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A comparative literature professor interested in how Arabic literature has worked, throughout its history, as a part of world literature

Belatedly, photos of Dec 5 runoff election in Zamalek

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Although there were some important runoff races, the turnout last week (Dec 5 runoff for candidates who didn’t win outright in the first vote; still the first of three rounds of parliamentary elections) was pathetic. Election workers and volunteers of various kinds far outnumbered voters. All the newspapers led with photos of empty polling stations. Here are mine.

The soldiers didn't have much to do. The women in vests are self-organized "Election guardians." Didn't see them in the first vote.


Why the sleepy turnout?


Bored election volunteers organize themselves for a group photo.


Say, "Democracy"!


Ken Garden talks with three FJP canvassers on hand to assist voters


Unsurprisingly, the FJP carried most of the runoff races. They are so professional. Their ubiquitous bright blue and yellow posters have become like wallpaper: you don’t even notice them anymore. Some people have told me they’re voting MB because they perceive them as competent. One taxi driver, in earnest: “Look at their campaign. They have so much money. Of course they’ll use it to fix the country.”
Those THREE FJP canvassers chatting with my husband (they were delighted to hear he was a religion professor) are not local. (Him: So, are you all here representing different parties? Them: Nope, one party.) When we told them there was a Brotherhood office on our street, they said, “Oh, that’s our office! We live in Dokki/Mohandiseen. Not around here. We are doing this election work in the daytime, but then we do outreach work through the neighborhood FJP office in the evenings.” (Dokki votes in Giza’s election round, not till Dec 14.)
For what it’s worth, “religious parties” are officially banned (e.g., the Salafi Nour party is a “party with a religious point of reference”). Anyway, since the FJP proclaims on its propaganda that it’s “the party created by the Muslim Brotherhood for all Egyptians,” theoretically there ought to be a separation between the religious organization and the political party. I don’t think it’s proper for the FJP to campaign out of the MB’s headquarters.
A sharp analysis of the first-round election outcome by Samuel Tadros here. But I don’t see how he says the parliament will be “solely composed of Muslim males.” Mostly, overwhelmingly, yes.

We know who represents Egypt. But who constitutes it?

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Neither the Brotherhood nor SCAF wants a system of checks and balances. Might that be exactly why they eventually produce one?

As before November 18, when the MB and Salafi parties very successfully challenged SCAF’s attempt to impose “supra-constitutional principles” ahead of the first-round parliamentary elections, the MB is standing up to SCAF on matters of legitimacy and power. Specifically, who gets to write the constitution? Will it be people named by the democratically elected parliament? If not, why?
SCAF held a ridiculous (foreigners-only) press conference Wednesday claiming that the to-be-elected parliament does not “represent Egyptian society” and therefore asserting control over the process of naming the constitution-drafting committee. In response, the MB withdrew from SCAF’s “advisory council” — another ridiculous initiative aimed at legitimizing the military junta’s arbitrary rule and spreading the blame for its failures. (The Arabist has a good wrapup of various coverage; but I think his own view that this is the last gasp of military rule is way too optimistic.)  The whole thing should backfire against SCAF: as though Egyptian liberals or their bilingual Facebook friends didn’t read The Guardian! But it might not.

Nicholas Kristof just wrote an amazingly dumb dinner story. Here is mine.

We had dinner today with my lovely friends whom I’ve known for a decade: they are both journalists, with two kids, an apartment full of books, and very liberal views (Arab liberal = favoring liberal democracy, i.e. elected civilian rule with constitutional protection for minorities; they’re also lefty and pointedly secular). Their younger child was born seven days before January 25 but, to the extent possible given two working parents and a newborn, they have been quite active in the revolution. The mom and kids had to go away to her parents’ house in another city during the week their street was flooded with noxious tear gas. In short, they loathe SCAF with every fiber of their being.Ditto for the Brotherhood: when two polite MB canvassers visited their apartment building in October giving out Eid gifts and leaflets and asking where people would pray the Eid prayer, my equally polite friend not only refused their gift but told them he was not planning to pray.
Imagine yourself now in these people’s position. The specter of illiberal democracy is stalking the region.  From all sides one hears the words “Turkish model”: for Brotherhood supporters it still means (despite the disenchantment with Erdogan that Piotr Zalewski analyzes here) “moderate, non-corrupt Islamists boost economy and enhance global stature”; but for liberals it now means “the military as guarantor of democracy.”  The problem is the transitional process SCAF has designed. But the ironic result is that some liberals may be tacitly turning to the junta for help.

