Modern Arab Research Articles

Abu Dhabi: Global Changes and Competing visions of Modernity

Abu Dhabi’s policy to invest in mega projects to brand its image for cultural tourism and urban expansion is part of its 2030 vision to diversify its income and attract investors through the creation of a modern Arab city. Shorefront development and large real estate projects run hand in hand as part of a process seeking international acclimation. Existing urban enclaves of the city created mostly in the 1970’s are being framed with iconic skyscrapers along Abu Dhabi’s waterfronts to offer new urban windows of the city. In the process star architects advocate signature projects to brand the city as part of Abu Dhabi’s new infrastructure development to create a gateway city in a rapidly developing and competitive Gulf region. These new icons of Abu Dhabi vary in their architectural manifestations from cultural projects and mega museums to complex skyscrapers made possible through new technologies that avail. Abu Dhabi’s new, more visible architecture manifests the emergence of yet another competitor on the global market of Asian and Gulf cities. The new architecture that is reshaping the skyline of the oil rich state constructs in the process a new city image of unprecedented wealth. This paper explores the current changes in Abu Dhabi and the competing visions of tradition, culture and modernity as the city strives to claim status in a global hierarchy of Asian and Arab financial centers.

النمذجة البشرية في الصحافة العراقية

This research deals with what so called concept of The Human Model and how Iraqi Media concerns of this concept practically as it plays a key role in attracting readers, on the first hand. On the second, it is important to shed light on the scientific desire of the Iraqi Media and how it deals with this contemporary trend especially in editorial media. The importance of the research stems from the fact that it alerts to a new stream of modern trends in journalistic writing, according to many modern Arab and foreign media studies; and to the importance of employing human modeling in dealing with facts, events, issues and problems in various editorial arts within their effective influence in conciliation. If this trend can contribute to the use of the largest number of readers to follow the events and benefit from the use of human modeling in the delivering the required media message. This study has ended by many conclusions: The Iraqi press has embraced human modeling in social subjects rather than in other political and cultural issues. The art of the column as the most prominent art employing human modeling was adopted. Then, it followed by the art of investigative journalism. Next, the art of news report, followed by articles in order. Iraqi Media has adopted this concept especially in dealing with social events more than any other ones, i. e.; political and cultural. In principle, the study used columns to functionalize this concept. And, in a way or another, it also used features, stories and essays. Emphasizing the use of known and unknown human models, as well as the employment of men and women of various functions and practical names, as models for the presentation of problems and events and facts and use them within the various press arts, in order to woo the reader towards this issue or that. This allowed readers to follow the issue or the incident without boredom, but recommends fans to use human modeling in journalistic writing should be taken care of and used in order to persuade the reader towards this event or that problem positively or negatively.

Introduction The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories

This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the historiography of modern and contemporary Arab art. It then details a recent turn to more critical engagement with that historiographic framework, as exemplified by the 2012 conference The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories, and introduces the four articles published in ARTMargins that came out of the conference.

Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Martyr

When Shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Qassām died in a gunfight with the Palestine Police Force in November 1935, the Government of the British Mandate for Palestine was ill prepared for the public outpouring of popular support and inspiration the imām from Haifa’s death would give to Arab Palestinian political aspirations. Al-Qassām soon became a powerful symbol in the nationalist fight against the British colonial power and subsequently the State of Israel. Al-Qassām remains a potent figure in Arab nationalist, Palestinian nationalist, and modern “Islamist” circles. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold: first, to provide an overview of the current state of the historiography on al-Qassām; and second, to add to that historiography with a recontextualized narrative of al-Qassām’s life and death. This latter part of the paper aims to fill some of the gaps with additional sources and place the findings alongside contemporary historical scholarship on political identity and nationalist movements in Palestine and the wider Mashriq. This article contends that the claims made on al-Qassām by contemporary Palestinian, “Islamic” nationalists have silenced the multiple contexts available if one considers the entirety of al-Qassām’s life. Viewed in this light, it is possible that al-Qassām never considered himself a “Palestinian” at all.

