Making Love by Making War War Imagery in the Classical Persian Ghazal Tradition In the tradition of the Persian ghazal we often come across the motif of a constant battle between a supplicant lover - often expressed through the first person singular pronoun man (I), thus implicating the poet himself - and a cruel and unyielding beloved needless of the lover. In the unequal battle between lover and beloved, the latter uses the bows of her eyebrows to cast arrows of her eyelashes (or her glances) in the direction of the lover, captures the lover's heart (or soul) with the long lasso of her tresses and enchains him (or his heart) in the deep pitch-black dungeon of her disheveled hair. With his heart captive to the caprice of the beloved, the lover becomes the helpless party in utter need of the beloved while the beloved is elevated to the God-like position of absolute power. While there is no dearth of comment on the prevalence of war imagery in the Persian lyric poetry, the trope has never been traced along a diachronic dimension and its connections with the concurrently evolving epic and romantic poetry have remained entirely unexplored. That's what the present paper proposes to do, or at least take some initial steps in that direction. It argues that, given the historical fact of the simultaneous emergence and evolution of the two genres of romantic epic and lyric during the same time span - i.e., 11th through 13th centuries, often in the hands of a single poet - it might be fruitful to explore the process by which war imagery is transposed from the vast spaces of the former into the much denser and more layered confines of the latter. Through a study of selected ghazals of Sa`di and Hafez, believed to have elevated the Persian ghazal to its zenith, the paper examines those specific usages that provide important clues to the ways in which the field of battling warriors may have been entwined with the bed where the visions of the impossibly beautiful beloved appear to the sleepless lover. Besides clarifying the use of an important set of images within the Persian poetic tradition, such a study may provide evidence of the ways aesthetic traditions develop internally by recasting earlier expressive devices in new molds, as well as in relation to their social environments.

War may not be the "father of all things," but it is a great mover and transformer of societies. Individual experiences of war, either in combat or on the home front, constitute the traumatic basis for collective memory and narratives of both glory and victory on the one hand, or suffering, humiliation and abuse on the other hand for many societies. Individual memories transition into a hegemonic narrative, a process that is often violent, manipulative, and oppressive in itself. How societies remember war is an important element in the shaping of collective identities. In extension, this memory forms a crucial foundation for nationalist narratives. In Arab societies, wars such as World War I, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Iran-Iraq war, or the Algerian war of independence, as well as armed conflicts such as the Syrian and Palestinian revolts and the nakba - to name only a few - form a crucial basis for shared Arab nationalist but also particular local remembrance. This paper explores how this remembrance is acted out in a physical and a performative sense, focusing on war memorials, their justification and interpretation in public discourse, and their "usage" by both the elites of states and the populace. Sources will relate to the architecture and artwork of "Unknown Soldier" (or "shuhada'") memorials, military museums, and memorials for victims of war and armed conflict, as well as their manifestation in text (inscriptions, captions, newspapers, catalogues and leaflets). In this paper, I will focus on Syria and Iraq as case studies, with references to a number of other Arab countries. The Damascus military museum, which establishes an Arab military narrative from the crusades, over the "glorious performance" of the Syrian army in the October war, to the 1987 Syrian-Soviet space mission, presents a different kind of memory than the accusatory posture of the Basra war memorial, where bronze statues of Iraqi fallen soldiers point their fingers across the Shatt al-Arab to Iran. Public memories and hegemonic narratives are also great silencers of the individual voice and the "other". To counter this, the paper will therefore also highlight dissident and counter narratives, such as Kurdish memorials of the Anfal campaign, in order to further contextualize and complicate memories of war.

Representations of war have always disrupted the stability of a mimesis built on a strict oppositional logic between interior fantasy and external realism. Indeed, even within the most popular understandings of war, its representation embodies a complex dialectic of irrealis and truth, of public and private, the political and the personal. One might argue, invoking much of the canon of Western literature and film, that war depictions constitute a basic aesthetic dynamic that defines much of the tensions between, on one hand, Cartesian notions of subjective hermeticism and, on the other, an objective notion of personal identity as dependent on social determinations of the self. Israeli representations have war have themselves always relied on this sort of dialectic. Perhaps one could even look at Israeli war depictions as constitutive of the basic Israeli citizen in how the disruption of a normative separation of public and personal in war defines the individual citizen's experience of the world as part of a wider political entity. In this context, poetry emerged as a dominant genre for much of Israeli cultural history, in how poetry negotiated between the subjective expression of the individual and the objective demands of public discourse. This paper argues that recent Israeli films--in particular the depictions of war in Beaufort and Waltz With Bashir--have worked to establish a new understanding of individual Israeli citizenship by disrupting these standard dialectics of art, of a separation and interconnection between interiority and exteriority. Film, in fact, has always presented challenges for the Israeli public sphere. In this, this paper works to connect recent Israeli war film to a Habermas-influenced conception of the public sphere, which relies less on an irreconcilable dialectic of public and private, and more on an analysis of how visual art--film, in particular, because of its inherently exterior perspective--works to redefine as a social experience individuality , private memory, and the relation between the subject and the world--in large terms, between psychology and reality.

In the last five years, the current Iraq war has gradually become one of the central themes in the American cinematographic discourse. Films like "In the Valley of Elah," "Iraq in Fragments," "Redacted," and the recent multiple award winner "The Hurt Locker" offered an array of ideological perspectives on this most recent military confrontation between the U.S. and the Arab world. However, Arab cinematic representations of the Iraq war remain largely unexplored. In my paper, I will examine two Egyptian black comedies, "The Night Baghdad Fell" and "Excuse Us," which depict a newly emerged image of the American other, resulting from fundamental changes in the U.S. policies in the Middle East post-9/11 and post-invasion. Both films were released around the same time in 2005, and remarkably, they belong to the same genre of farce, or black comedy. "Excuse Us" is a story of a cafe owner Armouty whose son Wahid goes to Iraq on business and gets trapped there when U.S. military invades the country. When Americans take Wahid into custody and then put him in jail, the father travels to Iraq with the intention to free his son. The film illustrates a complete departure from the familiar pattern of economic prosperity and the American Dream as the two principal representations of Americanness in Egyptian film. In "Excuse Us," the United States is demonized as a powerful military aggressor, and the Bush administration is mercilessly mocked. "The Night Baghdad Fell" goes even further and imagines the U.S. invasion of Egypt. The film's main character, Shakar, is a school teacher who becomes obsessed with the idea that Americans are planning to attack Egypt, and he recruits one of his students to help him with developing a powerful weapon to be used against the invaders. "The Night Baghdad Fell" portrays the American Other as a mysterious enemy, an almost supernatural evil who can be stopped only by means of creating a supranational weapon. The paper will analyze narrative and cinematic techniques utilized in creating a new prototype of the American Other defined through military and aggressive foreign politics. These films illustrate the emergence of a new discourse on Occidentalism, informed by recent crucial changes in Arab political, ideological and cultural life, and by Arab reactions to globalization.