taia’s turn, and he was in the Jebreal camp. He is a Moroccan gay writer who has lived in Paris for the last eight years, lithe with close cropped hair and a plaid shirt. He talked about the political space in Morocco, and how closed it was. There was no room to criticize; he was made to feel that Islam was against him. Though inside he understood, it is their problem not mine– he could be both “gay and Muslim.” This absence of political space was created by a dictator, Hassan 2. “He put all the leaders in jail in the 70s and 80s, he invented a literary prize.” And this is why Taia had had to get away. Because there was no room to criticize. There were no intellectuals on TV.
Now came the fourth speaker, Abdelkader Benali. He grew up poor in Morocco. He has lived in Holland for 30 years; and his ideas, which echoed El Amrani’s, were simply electrifying.
He began by speaking of the cultural space that develops in a closed society. When there is oppression and people are put into prison just for speaking their own language, well then the society changes, and people change. Because cultural and political ideas need to be exchanged regardless of conditions.
“Suddenly grocery sellers become poets, taxi drivers are commentators. And someone who cleans the street becomes a chronicleur of what is happening in the streets.”
Wow. And when Benali went back to Morocco from Europe, “even my grandmother who is illiterate, she knew what was going on in the world, how Morocco was faring.” She told his sisters to get an education, never to stay in the kitchen. School “is the only thing you have, otherwise you become like me.” She wanted those children in Europe.
Then came 9/11. And that is when the Arab revolution began.
“I have a feeling that the Arab intellectuals, especially the ones who became articulated in the west, they came back to their own homes and their own countries. They decided there was so much orientalist militarist language going on about the Orient, that they said, there is no place in the west now for us to create a discourse.”
This had befallen Benali himself. The hatred toward Arabs in Amsterdam even as the towers fell, a neighbor’s belief that he had no empathy, and the Israel-Palestine issue too (though I am keeping my powder dry, reader)—he had felt alienated from this great western society that was putting “experts” on television to speak about the Arab world, when he knew so much more about the Arab world.
And it had driven him back to the Arab world.
“We go back home and we see what we can do here. This is our west actually. We created our own kind of version of intellectual climate, and it was going to be a secret Nobody should know about it. So what you see is all these young urban intellectuals flying under the radar, doing things sometimes only once, because if you do it once, it will be closed down.”
And these were the materials of the revolution.
“In the last five or six years this has become a very fruitful terrain for dialogue, for talking about the responsibility of an intellectual writer to form his society, to give an idea of how it could look like, to create new dreams…”
The conceit of the evening was that Arab societies are shut down and now they are being liberated. It’s an arrogant western conceit, god knows that I feel some of it in myself. We gave them the tools. Yes and one of the tools was our prejudice. They had to build their own west.