The Demonstrative iyyā-: A Little-Considered Aspect of Arabic Deixis

Abstract The familiar Arabic pronominal object marker iyyā- performs other functions within the language. One of these, the demonstrative, has been recognized in spoken Egyptian Arabic but passes virtually unremarked in written Arabic. Nevertheless, it is so used by writers from the eastern Arabophone world more often than by those from the west. As such, it usually performs four roles in structuring information: expressing contrast, emphatic reflexivity, and two degrees of distal deixis. While modern Arab writers appear to use it demonstratively more often than did those of medieval and classical Arabic, that earlier writers were using it suggests that its demonstrative property is an inherent feature. This is confirmed by comparing object markers in other Semitic languages, which may function as demonstratives in Hebrew and Aramaic, reflexives in Syriac, and in remote deixis in Amharic.

Review: Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation (1808–1918) by Stefan Weber

Stefan Weber Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation (1808–1918) Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. 2 vols. Vol. 1: text, 464 pp., 646 illus. (some in color); vol. 2: catalogue, 664 pp., 666 illus. (some in color), 1025 ground plans, 7 city plans folded in back pocket. $245, ISBN 8779344240 Stefan Weber’s monumental two-volume study of modern Damascus is an extraordinary contribution to the study of urbanism and architecture in the modern Middle East, as well as to the study of Mediterranean urban history generally. It is the product of years of fieldwork, of architectural and urban surveys, of archival research, and most of all, of thoughtful analysis. At two hefty volumes, the work dwarfs any other study on modern Arab cities, literally as well as figuratively. Damascus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the world’s oldest cities, is best known to architectural historians as one of the most important centers of the classical Islamic world. Over the course of the long nineteenth century, however, Damascus, like many provincial centers of the Ottoman Empire, underwent a tremendous transformation. Modernization altered its development by adding new neighborhoods, large thoroughfares, urban squares, public buildings, commercial infrastructure, and domestic architecture. Zeynep Celik’s recent book, Empire, Architecture and the City, presents an overview of these developments throughout the empire, and shows how the Ottoman center staged its visions of empire through the construction of public space in its Arabic-speaking provinces.1 Weber’s book places Damascus, a provincial capital, at the center of analysis, providing a history of a single city and its buildings and people with an unprecedented degree of richness and depth. His book highlights the links and distinctions in urban and architectural practices between Damascus and Istanbul, the empire’s capital, and between Damascus and many Arab cities to which it relates, including Beirut, Aleppo, and Salt (in present-day Jordan). Yet we also have unexpected comparisons, as with Bitlis (in present-day Turkey). It is no accident that the historic photographs on the cover of both volumes …

Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (review)

Reviewed by: Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost Khalid Amine (bio) Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 271. $35.00. In Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, Margaret Litvin examines the overall discursive structures that conditioned the production, circulation, and reception of Hamlet in the Arab world over the past decades. Hamlet’s journey through the Arab world is marked by the political rhetoric of “to be or not to be,” which has become a defining slogan in Arab politics used by different types of communities. The lack of the infinitive form “to be” in Arabic further complicates the condition of “foreignness” that the statement implies. Litvin’s fresh reading unfolds the underlying histories that helped to bring Hamlet into sharper focus for Arab readers. Her timely and keen examination shows that there are compelling reasons to believe that the Arab Hamlet has been refashioned with a great sense of urgency to reflect ironically on Arab conditions. Hamlet’s Arab Journey delves deeper into the question of Arab identity and its inexorable concern with historical agency at given transitional periods. For Litvin, Hamlet “encapsulates a debate coeval with the largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity” (2). Her reflection goes beyond Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial denials where binary relationships between colonized and colonizer, local and global, East and West dissolve and become more and more interwoven, and focuses more on the middle ground of performativity. She explores the Hamlet currency in today’s Arab political lexicon. The urgency of the crisis leads Arabs to read “to be or not to be” as a representation of collective loss and bewilderment. Litvin’s model of literary appropriation, or the “global kaleidoscope” as she calls it, allows a persistent circulation and construction of different Hamlets all the time, rather than reproducing the original. She is more interested in how Hamlet is deployed, rather than to what extent Arab versions are faithful to the original. After all, the constant refashioning of Shakespearean texts is, indeed, informed by the mythos that surrounds them. A comparative reading of Hamlet’s soliloquy as it appears in two different quartos illustrates the multiplicity (rather than the uniqueness) of the Shakespearean text—a text that is constantly edited, revised, and presented as a pattern of self-erasing traces rather than an authentic script that claims presence. Arab Hamlet negotiations, then, are part of the struggle to make space and refashioning of the self through the “detour” of the other. In this vein, Shakespeare’s representation on the Arab stage amounts to a portrait of the self. In Litvin’s much needed revision, Hamlet negotiations are no longer part of a resistance to Western “masks of difference,” or the Prospero-Caliban model of [End Page 563] postcolonial writing-back. Beyond postcolonial appropriations, Litvin’s articulate argument underlines the politics of “Hamletization of the Arab Muslim political hero” in favor of the prevailing tendency of an “Arabization of Hamlet” (90). Litvin’s journey begins from Egypt in 1952 with Gamal Ab del Nasser’s geopolitical and cultural attributes allowing an array of Hamlets to reflect on collective identity and historical agency. She succeeds to a great extent in demonstrating that Nasser’s Hamlets are rituals of empowerment fueled by a unified ideology and a full-fledged counterculture highly sensitive to pan-Arabism, which emerged as a painful process of renewal that grew out of attribution and contention, a postcolonial struggle affected by violent taxonomic labeling and conflicting aspirations for a better future. Theater was at the heart of this counterculture, strictly defining itself as the theater that thinks for the emerging Arab nation. Political satire became a favorable frame in Arab theater, a breakthrough in both subject matter and style. Litvin demonstrates that the Hamlet productions before the 1967 Arab defeat produced a romantic national hero. Since the 1970s Hamlet has been read as a play about tyranny as dreams of pan-Arab unity faded. Hamlet became inarticulate, unable to fix the “out of joint” world around him. He becomes a...

