Marilyn Booth: Islamic Politics of John Stuart Mill

“The Islamic Politics of John Stuart Mill: Street literature, translation and gender activism in Egypt, circa 2002″.

The discourse on Islamic practices as a basis for politics in Egypt has been accompanied for at least a century by the production of manuals to guide believers in their daily lives, as gendered members of a community – as Muslim women and Muslim men.

This literature of conduct echoes and draws upon believers’ use of the Prophet’s sunna – his example in conduct and in words – to enact the proper and pious life. Such popularly aimed manuals focus particularly on assigning specific gender roles and social spaces to women as the signifiers of family and national honour.

This lecture considers the messages such conduct manuals propound, in light of 20th-century rhetoric on Islam and governance, and juxtaposes these works with a recent translation of John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women’ into Arabic, exploring how a classic work of European thought becomes part of a contemporary production of the gendered Muslim subject.

This lecture was recorded on 19 January 2012 at the Auditorium lecture theatre, Business School, The University of Edinburgh.

Shahrazad and Dhat al Himmah: Epics, Storytellers and Warrior Women

Covers of the story of Dhat al Himmah. Via Nil wa furat and Wahatalmorot.

The Thousand and One Nights is by far the most famous collection of Arab popular narratives.  Its heroine Shahrazad has become the symbol of the complex interactions of gender and power as they relate to the region, from those who see her as a positive agent of change, as in Suzanne Gauch’s interestingly titled Liberating Shahrazad, in which ”A long-silenced literary figure speaks for modern Muslim women,” to the negative, such as Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men, where the hero explains why the tale of Shahrazad angers his mother: “Shahrazad was a coward who accepted slavery over death.”

Although The Thousand and One Nights is, of course, legendary, it is only one of many sagas and chivalric epics, (a fun rundown of some of the tropes of “Arabian Hero Cycles” is found here.)

Another saga is the romance of the poet cavalier Antarah and his struggles to win his beloved Ablah, an episode of which Rimsky-Korsakov made the subject of the early orchestral work Antar. The child of a tribal chief and a black slave, Antar is ostracised until his bravery earns him respect. When Ablah’s father refuses the idea of a union between Antar and Ablah, the stage is set for an almost endlessly expandable saga that narrates the Herculean tasks Antar has to carry out and the impossible obstacles he has to overcome in order to marry Ablah. In the meantime, the heroine undergoes parallel trials which involve capture and confinement, although her resistance is restricted to scathing speeches.

In contrast to Ablah’s rhetorical resistance, the saga of Princess Dhat al Himma offers a typology of the warrior woman in the Arabic epic. As Gavin Hambly notes in Women in the Medieval Islamic world:

The epic tradition, just as Arabic popular narrative in general, abounds in themes and motifs that rarely occur in other Arab literary genres. This type of material may thus offer a fresh view on literary representation. The role of women is a good example: popular narrative casts them in roles different from those accorded to women in the high literary tradition…female versions of knightly warriors are among the stock character of Arabic (and for that matter Persian and Turkish) epic literature.

In Islam and the Heroic Image: Themes in Literature and the Visual Arts, John Renard argues that these women in Islamic epic literature “invariably function as links to the outside world, to the lands and peoples beyond those of the principal heroes.” This is probably true of figures such as the Princess Nura in the Dhat al Himma tale, but one of the exceptions is Amirah Fatima aka Dhat al Himma herself, whose name literally means ”She who is possessed of resolve.”

Continue Reading at Muslimah Media Watch

Notes on Arabic Literary Heritage

Allen, Roger. The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of Its Genres And Criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

1: Essay on precedents and principles

The Arabic Literary Heritage as an attempt to present an alternative approach to the production of a survey of Arabic literature.

Criticism of traditional modes of periodization of Arabic literature: No internal consistency.