Me: So [the SCAF general] claimed the elections didn’t represent the population? That’s ridiculous.

My friend: No it isn’t.

Me: But they’re free elections.  Isn’t that SCAF’s claim too?

Him: But a constitution is not for one five-year electoral cycle; it’s supposed to be forever.  It’s the fundamental law that constitutes the political system and decides how the other laws are made. For one parliament elected at one point in time to be allowed to write the constitution would not be fair.

Me: Why not?  Aren’t you doing the classic liberal thing, calling for elections and then rejecting the results?

Him: Not really.

Me: You are. If the parliament accurately represents the current views of Egyptian society, which I think we agree it (unfortunately) will, why shouldn’t it be allowed to decide what the political system looks like?

Him: What about protection of minorities?

Me: Hmm.

Him: What if the Islamist parliament appoints a constitution-drafting committee that throws out established principles of human rights? Or backs away from international rights accords that Egypt has signed? What if they only recognize three possible religions — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism — without making room for people who are Bahai or something else or atheist?

Me: Hmm.  So just like in the Mubarak days, secular liberals are tolerating the military dictatorship as a bulwark against organized popular Islamism.

Him: No.

Me: You are running to SCAF for help.

Him: No, this is SCAF’s fault in the first place. They put in an absurd set of procedures for the transition: an elected parliament first (before we even know whether Egypt will be a presidential or parliamentary republic or what), then a constitution afterwards. How can you have a parliament before the division of powers? Whereas the Constitution should be the fundamental thing, coming straight from a transitional civilian government, as ElBaradei had initially suggested. If they had really been interested in transferring power…

Me: I know, it’s messed up. But constitutions aren’t forever. They can be amended; they contain procedures for amendment. When the US Constitution was adopted, women couldn’t vote and a black person was only 3/5 of a person. 

Him: You can’t have parliament changing the constitution every five years. If people like me managed to elect a Socialist parliament one time, I wouldn’t want them to be able to rewrite the constitution either.

Me: No, you’re right. Plus, constitutional amendments aren’t easy.  I just kind of glossed over the whole Civil War thing that those U.S. amendments required.

Him: You see what I mean?

I do. How the hell to have a democracy where 60 years of misrule (or should we count the British and make it 130?) has fried the demos? It’s hard enough everywhere else.

Me: So who would you say should represent Egyptian society for the purpose of writing the constitution?

Him: There are other groups. Syndicates, for instance.  The syndicate of doctors, lawyers, engineers. The writers’ union, the syndicate of journalists. (Ah, the journalists.) Give each of those groups a representative.  And then give the parties in parliament representatives proportional to their seats, comprising maybe half or two-thirds of the constitutional committee.

I see the appeal of having some intellectuals involved. But — writers and artists appointed by generals, really? Plus, isn’t that pretty much what the SCAF guy said?

So we come back to the scenario of SCAF-MB checks and balances. If the MB can actually win the power to see the military’s budget, and SCAF in turn can help the MB tame rather than appease the probable crazy social-conservative agenda of its Salafi co-parliamentarians (whether they end up being coalition partners or yappy opposition), then the country certainly will not move forward; checks and balances are designed for gridlock. But at least it may get a bit of breathing room and stable-cleaning. That is the only remotely optimistic medium-term outcome I can see.

