This panel takes a cross-historical approach to concepts of activism and dissent through lenses of history as contextual backgrounds for current scenes in Arab countries. While much analysis presents various ‘Arab Springs’ from a ‘being-there’ standpoint, our approach explores threads of continuity or even disconnected gusts in previous seasons of dissent. Opposition located in political, religious, social, and artistic expression has shaken up entrenched systems. Using a number of theoretical frameworks, the papers focus on pivotal historical moments of cultural activism in Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria.
This activism coheres in performance: veneration of prophets, women’s classical poetry and contemporary fiction, and cinema and television production. Believers and prophets, individuals and groups, private and public spheres, recorded and live performance, dissent and authority play their parts in complicating definitions of mainstream and extreme. Each type of performance has foreshadowed current uprisings, and could be used to assess unfolding modes of dissidence.
The panel opens with an exploration of the built environment. “Building against Disaffection: the Case of Jordan’s Maqamat” considers responses to current mass mobilizations through the lens of manipulations of religious space when the monarchy was threatened in the 1980’s. The verbal/visual discourse affirmed the Hashemite’s Abrahamic connections and control of Islamist political challenges.
Stepping back chronologically, “Regime Change and Self-Exchange: Shurat/Kharijite Women’s Activism in Early Islam” amplifies seventh-century poetic voices in Iraq opposing the Umayyad authority, using sword or words for defense. Willing to exchange their lives “for God’s pleasure” (Qur’an 2:207), these women’s activism affected marriages, marginalized classes, and communities.
Examining their counterparts in our century, “Women Writing the Revolution” explores a new path in contemporary women’s fiction. Egyptian writers Naglaa Alaam and Manal al-Sayyid carry the torch of the previous generation but with a focus on imaginative worlds to critique women’s roles and status in Egyptian society.
Continuing in Egypt, “Ana Mazlum: Melodramatic Outrage and Depictions of Social and Political Injustice in Egyptian Popular Films” contextualizes recent revolutions within the Egyptian cinematic corpus. The trope of injustice has informed films for half a century, providing insights into current narratives about causes, successes, and possible dangers of counter-revolution.
A slight shift in genre and geography closes the panel. “Prelude to the Arab Spring: Syrian Fictional Television and Socio-Political Critique” demonstrates how the Syrian television drama industry, operating amid the constraints of state-controlled production, has provided activist cultural producers with a televisual language of opposition.
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Dr. Elena Corbett
Jordan’s Royal Court has spent several years trying to stem a tide of popular discontent over socioeconomic dislocation and entrenched authoritarianism, emboldened as recent regional events have unfolded. Varied considerations of Amman’s manipulated urban space have resulted in a small corpus of literature and art addressing the phenomenon of neoliberalism in Jordan and the Royal Court’s attempts to orchestrate it on the one hand, while on the other mitigate the threats it poses to royal relevance.
Recent popular mobilizations, however, have occurred largely outside Jordan’s major urban centers and most acutely among “Jordanian Jordanians,” the people upon whom the monarchy’s support rests, according to widely-held narratives of identity politics. This paper considers Jordan’s official responses to recent unrest through the lens of previous manipulations of rural space in earlier moments of socioeconomic dislocation and threats to the monarchy. In the mid-1980’s the Royal Court undertook to renovate the Shrines and Tombs of the Prophets and Companions (maqamat) within Jordan’s borders. The Iranian Revolution, ongoing conflict in Lebanon, and the significant drop in world oil prices had curtailed spending habits of the largest Arab economies, particularly those of the oil-producing Gulf states upon which Jordan was dependent for aid and remittances from its citizens working abroad. Within a few years, the intifada had resulted in Jordan’s official disengagement from the West Bank, and in 1989 the insolvent country turned to the IMF for restructuring.
The neoliberalization process had begun; so had the renovations of the maqamat. This extensive project represented the Islamization of a landscape invoking verbal and visual discourse built upon a long-standing ethos of pan-Arab Hashemism dependent on the Hashemites’ Abrahamic pedigree. It likewise served three timely functions: 1) raising pious donations, particularly from wealthy Gulf donors; 2) incorporating the Shrines and Tombs into much larger community centers, enabling state control of small municipal and religious space, sunni discourse, and potential Islamist political challenges; and 3) creating low-cost Islamic tourism space off the beaten path of attractions that appealed to westerners, encouraging shi’a tourism, and demonstrating Jordan’s religious tolerance, appealing to a variety of not only visitors, but patrons.
This work is based on field research for a comprehensive historical project regarding connections of antiquity, narrative, and identity in Jordan. This paper utilizes materials from the Ministry of Awqaf in Amman, Jordan, interviews with waqf officials, site visits to the maqamat, and informal interactions with other visitors.
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Dr. Annie C. Higgins
This paper brings Arab women activists’ voices from early Islam to meet their counterparts in current opposition movements, in light of gender theory. Women of the Shurat/Kharijites participated in a number of ways in opposing the Umayyad regime in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., beginning with their self-identification as Exchangers/Shurat, i.e., those willing to exchange their lives “for God’s pleasure” as described in the Qur’an. Poignant scenes in poetry by them and for them reveal how their activism affected not only their political ideals, but also marriages, families, marginalized classes, and communities.
In a scene foreshadowing, to some degree, the ‘virginity tests’ committed on women at Tahrir Square, the murder and public naked display of a woman named Balja’ inspired quiescent men to take up arms against the Umayyad military. In other scenarios, Jamra convinces her husband to divorce her so she can marry an activist leader; a new bride begs her arms-merchant husband not to join the opposition; while conversely another woman sells her bangles to buy a sword and join her husband on the field. She equates her action with her very identity:
If someone asks my name - it’s Maryam.
