One Arab's Post-it on the Arab Revolt

Caution: this is not an update.

It’s come to this for the Arab revolt. To be gawked at, poked, bullied, pushed this way and that, pitied by some, feared by many and truly befriended only by die-hards.

It’s not just strangers who gape in wonderment. The locals as well are at once riveted and unnerved by the beast. It’s been, what? 12 months--an ant’s scream out there in the wilderness, but never mind that--a roaring millennium in web years and this creature still won’t reveal its actual colors.   

And so, the guessing game must proceed, because, well…because it simply must proceed. I am not being ironic here. People, decent people, make a serious living off of it. For all I know, the whole world ticks because of it. And, as is our wont, the more uncertain the moment, the more incessant our need to pound it to death and render it benign and reassuringly familiar.  

I suppose, if only for effort, the professionals—journalists, hacks, pundits, anthropologists…--should be thanked. Except that they’re flailing as they hold all ten fingers to the wind, and left with very little to fall back on, they’ve begun to hang on, for dear life, to the same themes.

For a while now, I’ve been feeling like a beggar in these revolts. I go from site to site, rag to rag, pundit to pundit, mind in hand, looking for the rare informed opinion in the piles of junk. There is something distinctly unusual about this upheaval (as Egypt’s SCAF keep discovering after every bold decision turned gaffe), and yet, remarkably, most of the literature divides between déjà vu (been there, done that) and something wicked this way comes.

Often, friends call me as they sit stunned, not from living the revolts but from reading about them. While the Aluf Benn’s of this world can’t quite keep a lid on their overzealous imagination and predict--for sure--a total breakup of the postcolonial Middle East (except for Israel, of course), the Robert Kaplan’s see little more than a “crisis of centralized authority.” Sort of like, “Oh, Jesus, shit, you’re dying;” vs. “Take these! And get a grip on yourself, will you, woman!” after which comes the knowing look back and,” I’ll call ya in the morning,” before the door slams shot.

But these are the ones singing at the door of the echo chamber. The hum inside is all about Islamist upsurge and the equally revelatory it’s one thing to remove a dictator, it’s another to change a regime, which swells into a rapturous crescendo with, we really don’t know what will happen, but, since this is the Arab world, this may well turn out to be a tempest in a Turkish coffee cup. Which actually works out just fine, because the Turkish Model is the best of the available wannabes and the Arab Muslim Brothers are happy to do business even if they look so damn hairy. Win, win, when you think about it—for the West, at least.

Then, inevitably, comes the mind-numbing repeat of the same question: Will they or will they not play nice? After which come the tricky answers to it: yes, no, yes and no, with the same, exact reasons reappearing in different paragraphs in different articles.

Just like that, a year of revolts and we already have a body of consensus, which, soon enough, will solidify into groupthink and then finally cement as conventional wisdom.

Too bad, because—I don’t know? I could be wrong—it seems like the surface has barely been scratched and already vital questions are being left by the wayside for societies in genuine flux. For example, silly as it may sound, what exactly does an Islamist upsurge mean? Would, say, less than 40% of eligible voters qualify as an upsurge, or might it suggest an intriguing twist in the electoral system that lands you with a much bigger slice of parliament than of life? I wonder if it would not make sense to look into who voted for whom and why? (Here are a few hints from Gallup). And where, dare we ask, might these interesting factoids fit in this stimulating discourse?

In the Middle East and North Africa, SMEs [small and medium sized companies] comprise the most substantive part of the economy: there are 12 million SMEs, which make up 95 percent of the private sector… In Egypt, these enterprises account for about 75 percent of total employment and 80 percent of the gross domestic product.

Nothing major, a few questions for more nuance and added insight, so that when the brave types leap into judgments and fall flat on their faces they have something soft to cushion the crash.

