Me and my oudh...

Thoughts on giving up....

Greetings, once again, from this beautiful country, The Far Maghrib, the place where the sun sets over the Atlantic, the land of generous hospitality and warm, friendly people, and the place I'm struggling to find a reason for being in.

Here is an article I tried to write for an online magazine back at home....

Year in Morocco / Learning not to Kill Mockingbirds.

The analogy has been there since the earliest stirrings of my political conciousness. Boo Radley: kind, gentle and harmless yet slandered and genuinely feared for one simple reason - that he was never seen or spoken to. Harper Lee's creation, in her 1961 novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird', has been growing on my mind for many months now. How do Boo Radleys filter into our imagination? How are strangers created, and how can we prevent ourselves from being convinced of the grossest untruths about people we have never met and whose lives are at once similar and utterly different from our own?

As the 'War on Terror' continues, our minds are made ever more aware of Boo Radley. You could spend months researching 'Islamic' Terrorism, the new 'Biggest Threat Civilisation Has Ever Faced' (remember when it was the Soviet Union?) and come away convinced that a walk down the street in Cairo or Marrakesh was dicing with death. The War on Terror is being fought with Terror: a propaganda war which plants in the western mind a terror of the unknown which is then used to justify military wars on the grounds of 'protecting' the 'civilised world' from this mortal danger.

So what is the truth behind these images of fear and western governments' exploitation of Arab and Muslim 'otherness'? I realised, not long after the tragic events of September 11th 2001 and the following war in Afghanistan that it was a moral and intellectual duty on all thinking westerners to try and understand, objectively and open-mindedly, the new realities of global power and conflicting ideologies.

Around November 2002, my father prompted me to do the obvious: to start learning Arabic. Now I have been doing so for over three years - on my own in Exeter, then in Jordan, then at Leeds University, and now in Morocco. My course at Leeds requires that I spend a year in Fez studying Arabic language and trying to engage with Maghribi culture.

Sadly, I realise now that my hopes for intercultural dialogue were misplaced. The following passage is from an online magazine published by Colorado University, where the late Edward Said, the great writer on western perceptions of the Orient, taught:

"In class I handed out a 19th c. American example of Orientalism, taken from the time when Chinese immigration was at its peak after the Civil War, when American companies were importing Chinese men as a cheap labor source, particularly for building the transcontinental railroad system. The poem “The Heathen Chinee,” by Bret Harte, is a classic example of a discursive creation of the idea of the Oriental. Ah Sin in the poem is a card shark, a cheat, but smiles and smiles “inscrutably” and the Americans he plays with can’t read his expressions at all. Ah Sin does not speak, in the poem; rather, the poem is written/spoken about him, in “plain language” by “Truthful James.” The Western identity gets to speak, to produce images and ideas about the Oriental identity, which doesn’t get to talk back. On the back of that handout is another example of Orientalism, one which seems perhaps more benign than the overt racism of the poem. This passage, from an 1879 magazine, is protesting the labeling of the Chinese as “heathen Chinee” and is working to defend “the Chinese” from those negative associations. This is still an example of Orientalism, however, because this piece, even while it works to say that the Chinese are civilized and clean, is still constructing “the Chinese” as a race/national identity; it is still the West writing “the Chinese” into knowledge, rather than chinese people speaking/writing for themselves about their cultural practices and identities".

So it feels like even writing an article like this is unacceptable because by simply being a westerner studying Islam and Arabic I am projecting my western-based perceptions, which are always seen as negative, onto the discourse. Thus, however much I study, however much I know, I am not one of the people I am trying to defend and understand; even that attempt to understand is seen as patronising and it is always assumed that I despise the thing I am studying. A westerner studying Arab culture, if he is not a muslim, is generally seen as an imperialist, WTO-loving, anti-Palestinian, pro-War Republican (no matter that I've spent three long years working my heart out to learn Arabic, most of my friends are Arabs, and the only place I feel truly comfortable, socially, is with Arabs).

Sadly, then, it's hard to see where I'm going with the course. I cannot open my mouth without offending someone, I cannot state my pro-Palestinian position, my anti-globalisation position, or my anti-war position without somebody assuming that I am just saying it for Arab ears and in fact I think something else. It's so sad, because although my Arabic goes from strength to strength, the acadamic/political position I'm trying to take, which is my purpose for studying it in the first place, seems impossible to sustain.

Boo Radley can stay in his house, because he doesn't want to know.
___________________________________________________________

Thoughts on Amman 9 November 2005

ليدز و كل سكان الأردن. اريد ان اقول لكم ان افكر فيكم كثيرا و اتمنى ان تكنوا في احسن الصحة و السلام.

انما هده الأيم غريبة جدا: ايام عنيفة و فوضاوية، فيها الناس يقتلون الناس من دون هدف ومن دون سبب. الأيم غريبة و الأنسان اغرب, نشاهد عرب يقتل عرب في "مقاومة ضد الأستعمار" كدلك نشاهد مسلم يقتل مسلم في "مكافحة ضد الكفار" و من الدي يعاني؟ العرب والمسلمون. و النتيجة؟ هي زيادة الفوضى والعنف و الفقر الدي هو اساس المشكلة او كما نقول بالأنجليزية، قلب المشكلة. ما هو الحل؟ هل هناك حل؟

الحل هو الفهم، و التعاون بين الشعوب و كدلك التعاون بين الناس الأدكياء من كل طرف، و هم الناس الدين لا يرفضون ان يشاهدون ان الشخص الآخر هو انسان مثل اي انسان و له شخصيته و احلامه و مشاكله، كما يشاهدون ان كل شخص و كل شعب له ايجابياته و سلبياته و علينا الدين نقبل دلك ان نبنى التعاون في كل اسلوب نعرفه.