SCAF’s puppet show

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Al-Masry al-Youm, whose English edition was recently pulled off newsstands for running expert Robert Springborg’s column apparently suggesting that SCAF members might pull a coup-within-a-coup and dump Tantawy [UPDATE: you can now read the editors’ candid and serious editorial laying out the whole story here; the post-self-censorship version of Springborg’s column is here], yesterday tried in vain to keep a straight face while describing the Cabinet that Kamal Ganzoury finially swore in:

Major General Ahmed Anis, former head of the Morale Affairs Department of the armed forces was sworn in as the new minister of information. News reports criticized the choice, saying it was another move by the SCAF to maintain control of the media.

…

In announcing the new cabinet, government officials referred to it as a “national salvation government,” a term originally used to describe the transitional civilian government proposed by pro-democracy activists and political figures seeking to bring an end to military rule. The idea of a civilian transitional government was put forward during the violent clashes in and around Tahrir Square in late November, and would most likely have been headed by Mohamed ElBaradei and included former Muslim Brotherhood figure Abdel Moneim Abouel Fotouh. Had it been formed, the national salvation government would have taken on the executive powers currently held by the military council.
However, the military rejected the proposal, instead accepting the resignation of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, and the replacing him with Ganzouri. In forming his new cabinet, Ganzouri has adopted the term “national salvation government,” while ElBaradei and many pro-democracy figure continue to demand the end of military rule.

And best of all:

After being sworn in, the new cabinet was instructed by Tantawi to push for democracy in order to achieve a free society, according to official government sources.

Some clever Youtuber is already on the case:

It’s like a kind of torture/ to have to watch this show.

Qandil’s “Moon” Illuminates Egypt, Not Just Samarqand

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Here’s the beginning of my piece on Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s 2005 novel Moon Over Samarqand, which appears today on Marcia Lynx Qualey’s Arabic Literature (In English Translation) blog.  Read the whole piece there. Also republished at Mideastposts.com.

“Didn’t I tell you?” the colonel’s daughter Fayza al-Tuhami tells the semi-conscious protagonist of Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s Qamar ʻAla Samarqand (Moon Over Samarqand). “Those soldiers, they’re always looking for an enemy to defeat. And because they’re incapable of defeating the enemy lying in wait across the desert, they defeat us instead. We’re an easy target.”

For obvious reasons, the entire “Fayza” section of Qandil’s novel was suppressed by Dar al-Hilal, the state-owned press that first published Moon Over Samarqand in January 2005. The exotic stories of life and legend in Central Asia — part of Qandil’s nostalgic reconstructions from the medieval Islamic civilizational heritage, including a long section on Uthman’s Quran taken directly from his earlier magazine travelogue — were allowed to stand. So were the disorders and violations of Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan. But the most bitter and immediate part of the novel, which takes place in Cairo and Heliopolis rather than Tashkent and Samarqand, was not deemed fit to print.
Fayza’s story dramatizes the ongoing pathology of Egypt’s relationship with its paternalistic — and far from omnicompetent — military elite. We first meet her at a party; the hypocrite generals and colonels and military intelligence men, including her father and Ali’s, are drinking gin disguised in tomato juice; the young people smoke hashish, listen to music, and make fun of their dads. Later we see that their nihilism has roots in despair. Ali enters the dim basement studio where Fayza (whose name, ironically, means Victorious) paints horrifying canvases: “scratched lines … naked, amputated bodies, their limbs incapable of joining together . . . lost and defenseless, in a limitless grey void.”

It turns out that Fayza has been repeatedly raped by her own father, starting at age 13. One could not ask for a starker metaphor of an army preying on those it exists to protect.  Continue reading…

via Arabic Literature (in English).

Shakespeare at the Alwiya Club – a bygone Baghdad era

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My colleague Kecia Ali alerted me to this beautiful reminiscence by Abdul Sattar Jawad, an Iraqi literature scholar who was forced to flee Baghdad in 2005. Titled “Shakespeare in Baghdad,” it just appeared in Duke University’s student paper, The Chronicle.

