The Conflicting Poetic Voices of Ahmad Abd al-Muti Hijazi This paper investigates the relationship between politics and poetry in the Arab world by examining the power of major Arab political movements and events namely: Nasserism, the 1967 defeat and the Arab Spring in the works of Egyptian poet Ahmad Abd al-Muti Hijazi (b. 1935). The paper argues that Hijazi’s four poetic voices oppose and contradict one another in accordance with his political stances in different stages in his life starting from his earliest works in the 1950s to his latest work in 2011. Refraining from publishing poetry collections for twenty-two years and relying on his column in al-Ahram Weekly to reach the public and discuss politics, Hijazi struggles to emerge as the poet of the Egyptian Revolution after the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011. The paper explores Hijazi’s four conflicting voices: the voice of the regime in the Nasserist era (1950s and 1960s), the voice of the public in the Sadat era (1970s), the indignant and spiteful voice in the Mubarak era (1980s) and the new columnist voice (1990s and beyond). Specifically, the paper examines Hijazi’s poetic voices in five of his poems: “Abd al-Nasir” (Nasser, 1959), “Marthiyat al-Umr al-Jamil” (Elegy of the Beautiful Life, 1972), “Kainat Mamlakat al-Layl” (Creatures of the Night Kingdom, 1978), “Ashajar al-Ismint,” (Cement Trees, 1989) and “Iradat al- Haya: ila Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi” (Will of Life: to Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, 2011).

This paper examines the ideological discourse of current Syrian textbooks taught under the Assad regime. Through textual and visual selections, as well as analyses of the government manual for teachers, the paper examines how the regime exploits Syrian schools to indoctrinate youth and reinforce its power starting as early as first grade. The Syrian regime realized the power of school textbooks in socializing children in accordance to its ideology. It has, therefore, practiced tight control over the kinds of content that are permitted as opposed to those that are shunned and censored. Syrian textbooks reveal that children in public schools are expected to start learning about the Assad family and the Ba’ath party in conjunction with their learning to read. To accomplish this, the Syrian regime has employed several strategies in textbooks that include using ideological imagery, integrating political instruction with curricular activities in the classroom, and developing a teacher’s manual that specifically outlines the steps teachers must take to insure students learn the desired outcomes. The paper also explores the use of literary techniques to implicitly convey political agenda in official Syrian textbooks. Particularly, it analyzes the production of narratives that glorify political figures and tell a heavily ideological version of Syrian history as it is interpreted by the regime. In these fictional narratives, historical figures and political leaders become protagonists of a utopian state where every citizen is expected to abide by specific roles. The goal of the narratives in these textbooks is to insure that the legitimacy of the regime is not questioned and the responsibilities of ideal citizen are clearly outlined.

During his forty three years of rule, Colonel Gadhafi reinforced ideological and repressive state apparatuses, like the Revolutionary and People’s Committees, which kept a panoptical grip on most aspects of Libyan life. Not only were political parties outlawed as a form of “state treason,” but even fictional works with subtle political themes, like some of Ibrahim Al-Kouni’s novels, were also banned. Further, the regime suppressed historical narratives which did not glorify the “Grand Conquest” of 1969 by having army generals write school history textbooks. Therefore, the swift developments of the February 17th Revolution polarized the Libyan political and social structure into two main ideological camps. On one hand, the skeptics, who favored the familiar and long-circulated official narrative, saw the uprisings as a foreign conspiracy. On the other hand, the rebels who replaced Gadhafi developed an idealist and progressive discourse but eventually started to recycle the Gadhafi-era rhetoric of “revolutionary legitimacy” to “isolate” dissident voices. These overwhelming changes finally swerved the reclusive Libyan novelist Al-Kouni from his musings on the desert back to sheer social and political realism. The paper argues that Al-Kouni's historical novel, Knights of Slaughtered Dreams (2012), offers an alternative narrative of the Libyan revolution which refuses to gravitate towards the extremes of tribal and political alliances or sentimental media coverage. Instead, the novel blends the enthusiasm of a rebel and the reservations of a philosopher within the voice of a dissident from Misrata who joins the uprisings only to be disillusioned with the ideals of the rebels. By showing the expelled history teacher-turned-rebel in conflict not only with Gadhafi’s ideologies but also with a new class of self-righteous and self-serving insurgents, the paper further contends, Al-Kouni’s novel achieves two counter-discursive goals: first, it exposes how the abuse of authority remains a constant in spite of the change of political agents; second, it calls into question the unyielding tribal values which fail to correlate with the “progressive” rhetoric of the revolution. This paper follows a new-historical approach by reading the concerns raised by Al-Kouni’s novel against/alongside texts which reflect the nature of social and political discourses around the time of the revolution. Most important of these are pro-Gadhafi historians Mustafa Shabani and Fadil Faqini's The Critical Approach to History (2008), political dissident Mohammad al-Moqaryaf's Libya: from Constitutional Legitimacy to Revolutionary Legitimacy (2008), and selections from Popular Thought, a compulsory four-year, college-level textbook attributed to Gadhafi.