Truth be told, there are the rare wise voices reduced, alas, in this din of mad harmony, to whispers. I do need to name names, just because I am so grateful: Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group, Nicholas Pelham of MERIP and the New York Review of Books, Mona el-Ghobashi of Barnard, Khalil Anani of Durham University, along with a few merciful others. (By all means, feel free to click on the links).

Then there is the tempo of these dizzying times which we Arabs get from those, like us, who are living them day in, day out. Raw footage, I call it; or, to borrow from the Economist’s review of Ahdaf Soeif’s new book, Cairo: My City, My Revolution, those “well-observed details [that] have an unmistakable ring of truth…revisionist historians ignore…at their peril.”

But, really, when it comes down to it, what makes these revolts especially intriguing for us Arabs is the utter disarray into which our own clairvoyants have fallen. Once upon a time, we were not meant to tell the difference between conspiracy and conviction, between high principle and base interest, between rhetoric and action. Now, once immovable ideologues are jumping all over the place, ostensible democrats are offended, Islamists are having to discover the meaning of victory (although the West seems to have figured it all out) and brothers in arms are parting company.

The rules are a changing and, for a people who have been stuck for so long in the trenches, that alone is liberating enough. 

Rest in Peace, Nassib Lahoud!

Two years ago, over dinner with a couple of this town’s star journalists, a friend asked me, ”Who is the one Lebanese politician you would miss when gone?” I didn’t skip a beat: “Nassib Lahoud.”

My friend’s devastating comeback was equally swift. “But poor Nassib is already dead.”  

That has always been the tragedy of Lebanon. Decency here is a certain kind of death. And much of what made Nassib Lahoud so magnificent in life and yet so unpromising in politics was his decency.  Remarkably, it was only one of his many handicaps as a politician.  His incorruptibility, his non-sectarianism, his visceral distaste for violence, his peculiar deference to principle made him universally admired but rendered him fundamentally peripheral when it came to the hard politics of this hard place.

I often yearned for Nassib to be more passionate, feistier, wilier, louder. But I was wrong. His was the quiet method, and he loved Lebanon enough not to succumb to her ugly ways.

Of this country’s countless failings, perhaps the most ruinous is her cruel indifference towards her children. And how cruel she has always been to the likes of Nassib, and how kind and generous he was in return.

I knew Nassib and loved him. I know Lebanon, and I am so desperate to love her.

I mourn him today. But I mourn Lebanon even more for her loss.

Between Slaughter and Elections

A harrowing picture to add to the most memorable about 2011: a lone girl standing over a pile of death, some faces barely in their teens; some still in babyhood. The contortions of anguish, you think, as she registers the horrific sight that engulfs her. A family gone, perhaps; a life, hers, theirs, ended by unfathomable, unfathomable, you keep repeating to yourself, cruelty and madness.

You stare and then you click, desperate to leave her, because the moment is you at your most ridiculous.

Not that the murderers in Afghanistan who harvested 63 Shiite souls last Tuesday had it in mind, but the picture of a people dying there while another in Egypt were rambunctiously voting is sort of apt: a juxtaposition of yearnings, one for a nightmarish kind of silence, the other for a less painful existence; two orgies, of death and of life; a clean break between future and past…you pray.

I wonder if I am reading too much into these two events, drawing a line between them that’s not there, or even scrubbing out of them the messy realities that bind trauma to joy in this embattled region.  

In any case, it is early days yet. “Spring” is barely behind us, and already elections are being oversold as good behavior certificates. That’s the thing about elections: they’re so damned convenient. They could be the most visible manifestation of a people’s will or the easiest forgeries of it; they’re the quickest fix for revolution, or war, or peace…when it starts itching for tangible yields.  

And the yield in Egypt, as disheartening as it seems to many, is nothing short of enlightening. You’re too quick to the trigger if you think I am about to marvel at the Islamists’ win. As surprising as it is to those who must have been living on Mars for the past few decades, it is in fact the least interesting revelation about Egypt’s mood and our reactions to it.  