There are some spiky details under the surface of the piece.  For instance, “Iraq” functions as a metonym for everything in the Arab world (just as “Egypt” does for Egyptian intellectuals), including a late 19th c adaptation of Romeo and Juliet adapted by a Lebanese migrant for performance in Cairo.  Also there is curiously no mention of the great Palestinian-Iraqi poet-novelist-critic-translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who did so much for Arabic reception of Shakespeare (and of Abdul Sattar Jawad’s other great love, T.S. Eliot).  But who wants to quibble?  The piece is a lovely evocation of a cosmopolitan Baghdad paradise very similar to Jabra’s and now, unfortunately, lost for the forseeable future.
Here’s the opening: 

Shakespeare in Baghdad

It has been nearly thirty years since I drove to Oxford to visit its celebrated university and pay tribute to Shakespeare’s mausoleum in Stratford-upon-Avon in the heart of England. I was greeted in what seemed unthinkable: “Hey Sheikh Zbair, how’d you do?”
It was really a surprise to me although I am well aware of the Iraqi myth alleging that William Shakespeare is an Iraqi from Zubair, an Iraqi city bordering Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This myth was disseminated by Iraqi scholar and poet Safa Khulusi, who did his Ph.D. at London University in the 1940’s and then settled in Oxford as Chair of Islamic Studies. Of course this funny theory was very popular among Iraqis from different walks of life, who loved Shakespeare through his plays and poems taught at high schools and colleges.
Similarly, when I first came to Duke in 2005, Bruce Lawrence, professor emeritus of religion, extended his hand to me at the John Hope Franklin Center and said: “Welcome Sheikh Zbair.” From that time I realized that the Iraqi myth had crossed the Atlantic and become a source of fun, if not laughter. To the Iraqis and Arabs, Old Will is perceived as a bringer of much delight and gladness to mankind and the only author read or staged everywhere. He is, as Harold Bloom, one of America’s leading critics, said, an international possession transcending nations, languages and professions. Through invention and originality Shakespeare has notched the highest popularity and survived migration from country to country.
Old Will always manifests himself as a force that continues to activate the potential of other languages, in terms of grammar, vocabulary, register, rhythm and tone. In Iraq, Shakespeare was received as the most popular playwright and poet who taught us how to understand the human nature. His plays were performed even in the Iraqi vernacular: Othello retrieved his Arabic name Utail, Iago was Arabized into Yaccoob and Romeo and Juliet took a new title, Martyrs of Love, to attract public attention and boost the box office.
Read the whole thing…

Varia

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Small things:

  • Long post on my other blog about a conversation with a prominent theatre director about Shakespeare adaptation. But I have to mention here that while we were talking, his car was robbed: a theatre staffer came to tell him that someone had broken the window, stolen his cashmere overcoat and the money in the pocket, made off with some CDs, even taken his reading glasses.  The director carried on with the interview as though nothing had happened.
  • The Guardian-Observer calls my book “inspired” and suggests it as a “quirky” Christmas present.  Woo hoo!
  • Wild rumor circulating about the Salafis: if they come to power, they will try to ban Egyptian women from wearing makeup.  But then, wouldn’t the economy grind to a halt completely?
  • Tension and mud-slinging (mutual allegations of voting-day irregularities, etc) between the Brotherhood and the Salafi Nour Party as they contest twenty seats in first-round runoff elections today.  The Arabist has some good charts on what it could lead to.  No telling (because we still don’t know what kind of powers this Parliament will have) what it will mean.
  • Nine days later, old-New Prime Minister-designate Kamal Ganzouri has yet to form his “national salvation” government.  And all he has to deal with is SCAF and the Egyptian public. Imagine the government-formation process after an election when you would also have to deal with competing parties and political factions?
  • Shades of Hamlet? In the lead-up to last week’s polls, not one but two English-language newspapers, AMAY and Ahram Online, ran the headline “To Vote or Not to Vote?” (Thanks, Amy Motlagh.)