Temporal divide between

  • Pre-Islamic (Jahiliyyah)
  • Islamic (Lifetime of the Prophet and the first four caliphs)

Subdivision of Islamic period into

  • classical era
  • a period of decadence
  • a modern era

Principle of dynasties, eg:

  • Umawi (Ummayyad)
  • Abbasi (Abbasid)

Methods that place more emphasis on non-literary criteria (geography, dynastic history), eg:

  • Andalus/Iberian Peninsula not integrated into collective vision of Arabic literary tradition

13th to 18th century: “Era of decadence,” widespread ignorance of 5 centuries of creativity:

  • Rule of large parts of region by non-Arabic speakers
  • Perceived preference for aesthetic norms considerably at variance with our own

19th century: Modernisation

  • Encounter with the west
  • Revival of heritage of the past
  • Rendered difficult by the fact that the real circumstances of the “pre-modern” remain unclear.

Dilemma brings us back full circle to antecedent principle of the pre-Islamic/Islamic divide.

Adunis: From the Ocean to the Gulf

Gamal Abdel Nasser: “From the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf we are Arabs.”

The word? You wish to discover its fire? Write then, I say, write! Don’t gesticulate, don’t copy! Write! From the Ocean to the Gulf I cannot hear a single tongue, nor read a word. All I hear is noise.

 

- Adunis, Qabr min ajl New York, A Grave for New York, 1971

Qtd in: Roger Allen, The Arabic literary heritage: the development of its genres and criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998, p 11.

 

Hayv Kahraman: ”Telling Tales of Horror with a Demure Grace”

 

Hayv Kahraman, Collective Cut, via Art Slant

Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi artist whose work reflects on issues of gender, looking at the victimization of women during war, and the effects of practices such as honor killings and genital mutilation, as well as alienation, marginalization, and displacement. Kahraman addresses these contemporary issues through paintings which have a classical and timeless feel to them, her delicate and elegant work in tension with the complex issues and painful real-world realities which she often takes as her subject. As the Saatchi Gallery describes her work, “Kahraman tells…tales of horror with a demure grace through her stunningly beautiful paintings.”

Born in Iraq in 1981, Kahraman moved to Sweden while a child, and later moved to Italy, before returning to Sweden in 2006 to study at the University of Umeå, and later moving to the United States. Having taken up oil painting at twelve, she extends her work beyond drawing and painting to sculpture and design, and the stylistic references her works evoke are wide-ranging. Her influences include Persian miniature art, Arabic calligraphy, traditional Japanese prints, art nouveau, and fashion illustrations, and she introduces elements of the uncanny and bizarre as her way of applying “the background of Islamic art and calligraphy to the traditions of western Europe and the Renaissance.” Kahraman’s precise technique and flattened perspective gives her work a minimalist sparseness and a compelling iconic feel, all the more evident in paintings where she employs religious symbolism. In one series, for example she illustrates the scriptural story of the Sacrifice of The Lamb, with the figures recast as women. The title, “Collective Cut,” suggests that the sacrificed lamb “might also be metaphorically understood in relation to the practice of ‘honour’ killings.” In another painting, unambiguously titled “Honor Killings,” she depicts women hanging from a tree, and in another work, she reinterprets matryoshka dolls through an unveiling process.

Kahraman’s characters are often depicted with elongated necks, representing the archetypical image of the swan, emphasized by the way her figures are often caked in a waxen white color, objectified women with expressionless eyes. As one article puts it,

Her women look like Modiglianis, and have that melancholy serenity about them; plaintive, dreamy-eyed and ethereal in their suffering. They are glimpsed behind closed doors, sumptuously arrayed in harems; exquisite creatures wrapped in fine shawls and lounging on rugs.

This description highlights the elements of orientalist imagery blended into Kahraman’s use of fairy-tale and surrealism as codes in her metaphorical representations of women’s struggles, making her work comparable to artists such as Laylah Ali and Shirin Neshat. Kahraman describes the latter as an inspiration and as “a pioneer in her field.” Kahraman goes on to say that “It’s an exciting time for female artists from the Middle East right now. Many are emerging with a powerful visual language and history is being made.”