By way of the obligatory preface, let me stress that the motive here is not to debunk the ballot’s judgment in this first round, however imperfect the performance has been: the disorganization, the tricks, the miles-long lines, the money flooding in from some friendly folks in the area looking to elbow their way of life in... It is almost impossible to measure this imperfection’s impact on the final tally, although there is much benefit to the public good in harping loudly and frequently about the point.

And, yes, much can be (and has already been) said against a bizarre electoral process that defies—because, of course, it means to—all sense. In this, the Egyptians are not alone, although they do stand at the extreme end of electoral systems that insist on convoluted interpretations of the people’s intent.

But such are the current rules of this Egyptian game, such are its weaknesses and such is the upshot: the Islamists, combined, are almost sure to enjoy more than 60 percent of the vote and constitute the majority in parliament.

This is not, however, where I really want to go. The elections in Egypt are only a small part of a much bigger, still blank canvas of change. What they draw for us are just a few pieces of the final picture. It’s the trends that dance around them that are worth a lingering thought.  

And one very clear thought for the jubilant and the defeated is that victory should never beget silence—not when the soul of a nation is being negotiated between its people. There is nothing run-of-the-mill about these times and nothing ordinary about the winds that have converged to rid us of a certain way of politics and life. Even when we ought to nod to the ballot’s verdict, there is no tyranny that should attach itself to the fundamentals that will govern the space to which we all need to belong. Otherwise, elections become little more than shortcuts to dictatorship, the most dangerous chinks in the democratic edifice they are meant to protect.

In my last post about Arab Women and Revolution, a few of Islamism’s fans insisted that this is the time to let the winning side show its stuff in quietude. But consensus is never born in silence, it emerges only when the discussion remains vibrant. Track records, ideology, convictions, hope, indeed skepticism, have a role to play in plotting the future’s trajectory, because the future is for everybody, winners and losers alike. Otherwise, let your eyes never leave that lone woman.

Here’s another thought, for what it’s worth: In this first round, voter turnout stood at 52 percent, of which the Muslim Brothers’ party list won around 37 percent, the Salafists' 24 percent. Almost half of eligible voters in these districts did not vote. That leaves the MB and the Salafists with 31 percent (19 and 12 percent, respectively) of the entire spectrum of voters—respectable by any standard but nowhere near enough to put a halt to the country’s momentous discourse.  

What Now for the Women of Egypt?

We are barely through the first stage of Egypt’s parliamentary elections and the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, having clinched well over 50 percent of the vote, are already rhapsodizing about the beauty of democracy which was to the Salafists—until, when was it, yesterday?--a Western concoction alien to the spirit and letter of Islam.

Many are already in a panic. And with good reason. Widen the lens to the larger Middle East and you will very quickly discover that, left to its own devices, Islamism is never in the mood to engage. Witness Iran since 1979, Sudan since 1989, Gaza since 2006… With a majority in parliament, Egyptian Islamists could easily decide there is nothing really to discuss. But what makes these examples uniquely revelatory is the one feature they all share: domination of the state and its tools of coercion by the ruling party. 

Egyptians fretting about their liberties should keep this foremost in their calculus. That, so far, the Muslim Brotherhood is having to argue its case all the way to the altar does suggest that Bayat’s post-Islamist realities have already started creeping into Egypt, but what it also reflects is the MB’s keen awareness of the imperatives of accommodation in a country in which it has considerable reach and influence but one which it does not control--yet. If only for this, Egypt’s future promises to be different from Iran’s or any of these other Islamist polities.

Juxtapose revolutionary Egypt and Iran if you like. You don’t have to peer too closely before the disparities begin to impose themselves. Note how the left quickly sublimated its beliefs to Khomeini’s, and watch the reticence of Egypt’s leftists and liberals, however disorganized they currently are. Register how Iran’s army was swiftly kicked out of the political arena in ‘79, and how Egypt’s very likely will retain much of its heft in Egyptian politics. Mark the fact that Iran’s youth gave all, in awe to the presence and charisma of the septuagenarian Khomeini, and how Egypt’s are just not buying in a marketplace conspicuously empty of such overpowering men.