 

Fahmi Al-Kholi’s post-Camp-David "Merchant of Venice"

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Sometimes, to be naughty, before the Arab Spring, a reader would ask me: “It’s all very well what the Arabs have done with Hamlet. But what do they do with The Merchant of Venice?”  I have generally avoided focusing on this question; it’s not my favorite Shakespeare play anyway.
And yet: Could it be the case that Arab theatre’s response to the Camp David Accords challenges my basic historical claim that there was no space for “real” (i.e., aspiring to have an effect on policy) political theatre after about 1976? 
I met last night with the Cairo-based theatre director Fahmi El-Kholi, whose production of Shakespeare in Ataba I had written about in my book. Just wanted to (belatedly) check some hunches on scenography, allegory, and reception.  But before I know it, he launches into a description of a Merchant of Venice production he directed at Cairo University in 1978, right after the Camp David Accords, and revised/reprised in 1979-80 with amateur actors at the Workers’ Theatre at the Nasr Automobile Company.  Recall the context: huge demonstrations against Sadat, and resolutions by most of the relevant professional organizations (Writers’ Union, Cinema Union, Musicians’ Union, Theatre Makers’ Union) to condemn and oppose any sort of “normalization” effort that would involve cultural interaction with the Zionist Entity. Anyway, El-Kholi said it enjoyed an unbelievably warm reception, sliding past (probably sympathetic) censors and inspiring audience members to come see it with Palestinian flags on their lapels and keffiyyehs on their heads.
His description included:

  • Modern dress; Shylock, in black shirtsleeves “like an accountant or merchant” carried a calculator and used it to sell weapons to a long line of buyers from different nationalities. Later he would calculate the pound of flesh which was, of course, a slice of land.
  • The set was a bare stage punctuated by two crosses: one placed horizontally/diagonally (rising at a slight angle) from downstage to upstage; the second vertical, upstage, made of olive branches with a Palestinian keffiyyeh on top where the crown of thorns would be. At crucial moments in the play the keffiyyeh would start to drip little drops of blood thanks to a specially attached mechanism.  Because the Palestinians, you see, were crucified on the olive branches of the peace accord.
  • The actor playing “the big brother” Antonio impersonated the speech patterns of Nasser in Act I, then (after N’s death) acquired a pipe and glasses to become Sadat in Act II. 
  • A young woman called Palestine, bleeding and fleeing her captors in a torn white dress, appealed for help to her fiance Yasser (Arafat), then to her big brother (Egypt).  They ultimately failed to help her.
  • Shakespeare’s text (in translation) was used “word for word,” except that loaded translations were chosen for certain key terms. E.g., Shylock’s “bond” became اتفاق, which means “agreement” or (the term used for Camp David) “accord.”
  • Shylock became, in the 1979-80 restaging, Shylock-Yahu in honor of (then also) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahyu.  
  • In the 1979-80 workers’ restaging, the set included the dome of al-Aqsa mosque, with 14 men chained to it by ropes coming off different sides. (Ropes are a recurring element in El-Kholi’s scenography.)  The ropes acted mainly as leashes (El-Kholi described them as “like umbilical cords”), but at the crucial moment (at the end, when the Arab world rises) were activated to allow the men to defeat Shylock.  Most of Shakespeare’s script was dumped, leaving only the scene of Antonio’s deal with Shylock and the trial scene.  Other parts of the script were taken from public recordings of UN and Arab summit meetings, historical documents, and Sadat’s famous speeches leading up to his peace initiative. At other times, quotes from the Israeli news media and Israeli leaders’ speeches were reproduced by actors dressed as rabbis, sitting on onstage toilets, evidently suffering from diarrhea, pulling the chain after every one-liner. In both productions the trial scene was played as a UN meeting, with the Duke a figure for the UN Secretary-General.
  • Oh, and did I mention that the play went all the way back to 1948? That was the scene with the torn white dress.  The 1967 defeat was figured as all the 14 men lying around sleeping with model planes balanced on trays on their bellies; Shylock fished for these planes with a fishing rod, and when he caught one, it blew up. The 1973 “victory” was figured too. 
  • “And I forgot to tell you,” El-Kholi said. “I opened the play with a somewhat flashy opening scene. It was in Damascus, and a Muslim man disappeared, and a small Christian boy disappeared. This actually happened. And it was found that…” The scene he described was an enactment of the “blood libel” myth of Jews grinding up Christian boys to enrich their Passover matzoh (he called it “fateera“): the victims were hung upside down, dripping the same small red drops of stage blood, while a group of rabbis performed some kneading motions to the tune of (he hummed it for me) Hatikva. The matzoh they ate was, of course, supposed to represent the Arab lands, “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” El-Kholi then added, unprompted (I wasn’t even going to get into it – where would you start?): “Oh but we have no problem with Jews. Everything was fine before 1948. There were Jewish families in Egypt, Jewish businesses, department stores, everything.”  
  • What about censorship, I asked?  Surely this blood libel scene would have violated two of the major state censorship taboos (politics and religion), especially in the volatile aftermath of the peace accords?  Well, he said, we took out the scene in the script shown to the censors, and then we reinserted it for the performance.