Descriptive grammar between Dr. Mahdi Al-Makhzoumi and Dr. Tammam Hassan, a study in the sources of agreement and the difference between them

Most of the modern Arab grammarians focused on attempts to reform the ancient Arabic grammatical approach, which may have been marred by complexity and ambiguity, due to the overlapping of Western approaches and their differences from the linguistic approach of the Arabic language, such as logic, philosophy, and others in it, and the efforts of Dr. Mahdi Al-Makhzoumi and Dr. Tammam Hassan

Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization

IN MAY 1944, WHEN THE EGYPTIAN philosopher Abd al-Rahman Badawi defended his dissertation on existential time, Taha Husayn, the doyen of modern Arab letters, declared it the birth of modern Arab philosophy. The defense was a national event, and the widely distributed Egyptian daily al-Ahram immediately shared the news with its readers.1 Six years later, Badawi announced that he had devised a new philosophy for “our generation.” He called it existentialism (wujudiya), and though it shared the name of the European movement, it was not simply a carbon copy of it, but rather a series of formulations and adaptations that collectively sought to create a new postcolonial Arab subject: confident, politically involved, independent, self-sufficient, and above all liberated. Whether in its Heideggerian or its Sartrean form, we normally think of existentialism solely as a chapter in European intellectual history. Yet in the context of decolonization, Arab intellectuals processed the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre into an entirely new intellectual tradition that was European in origin and Middle Eastern by design. What began as an esoteric experiment on a philosopher’s desk grew into a decentralized yet influential intellectual movement with meaningful global connections. By the early 1960s, Arab culture was dominated by the language, assumptions, and politics of existentialism. Yet this story has thus far remained an invisible chapter in the intellectual history of decolonization. The emergence of Arab existentialism as a major category of Arab thought coincided with the worldwide process of decolonization and the rise of the first generation of Third World regimes.2 Between the end of World War II, when pro-colonial Arab monarchies teetered, and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the revolutionary Arab states that had replaced the monarchies were defeated, a young generation of

Morocco, Latin America, and the Problem of Reading

This article analyzes three short stories by Muḥammad Zafzāf, the late Moroccan author, exploring Hispanophone roles in Moroccan literary culture. The analysis finds that Zafzāf writes an Arabic metatext about Spanish language, and speaks about Latin Americanness as a cultural referent, all in order to probe the limits of Arabic. Where Arabic fails to be intelligible—a failure represented in fictional Arabic speakers’ frustrated encounters with European languages and societies—Zafzāf's fiction looks not northward but westward, seeking an explanation in a Latin American exotic. The article places this ethnographic fiction in the context of the modern Arab literary field, where Moroccan literature holds an acutely contested position. Zafzāf renders Moroccan fiction legible to his Mashriqi readership—which makes up a large portion of his audience overall—defining Moroccan identity against a Hispanophone other. This foreign figure's specifically Latin American characteristics change, and challenge, the postcolonial cultural oppositions Arabic literature has historically employed.