I sold my bangles to buy a lethal sword.
In a potent instance where woman’s word is mightier than the sword, a woman’s sarcasm-spiked poem prevents the fearsome General Hajjaj from destroying her village.
Although Shurat/Kharijites are often presented as a forgotten early sect surviving unobtrusively in Oman and Algeria, an alternate view locates them as models of dissident voices challenging power in contemporary times. For instance, ‘Abla Ruwaini entitled her collection of daring women’s poetry "Kharijite Poets" (Cairo, 2004) while Syrian journalist Riyad Rayyis dubbed himself and his book "The Last of the Kharijites" (Beirut, 2004). The values which the Shurat identified as Islamic, and as the basis of crucial social changes that the prophet Muhammad brought, resonate with what many consider progressive values today: equality among ethnicities and races, qualified religious tolerance, election of leaders, a modicum of consensus or democratic ideals, commitment to the common weal, and a deep sincerity, the last of which was recognized outside their ranks as well. Voices of Shurat women call across the centuries to women today as they head to the square, speak in public, question in private, find new self-worth, and define their contribution to a future they seek to shape.
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Dr. Caroline Seymour-Jorn
Women Writing the Revolution
During the decades leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, women writers, like their male peers, addressed many of the central issues that ultimately spurred on demonstrators both young and old. Senior writers such as Salwa Bakr, Radwa Ashour and Ibtihal Salem dealt with issues of political corruption and oppression and also explored the very intimate repercussions upon women’s psyches of the failures and abuses of the Mubarak regime. While they have received much less attention in the literary field than their older peers, the women of the 1990s generation of fiction writers have likewise been exploring the momentous social and emotional toll upon women that came about either directly or indirectly because of the Mubarak regime. This includes severe economic hardship for the middle classes, abject poverty for the lower classes, and a new religious conservativism that has challenged women’s participation in various aspects of social life outside the home. This paper explores the fiction of writers Naglaa Alaam and Manal al-Sayyid and examines how these women have carried the torch of the previous generation but also have sought, through a new focus on women’s imaginative worlds, to forge a new path in using fiction to explore and critique women’s roles and status in Egyptian society. This paper relies upon literary analysis of short stories by both writers, interviews with the writers, and ethnographic observations of the Cairene literary scene.
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Dr. John C. Eisele
The recent uprisings and revolutions in many Arab countries have been exhilarating, epochal, and astonishing in their extent and degree of success. They have not, however, been completely unexpected, given how clearly the citizens of Arab countries have tried to express their impatience and disgust over the decades only to be pushed back and clamped down again and again—until now, at least for Tunisia and Egypt so far. In this talk I will look back over the last half century of Egyptian popular films to see how the trope of “injustice” (aZ-Zulm) (whether social, political, or personal) has informed scores of popular films. Seen from the perspective of a post-revolutionary Egypt, these themes take on added significance, whether they are found in melodramas, action films, or comedies. They may also give us a glimpse into the kinds of ongoing narratives that are still being developed about the causes and success of the revolution, and the incipient dangers of a counter-revolution. The analysis will be carried out within the framework of film genre studies and how film genres both reflect and influence cultural norms and expectations.
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Dr. Christa Salamandra
This paper demonstrates how the Syrian television drama industry, operating under strict state control, has provided activist cultural producers with a televisual language of opposition. Reports of the 2011-2012 Syrian uprising discount this legacy, suggesting instead an eruption of long-suppressed artistic energies. Observers celebrated a new generation of activist artists who challenged the regime with innovative forms of creative dissent. The wall of fear that had long curtailed artistic expression had collapsed, they argued, with youthful satirists moving beyond the despair and complaisance of older cultural producers to flood the internet with caustic caricatures and enliven demonstrations with imaginative tactics. Articulated in the international media and echoed in scholarly discussions, this notion of rupture attributes no role to Syria’s artistic establishment. The country’s “traditional opposition,” including many television drama makers, is assumed marginal to the protest movement. Through omission, accounts of dissident youth imply an older generation’s impotence. This emphasis on rupture privileges event over process, denying the history of fictional television informing the protest movement.
Syrian television series, produced in commercial conditions and subject to stringent state censorship, often feature biting social and political critique. Reaching vast transnational audiences via pan-Arab satellite networks, these social dramas and comedies regularly treat issues highlighted in the protests: poverty, sectarianism, class conflict, Islamic revivalism, gender inequality, and regime corruption. Social realism brought to life Syria’s impoverished informal settlements, which slip easily from middle-class consciousness amid the veneer of neoliberal prosperity, long before these areas erupted in anti-regime sentiment. Satirical sketches lampooned the seemingly untouchable, including the security services. Often dismissed by Syrian intellectuals as part of the Syrian regime’s “safety valve” strategy, these programs reveal a striking level of thematic and formal innovation that cannot be dismissed as sophisticated propaganda. They have systematically expanded the boundaries of permissible expression. The existentialist satire No Hope (Amal Ma Fi), a dark Beckettian conversation between despairing armchair intellectuals, has leant its groundbreaking form to the oppositional Orient TV channel’s production Freedom and Nothing But (Hurriya wa Bas). Working anonymously, a pair of young activist actors transforms the former program’s somber resignation into revolutionary fervor. Examining the cultural politics of television production reveals the longue durée of struggle obscured by notions of rupture.