This raises some of the issues of political agendas, and how artists from the “Middle East” are often brought into the limelight depending on the international interest in certain facets of their subject matter – in Kahraman’s case, her exploration of the “subject of female oppression with particular reference to war in the Middle East and specifically in her home land of Iraq.”

Continue reading at Muslimah Media Watch

 

Zenocrate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine

Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Zabina, Empress of Turkey, via scene4.com

The two parts of Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, loosely based on the life of  the Central Asian emperor Timur the Lame, tell the story of the Scythian shepherd who becomes a conqueror of kings. Although this play was written in the 1588,  it gives us an insight into representations of Muslim women at the time of writing, and has some relevance for today, as is evidenced by the proliferation of studies of early modern “Turk” and “Moor” plays.

As one review of DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production puts it:

Tamburlaine’s landscape, brutality, and clash with Moslem countries give currency to today’s American audience who live with involvement in brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that impact relations with Iran and other Moslem countries.

Perhaps the most famous line in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, “And shall I die and this unconquered?” encapsulates the story of Tamburlaine’s continuously chasing conquest, “Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms/And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.” As those conquests sweep from central Asia through Persia to Turkey, the play explores not only issues of ambition and hubris, but also appeals to anti-Turkish sentiments felt around Europe at a time when, as Richard Knolles writes, the Turks had “grown to the height of majesty and power, as that it hath in contempt all the rest.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the play is the utilizing of national anxieties reflected in Tamburlaine’s victory over the Turkish Emperor Bajazeth. While Bajazeth proclaims “Now shalt thou feel the force of / Turkish Arms, /Which lately made all Europe quake for fear,” Tamburlaine asserts, “Tush, Turks are full of brags/And menace more than they can perform.”  These dynamics make Tamburlaine a complex text when it comes to the question of how Islam was represented within the human geography of the world on the Renaissance stage, a question which has recently seen a resurgence of interest, but which goes back almost a hundred years to Louis Wann’s ‘The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama’ (1915) and Warner Grenelle Rice’s ‘Turk, Moor, and Persian in English Literature’ (1927).

But Tamburlaine is equally interesting for its construction of gender roles, especially in the first part, given Zenocrate’s transformation from being the daughter of the Sultan and the betrothed of the Prince of Arabia, to being Tamburlaine’s captive, to Queen of Persia. In the beginning, Zenocrate’s speech is a constant reminder of her status, which forms a distinction between her and Bajazeth’s wife, Zabina. As Lamiya Almas points out, while both are captives, “Zabina is an empress by association and not by birth, but Zenocrate, also an empress, is an absolute monarch by birth, and through her marriage Tamburlaine’s territories and hers will be united.”

Soon, Zenocrate begins to compare herself with Juno through her connection with Tamburlaine, retorting: “Call’st thou me concubine, that am betrothed/unto the great and mighty Tamburlaine?” The text seems to offer some autonomy to Zenocrate here, yet this could be seen as underlining Zenocrate’s trophy position. As Mohja Kahf puts it in her book Western representations of the Muslim woman: From Termagant to Odalisque, “Whether wives, mothers, maids or concubines, the women in Tamburlaine are trophies and accessories to men and rarely budge from rather wooden roles.”

There is, however, an openness to other interpretations, depending on whether Zenocrate is portrayed as a dissident voice against violence later on in the play. Some of her lines do conflict with the dominant narrative, in her plea for her father’s kingdom, her grief for the virgins whose execution Tamburlaine orders, and her lament over Bajazeth and Zabina’s suicide. But it could equally be argued that the rise and triumph of Tamburlaine is paralleled by the suppression of Zenocrate, who becomes increasingly silent towards the end of the first part, whether this is interpreted as the “silent treatment” or as Sara Deats sees it, a progression through which Zenocrate, “interpellated into female passivity and silence by the end of Part I, petrifies into the figure of the ideal wife and mother in Part II.”

Is there an aspect of Zenocrate’s portrayal that is specific to the play’s Islamic context?

Continue reading at Muslimah Media Watch