Modern Arab uprisings and social media: An historical perspective on media and revolution

Journalists and other observers claim that new social media brought about the wave of current popular uprisings in the Middle East. This article examines – with an historical perspective within the intellectual framework of media ecology – this idea of new media as the cause of revolution. It concludes that while new media are an important factor behind these recent revolts, they do not cause revolution. Shifts in communication technology have a major influence on the way we interrelate and organize our society. The very structure of the World Wide Web makes control of information extremely difficult for autocratic governments and is indeed a strong force for popular movements, democratic change and freedom.

THEORIZING FROM THE PERIPHERY: THE INTELLECTUAL PROJECT OF MAHDI ʿAMIL

AbstractThe paper will draw the contours of the intellectual project of Mahdi ʿAmil (1936–87), a prominent Lebanese Marxist. It will start by relocating ʿAmil's work in the generalproblématiqueof the adaptation and adoption of theories in the periphery, looking at the process of translation he deploys in his construction of an “Arab Marxism.” After presenting his project, the paper will focus on its diachronic dimension, by presenting two developments that threatened ʿAmil's overarching project, namely, the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and the rise of a new register of critique in the 1980s, epitomized by the work of Edward Said. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of ʿAmil's work to the historiography of modern Arab political thought.

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

A Study on the Consilience between Arab and Western Modernity in the poems of Apollo Group

A Study on the Consilience between Arab and Western Modernity in the poems of Apollo Group

Imperfectly symmetrical: a discussion of Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust

This review provides a summary and evaluation of Gilbert Achcar’s history of Arab attitudes to the Holocaust (and related matters, such as fascism) from the early 1930s until the present. The author’s ability to integrate a story of Arab intellectual and political diversity with the story of how this diversity has often been reduced to a monolithic caricature is found to be magisterial. The review ends with the kind of critical interrogation that so formidable a work deserves: has Achcar exaggerated the role that ‘narrative’ might have in resolving political conflicts? Has he exaggerated the degree to which reactionary and/or fundamentalist Islamism has influenced modern Arab and Islamic thought? To what extent has he neglected to discuss the Jewish fundamentalist ideas that provide a religious basis for prejudice and aggression towards Palestinians and Arabs? Does he adequately address the relationship between Zionism/Israel and imperialism?

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

Behind the Statistics: The Ethnography of Suicide in Palestine

As part of the first anthropological study on suicide in the modern Arab world, statistics gathered from the Ramallah region of the West Bank in Palestine painted an apparently remarkably similar picture to that found in Western countries such as the UK and France. More men than women completed suicide, more women than men attempted suicide. Men used more violent methods such as hanging and women softer methods such as medication overdose. Completed suicide was higher in the older age range, attempted suicide in the younger. However, ethnographic fieldwork and detailed examination of the case studies and suicide narratives gathered and analysed within the cultural, political and economic contexts illustrated more starkly the differences in suicidal practices between Palestinian West Bank society of the 1990s and other regions of the world. The central argument of the paper is that although statistics tell a very important story, ethnography uncovers a multitude of stories 'behind the statistics', and thus helps us to make sense of both cultural context and subjective experience.

مخالفة الحاشية للمتن حضور عنترة وغيابه في المسرح العربي الحديث "حواء الخالدة" نموذجاً