All this left me, as a scholar of theatre, with only one question: with so much strong imagery available, why enlist Shakespeare at all?  I asked him, and he didn’t really give an answer. Not a ticket past the censors. Not high-cultural cred for a sketchy contemporary message. (In fact I think it was both those things. Despite every expectation that the audience and even the actors would not know Shakespeare’s text, the big-name pedigree would impress them.) Fahmi El-Kholi said only: “Well, Shylock is generally associated with Israel, with Zionism, with the pound of flesh being the slice of Arab land.”  He and I were both able to cite several plays along these lines, both by older (Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Shylock al-Jadid) and by younger (Ibrahim Hamada, Ratl al-Ard) playwrights.

And then the conversation moved on to other things.  Have you seen his latest Shakespeare effort, Measure for Measure, produced in Doha in 2006?  Reviews here and here.  Or what about Jerusalem Will Not Fall, an elaborate agit-prop historical starring Nur El-Sherif, in 2002?  El-Kholi was also honored with this year’s State Distinction Award in the Arts in a surreal mid-revolution awards ceremony in July.
El-Kholi’s current projects? Either a play called Hulagu about the U.S. occupation of Iraq (“as soon as I can find a good person who will fund it” – sounds like this one has been on the drawing board for some years now) or, responding more immediately to the 2011 Egyptian “revolution” and its uncertain aftermath, a revival of Salah Abdel Sabur’s play Leila and the Madman (1970).

From Guantanamo to “post”-“revolutionary” Egypt

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We got hope and change and yes we can. They got a revolution. But former Guantanamo detainee and current Egyptian prisoner Adel al-Gazzar has gotten… well, there is no polite way to put it. It seems the War on Terror is still doing its multinational damage.

Injured in an airstrike in Afghanistan, sold for a bounty to Guantanamo, forced to wait eight years (!) after the US cleared him for release, resettled in Slovakia but illegally imprisoned there, the man comes home to Egypt after the revolution and — gets arrested at the airport.  Read his whole story here.

My ferociously smart friend Katie Taylor, after working for years in Palestine, is now in London at an NGO called Reprieve, which advocates for the human rights of people on death row and people who are or have been at Guantanamo. She is working on Adel al-Gazzar’s case. She says it’s likely his in-absentia conviction, in a multi-defendant trial based on testimony extracted by torture from co-defendants while Adel sat at Guantanamo, will be overturned on appeal.  The Military Prosecution (of course this is a military trial) unexpectedly fast-tracked his hearing a few days before the election; ruling expected as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Putting it gently

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Remember the United States of Canada and Jesusland?  One friend of mine who lives in Heliopolis (where polisci professor and liberal hottie Amr Hamzawy has beaten out the FJP candidate for the individual seat) just jokingly offered political asylum to her friends from other districts.

Oh, and Al-Masry al-Youm, in its front-page editorial today, reminds its (predominantly liberalish) readers that the Islamist candidates who seem to have won a majority in the first round yesterday are indeed Egyptians. “Their ideological allegiance should not make us deny their Egyptianness, their citizenship, or their ambition to participate in politics.”  And it adds, a bit alarmingly:

Before the Islamic current are numerous examples of successful experiments of majority-Islamist parliaments. The [Egyptian] people wants [الشعب يريد] it to be closer to the Turkish experiment than to the Afghan one.

Umm, by “the Afghan experiment” do you mean the lloya jirga, or the Taliban?