انا اقول هده الأشياء و لا اعرف ما اقوله لأنني فقط شاب و شاب ليس فقير و ليس عربي و ليس مسلم. انا مسيحي و غربي, و لكن شاهدت كارثة يوم الأربعاء في شاشة التلفزيون و احسست بأشد الحزن و التضامن مع الدين فقدوا اصدقاء و اعضاء عائلتهم لأنني شخص في هدا العالم و اتمنى ان اعيش في عالم افضل من العالم الدي شاهدناه على شاشاتنا التلفزيونية في هده الأيام الغريبة.

اتمنى لكم الخير و السلام.

بابلو

Eid Greetings and some intellectual ranting which you can skip if you want

EID MUBARAK LI KUL WAHID! KUL 3AM WA ANTUM BI-KHIR!

So Ramadan is ending and we can start eating again... Al HAMDU LILLAH!!!! Eid mubarak to all, may every eid be full of blessings for you and your families, bi-idhn Allah.

Ramadan in Morocco has been a wonderful experience, although I'm glad it's over. The whole idea of not eating or drinking ANYTHING, ALL DAY, has been very challenging and i've only managed it about 12 times out of the 30 days. Ok, so I'm not a muslim and I'm not required to fast, but attempting to do so was worthwhile. My muslim friends appreciated it and breaking fast together at the end of a hungry day was a fantastically rewarding experience - dates and lentil soup have never tasted so good!

I visited Casablanca on the weekend, which was nice. A big, industrial port city but worth the visit. I bumped into a friend from Fez in one of the cafes (WIERD!) and spend the next day with him and his mate walking along the beach. Fasted, and 'breakfast' (at sundown) included fried octopus tentacles... These Casa-we-een are a little bit crazy, i think.

Somebody asked me if I had come up with any critique of western intellectuals while i've been here? It's a nice idea! Unfortunately i haven't really had much time to read or think about things that much - the course is very intense and focusses on language only, so any debate outside of that is a bit slow and my brain's fried a lot of the time so i really have very little to add to Freud or Marx!

there were a couple of things... i read (on Edward Said's 'recommendation') Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' just before i came. i thought it was one of the best novels i've read in ages - intense and eloquent with a thread of darkness and fear which runs from the first page to the very end. I have not read much of Said's work on Conrad, certainly not since i read the novel, anyway, but i guess that much of his thesis would be that the 'west' (which sees itself as 'civilised', ahead of the 'backward peoples', and so on) takes its view of the 'east' and africa from this kind of text: the fearful, the tense, the text which interprets - or leaves incomprehensible - a world which comes to us as completely alien. this applies as much to the Middle East and to Morocco as to the Congo, where Conrad's novel is set.

It has been incredibly interesting being in Morocco after studying that sort of thing. I've been enjoying the contrasts and the variety of this beautiful country - the miriad forms of scenery and background, the new and the old and the ancient which pile on top of each other, clambering for attention, and the different strands of thought and social reality which are thrown in your face: poverty, cultural richness, Islam, history, and 'progress'.

Why is the 'East' seen as so alien? Ok, geographically Morocco is not that far East, but it's in the Arab world, living with Muslims, I am living in 'the other camp' - and do I feel threatened? Basically, no. The threat is in my mind, if at all. Of course you need to be careful, you need to avoid causing offence, you need to make sure you only trust people who aren't out to get you, you need to be more careful about every purchase than you would be in Britain or Canada or the States. But you also have to examine your own reactions to the place: if I feel threatened or out of place, is it reality I am responding to or simply the unfamiliarity of the atmosphere? The more time I spend here, the more familiar everything becomes (the streets, the inside of people's houses, the wild-looking arguments which dissipate like smoke, etc), and the more at home I feel. The alien is only alien because we make him an alien - and more to the point, only poor because we make him poor.

I do think the guidebooks talk a load of crap. They make people sound like scary, backward, camel-oriented theives who fly off to grab their gun as soon as you put one foot wrong. It's not like that. Morocco is a country looking in many directions - to the Arab, the Berber, the African, the European and of course to the Islamic. People are used to seeing westerners, at least here in Fez, and I think our western image of the old medina, 'like something out of Alladin' gives us a false impression. Yes, the city is bursting with history and culture and beautiful old buildings, but at the same time, many of the 800-year old houses are internet cafes, teleboutiques, and so on. Stand somewhere overlooking the city, and you'll see just what Ibn Battuta would have seen here seven centuries ago (say the guidebooks) but now the skyline bristles with tv aeriels and satellite dishes.

There are some nice romantic stereotypes about Morocco, but the reality can be quite different, and I was annoyed at myself that subconsciously, and against all the mental strength i could muster in England, I absorbed some of the fear which the Rices and Wolfowitzes of this world are so keen on spreading. It's easy to refute the fear academically, in a library in Leeds, but practically, when you arrive somewhere, it's easy to feel uneasy. I'm thankful for this opportunity to absorb some of the reality.

Peace

Paul