A person who ponders over the literary theater achievement through tout the Arab world, beginning from the leading phase, finds a lucid presence of tradition in the leading stage, and a remarkable excellence in the following periods as well. Perhaps, this is because of the potency of tradition to deepen the significances of the literary work, and to increase its divergence, in addition to its immense agreement in its nature with the theater. Perhaps the most significant character which has been evoked and employed by the writers is the character of "Antra Bin Shaddad" who has puzzled the researchers and writers, whether they are Arab or Orientals, due to having a set of opposing binaries that made him an universal character which is suitable for evocation and employment in every era and every place; this character is a semoitic sign of several significances that is incalculable, and the most significant among them is a traditional character which is the sign of the several variable significances. It is impossible to separate the significances of Antra, the knight from the significances of Antra, the lover, the slave, the independent. He is a personality of overlapping components that melted all in a social, cultural and historical crucible. All these elements have been interlinked in such a way that is not possible to separate them. This study which looks at the modern and contemporary texts, evoking the tradition and employing its characters and events, aims that it is a footnote on the text ( e.g. traditional story), in monitoring the difference and agreement between the footnote and text, knowing the levels of presence and absence of constants of text, significances of presence and absence, absence of the text and presence of imaginary, and the significances of this presence, applied to the play " Hawwa Al Khalidah / The Eternal Eve" by Mahmood Taimoor. المتأمل في المنجز الأدبي المسرحي في الوطن العربي، بداية من مرحلة الريادة، يرى للتراث حضوراً ظاهراً في مرحلة الريادة، وتميزاً ملحوظاً في المراحل التالية عليها، ولعل ذلك راجع إلي قدرة التراث على تعميق دلالات العمل الأدبي، وزيادة تشعبها، بالإضافة إلى اتفاقه في طبيعته مع المسرح اتفاقاً كبيراً. ولعل أكثر الشخصيات التي استحضرها ووظفها الكتاب شخصية عنترة بن شداد، تلك الشخصية التي حيرت الباحثين والمبدعين، عرباً ومستشرقين، لجمعها بين مجموعة من الثنائيات المتضادة، جعلت منها شخصية كونية صالحة للاستحضار والتوظيف في أي عصر، وفي أي مكان؛ فهي علامة سيميائية ذات دلالات متعددة يصعب حصرها، أكثر من كونها شخصية تراثية، علامة ذات دلالات متغيرة بالمواقف التي توجد فيها، لكنها دلالات لا تقوم بذاتها، فلا يمكن فصل دلالات عنترة الفارس، عن دلالات عنترة المحب الولهان، عن دلالات عنترة العبد، وعنترة الحر؛ فهو شخصية ذات مكونات متداخلة، صهرت كلها في بوتقة اجتماعية، ثقافية، تاريخية واحدة، فتداخلت عناصرها بشكل يصعب معه الفصل بينها. وتطمح هذه الدراسة الناظرة إلى النصوص الحديثة والمعاصرة المستدعية التراث، والموظِّفة شخصياته وحوادثه على أنها حاشية على المتن {أي القصة التراثية}، في رصد الاختلاف والاتفاق بين الحاشية والمتن، بالوقوف على مستويات حضور ثوابت المتن ـ التي لا خلاف عليها ـ وغيابها، ودلالات الحضور والغياب، وغياب المتن وحضور المتخيل، ودلالات هذا الحضور، بالتطبيق على مسرحية "حواء الخالدة " لـ محمود تيمور.

Innocence, Maturation, and Liberation:The Maturation Process in al-Mīdānī b. Ṣāliḥ’s Work

Abstract The Tunisian poet al-Mīdānī b. Ṣāliḥ’s work not only reflects a clear preoccupation with themes of innocence and maturity, but also displays interesting stages of maturation on both personal and literary levels. It also echoes different stages in modern Tunisian and Arab intellectual and political history. This article traces the different stages in this poet’s literary and intellectual experience, and through him assesses the poetic and literary scene in Tunisia and the Arab world in the second half of the twentieth century.

“Islamofascism”. Remarks on a Current Ideologeme

The term “Islamofascism” for quite some time has had currency in polemical, but also in sober political discourses. However, it is clear that Islamic fundamentalism has very little, if anything, in common, in either origin or in form, with the historical phenomenon of fascism. If fascism is understood as what developed in certain historical constellations in Italy, Spain, and Hungary or as a specific exceptional form in German National Socialism, then it is something quite different from the movements of radicalized Islam. Islam, as a religion, is driven by different factors and follows goals very different from those of political fascism. One has to rigorously empty the political-scientifically established term “fascism” of content if one wants to make out superficial similarities. This must not be misunderstood: of course there is a modern (sometimes fanaticized) Arab nationalism; but as such it is not a substrate of Islam and thus does not substantially derive religiously from Islam. The Nazi (racial-biological) concept of the “national comrade” (Volksgenosse) has connotations different from those of membership in the Islamic Umma, which neither has anything do with an ideology of “blood” or race nor is determined by territorial presence, but rather includes Muslims living in the Diaspora—and in this respect is much more closely related to the Jewish-religious concepts of nation, people, and Diaspora than to the categories of the fascism that genuinely arose from Western modernism. It can therefore be assumed that the use of the term “Islamofascism” has little to do with an interest in analytical knowledge, but all the more with ideological polemics and political indoctrination.