Reflections on Arab society and culture

23 April 2010

Review

Sari Hanafi

Special to The Daily Star

BEIRUT: Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf have assigned themselves the daunting task of framing the most important and enduring issues relevant to Arab society and culture. Their 545-page edited volume “Arab Society and Culture: An Essential Guide” is a thematically structured reader, a compilation of reprinted essays about the societies of the Arab East and Maghreb as well as Arabs living abroad.

These themes revolve around cultural variations in everyday life, negotiating identities, behavioral departures and alternative lifestyles, empowerment of marginalized groups, gender, religion and ritual construction of space between local and global identities, sexuality, new media and transitional Islam.

In all there are around 50 timely and well-selected readings relating to Arab society and culture. An introductory chapter prepared by the Khalafs for each theme constitutes the glue which cements together the insightful, expository and synthesizing commentaries. Although some of the materials broached are complex, they ought to be fathomable to the discerning reader.

Through beautiful texts from Orhan Pamuk, Wright Milles, Charles Taylor and Bertrand Russell, the first part of the volume, sheds light on the foundations of, and opens reflection upon, the sociological and literary imagination of (and about) the Arab world.

All the collection’s essays stem not only from the social sciences, mainly sociology and anthropology, but also from literary work, shed light on the compelling transformations that the Arab world has undergone, especially in the last two decades. These transformations and their consequences are often qualified as “unsettled,” which illustrates how much the Khalafs want to show the complexity of this geographical area and warn readers from any linear reading of these changes. Thus, the selected readings are far from reifying Arab culture. Editors depict movement, dynamism and in-between-ness.

For instance, in the part related to negotiating identities in dissonant worlds, they report the dazzling cultural transformations of the new generation, which “lacks the traditional certainties of their grand-parents and the economic security of their parents. Hence, they are embroiled in the need to negotiate a sense of self from among a set of overlapping and competing internal and external sources of loyalties.”

Negotiations do not occur under agency and the constraining social structures within one’s nation-state but under the compelling effects of the globalization. To paraphrase Farha Ghannam, the local is globalized and the global is localized. Arab culture is no longer confined to the Arab geographical boundaries. Culture travels and from there local Islam becomes transnational.

In this regard, selections from texts by Tareq Ramadan, Bassan Tibi and others are very interesting. The headscarves’ affair is explored by Joan Scott, showing the crisis of the visibility of Muslims in some nations. Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues smaller countries in the West, such as the Netherlands, may offer greater opportunities for crossover culture than larger countries, such as France. However developments and violence since 2008 in the Netherlands suggests an oppositional trend.

Migration produces tremendous transformations in Arab culture. Being between worlds, Edward Said delivers a very insightful autobiographical text about exile and the anomic situations  of migrants and refugees. In their introduction, the Khalafs introduce the topic of transnational Islam and Bassam Tibi’s essay insists on the process of hybridity for immigrants in Europe, particularly for the second generation. Tibi writes that they undergo the reconstruction of new identities, rejecting what some writings on the predicament state – that migrants find themselves compelled to choose between their place of cultural origin and European culture.

Samir Khalaf employs the homonyms “roots” and “routes” to support what he views as the dialectical interplay between tradition and modernity – which can affect migrants and non-migrants alike.

In his analysis of Lebanese social transformation, he examines how “familism,” communal and confessional solidarities have responded to the forces which undermine their cohesion and collective identities. He demonstrates “how this longing to reconnect with one’s roots may be transformed into routes for the articulation of professional and new cultural identities that are more relevant for safeguarding civil peaceful forms of pluralism and tolerance.”

Himself a professor of sociology, Samir Kalaf has numerous publication credits to his name and works as director of the American University of Beirut’s Center for Behavioral Research. Roseanne Saad Khalaf is assistant professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at AUB.

In their book, Samir Khalaf and Roseanne Saad Khalaf insist on showing the diversity of cultural patterns and social structures. Family and kinship ties remain resilient sources of psychological wellbeing but variation is very important.

Different from the writings on urban society, the piece by Naja Hamadeh, “Wives or Daughters: Structural Differences Between Urban and Bedouin Lebanese Co-wives,” points out how Bedouin Lebanese co-wives generally accept their husbands’ polygamy and are even ready to live with other co-wives under the same roof.

Gender, intra-family relationships, including parent/children relationships, and sexuality vary tremendously between a working-class neighborhood in the eastern suburbs of Beirut (Bourj Hammoud) and the (upper) middle-class milieu of AUB students. Suad Joseph and Roseanne Saad Khalaf respectively offer compelling results from fieldwork and research on these differences.

This reader chose some essays which depict the changing patterns, not only geographically but over time. The essay from Samir Khalaf on sexual outlets in Beirut traces the history of these outlets since 1890. Using historical records and autobiographical sketches, Khalaf shows the role that the regulation of the prostitutes’ professional lives has played in changing perceptions of this profession. He argues that the commodificaton of legal prostitution by the Ottomans in 1931 generated “circumstances which rendered it more human and less alienating to both the women who are supplying the services and the men who demanded them.”

[Presumably “1931” is a misprint, since the Ottoman Empire is conventionally seen to have ceased to exist in 1922-3.]

This changing pattern can be seen in the piece by McCormick about Lebanese society’s acceptance of gay culture and its visibility.

Religion and rituality are also changing. The most influential moral entrepreneurs for Arab youth who live in the MENA region and beyond are no longer preachers in the mosques. Rather they are the new preachers such as Amr Khaled, Khaled Guindi and Omar Abdel Kafi, who provide a more modernist message than the classical orators. The essay from Asef Bayat is very interesting in this regard, showing how these figures, akin to American televangelists, are combining faith and fun and conveying simple ethical messages about moralities of everyday behavior. They do not issue fatwas, but address the spiritual and psychological needs of those groping to forge a meaningful identity anchored in a new scriptural cosmopolitism.

While showing a variation of pattern according to different fault lines, these rich materials about Arab society and culture did not, in my opinion, sufficiently address variability according to social class. I also wished that the selected essays had brought more voices from the Arab region, as foreign researchers and those living aboard dominate this reader.

This work should gladden all inquisitive persons with a serious interest in Arab society and culture. Its audience will likely encompass social scientists, lay persons and policy makers. The volume is also suitable for didactic purposes.

This excellent reader is thoroughly recommended to all, particularly the Western audience, as it ably achieves its aim of providing a greater understanding of Arab society as a structure or historical process. The Khalafs’ staunch efforts in the aforementioned regard were truly fruitful. They have carefully probed and examined the somewhat nebulous and amorphous terrains of culture in an unsettled area such as the Arab region.

“Arab Society and Culture: An Essential Guide,” edited by Samir Khalaf, Roseanne Saad Khalaf is published by Saqi Books.

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