Author: Martin Kramer

Those boring Arabs

On By Martin Kramer

Every so often, I take one of the works of the late Elie Kedourie off the shelf to refresh myself, and I never fail to find some pertinent passage that speaks directly to the present. Today I came across this one, a few lines of which I vaguely remembered, and which I hope to remember better in future by posting it here. It’s vintage Kedourie, on the West’s invention of the Arabs:

Chanceries, academics and newspapers are alike preoccupied with Arab grievances, demands and aspirations. From small beginnings thirty or forty years ago, the Arab question has become an industry similar to that of electronics or space technology. But the Arabs have also become a bore. Fifty or a hundred years ago an author who felt drawn to Middle Eastern subjects had a tremendous variety from which to choose: Barbary corsairs, belly dancers, fanatical Mussulmans, sultans, pashas, moors, muezzins, harems. Now, in a decidedly poor exchange, it has to be the Arabs.

By Arabs of course we do not mean the lively and interesting denizens of Cairo, Beirut, Damascus or Baghdad. We mean rather the collective entity which writers of books manufacture and in which they manage to smother the charm and variety of this ancient and sophisticated society. This collective entity is a category of European romantic historiography, and judged by its results, it is not a felicitous invention; for as they are described by their inventors the Arabs are a decidedly pitiable and unattractive lot; they erupt from the Arabian desert; they topple two empires, while making grandiloquent speeches in their rich and sonorous language; but all too soon the rot sets in, materialism and greed erode their spirit, and their caliphs change from lean puritans into fat voluptuaries. After that, it is all up with them: they are engulfed and enslaved by the Turks, hoodwinked by the British, colonized by the French, humiliated by the Jews, until at last they rise up again to struggle valiantly against Imperialism and Zionism under the banner of Nationalism and Socialism.

The ultimate insult is that the victims of this European travesty have accepted this caricature as a true picture of themselves, and as nature is said to imitate art have, in the process, come in fact to behave like it.

This passage is taken from an essay Kedourie published in the New York Review of Books back in November 1967. Since then, the idea that “the Arabs” are the heroes of the drama has retreated quite a bit, at least in the Middle East, but it still lingers in intellectual and academic circles. There has been no remission in the West’s drive to reinvent the peoples of the Middle East to suit its ever-changing moods. I wonder what Kedourie would make of their being cast in the new role of eager seekers of democracy. “The Middle Easterner is very far from thinking that he has a right to have a say in politics,” Kedourie opined in his last interview in 1992. “All he wants is to be left alone and not to be oppressed.” Kedourie was no neo-con. But by his own logic, might nature imitate art again? Well, we’ll know soon enough.

Hizbullah back in the news

On By Martin Kramer

The New York Times runs a piece on U.S. efforts to have Europe list Hizbullah as a terrorist organization. According to the article,

The Europeans are not solidly opposed to listing Hezbollah as a terrorist group, the [unnamed U.S. and European] officials said. The Netherlands, Italy and Poland support the Bush administration’s view, several officials said, while Germany and Britain believe the issue is moot unless the French change their minds. One European diplomat said other countries were “hiding behind” France on the issue.

Well, of course. This is a time to remind readers that this website is loaded with my past writings on Hizbullah. For a general account, see my entry on the movement from the Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Another good introduction is the article entitled “Hizbullah: The Calculus of Jihad.” If you click here, you’ll turn up search results for the entire site. I wrote most of these pieces in the 1990s, but they stand up pretty well.

Rafiq Hariri, the movie

On By Martin Kramer

I won’t play the speculation game about the assassination yesterday of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Instead, I’ll recommend that you try to see the film which, I’m sure, will remain the most succinct statement of who Hariri was. I’m referring to the documentary portrait by the Syrian director Omar Amiralay, L’Homme aux semelles d’or, which I reviewed a few years back. The review was embedded in a longer treatment of several films, so here it is, extracted:

It’s an odd combination: Amiralay, a Syrian Marxist, better known for his films on intellectuals (Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannus, French sociologist Michel Seurat), has done Hariri. Amiralay was a bit hesitant about the idea, and the film includes sequences in which his mother warns him against criticizing the formidable man while his intellectual friends worry lest he be seduced. At first, Hariri, too, is not so sure he wants Amiralay to film him. Perhaps the filmmaker will use a camera to assassinate his character? As Amiralay discovered, Hariri is so wary of his image that he staffs a small library devoted to recording and cataloguing all of his media appearances.

Nothing to fear: Amiralay slowly succumbs to the allure of the great man of Lebanese politics. Here is Hariri standing on some kind of dock at night, a lone, receding figure, an enigma. Here he is in humble robes, in his mountain palace, ruminating on the meaning of his life. Here he is engrossed in the country’s business, at his sprawling desk in his private jet. Here he is looking out on Beirut from his penthouse office above the city, the solitary, self-made, self-contained man. Hariri engages in some self-deprecation, but his bottom line is clear: “I regret none of my economic or political choices.” “In this kind of duel between the man of power and the intellectual,” Amiralay has told an interviewer, “the intellectual always loses.” Amiralay is absolutely right: he has produced a subtle work of sycophancy of Hariri, of a Hariri excised from the complex nexus of Lebanese politics and Syrian hegemony.

But in its own way, the film tells something about the appeal of Hariri: he is the clean slate, a man not implicated in Lebanon’s wars, a super-contractor who tears down the past to build a new, antiseptic present behind reflecting glass. He is no Berlusconi, he insists; his money was made before he entered politics, outside the borders of Lebanon. He established Solidère because no one else would. In the cut-and-thrust with Amiralay, he argues perhaps his most important point: he did not need a political role, and if he sought one, it was only in a moment of vanity. Now it is a matter of fidelity to the idea of Lebanon.

At the end of the film, Amiralay brings his intellectual friends together around a table where they vent the usual criticisms of Hariri. He turned his money into power; he represents the old order; he is not a national figure, but a Sunni za’im, a sectarian leader. Perhaps this is meant to disabuse the viewer of any notion that this film is a testimonial. But could it be anything else? And might it be more than this: a longing to see Lebanon finally cleansed? The opening and closing scenes show Solidère’s cleansing of Beirut’s massive wartime dump. No evictions, no demolitions: just the clean-up.

If you’re serious about understanding Hariri, try to see Amiralay’s film. This is Hariri as he would want to be remembered, and it gives a real flavor of how he spent his time and money. The spell he casts over the skeptical Amiralay is strong testimony to his persuasive powers.

Pointer: Recently, Amiralay has made another film, a devastating critique of the regime in Syria, that played to great acclaim in Beirut last fall. Whether he can continue to do this and move back and forth from Syria is a very open question.