But, most of all, remember that Egypt’s victorious Islamists will soon populate a government that has already incorporated quite a bit of what they preach, whereas Khomeini had to start practically from scratch. That’s the road Mubarak paved so nicely for his Brothers, and if things turn out badly, that may well turn out to be his most enduring legacy.

But if religious conservatism brings Iran and Egypt together in many social mores and legal codes, so do the years that have tested the solutions of political Islam itself. On that fundamental matter of piety alone, the sure rewards in Iran have been as mocked by burgeoning prostitution and rampant drug abuse as they have been by widespread sexual harassment in Egypt, where close to 80% of adult females are veiled.

The electoral results appear to argue against such talk; after all, how much skepticism can there be in a landslide? And yet, it would be pure folly to assume that the numbers confirm an outright, wholesale embrace of fundamentalist convictions. There is much to disentangle in this unfolding Egyptian story, and we are still on the very first page. What’s more, we all know that only a few of its authors are Egyptian and only some of the events likely to impact it will be homegrown.

As Pankaj Mishra points out in a recent piece, the electoral rise of political Islam may owe much to the Arab people’s deep comfort with Islamic principles as ultimate guidelines in politics as in life. But it doubtless owes just as much to a relentless, decades long hammering of civil society by oppressive regimes that cynically shored up Islamism at the expense of all other trends. 

In any case, we soon will find out, as Mishra puts it, “…whether and how the new Islam-minded rulers of the Arab world will enshrine [diversity and pluralism] in legal and political institutions as opposed to declaring that the Shariah contains all that you need.”  

Needless to say, the quintessential test will be how these rulers proceed on the question of us women. 

****

The moment, as unnerving as it is, calls for extreme vigilance and grit, not panic and fear.

The Egyptian revolution has forced the political playing field wide open. It is crucial that it remain so. Just as this new climate has already challenged the SCAF, it shall the MB and Salafists. How these three antagonists-cum-allies interact in this crucial stage is, of course, of serious consequence for the future of a democratic Egypt, but without control over the state’s tools of coercion and violence, the Islamists can neither unilaterally impose their will nor circumvent the judgment of future ballots.

Alas, for Egypt’s women, the path forward will be full of pitfalls and setbacks and insults and assaults and groping... The violence that women have been subjected to in Tahrir Square before anywhere else stands as a sad marker of the misogyny that unites many an oppressor and revolutionary. But Egyptian women need only recall Iran’s in reassuring themselves that tenacity and ingenuity can beat even the worst of odds.  

"NOT NOW!" On Arab Women and Revolution. Part 2

The Quest for Identity

Egypt and Iran

Touch us women, in much of the Middle East, and you touch the essence of life. This is how entangled our story has become with that of politics and culture and religion.  

Call it destiny, the way we find ourselves, willingly or not, at the center of our societies’ passionate quest for identity. In a century of existential struggles, large and small, real and imagined, we could be the clearest expression of a beleaguered people’s thirst for a sense of self. In times during which practically every argument of consequence has been with a much too domineering West, we could be at once a symbol of resistance to colonial cultural theft and a measure of resilience against its encroachments. Still more, we could be deployed by the conservatism that envelops us--or indeed offer ourselves--as the first line of defense against the very temptation of modernity. Such has been the importance of this fight that the narrowest interpretations of Islam would always be invoked to imbue earthly purpose with heavenly intent.

Colliding ideologies thus found common cause against a common enemy: the West. No less significantly, the pseudo-secular state and ascendant Islamists clashed over practically everything but agreed over the finer sex, the “weakest link” in embattled societies. Tradeoffs were sealed: politics in exchange for family.

The veil—imposed or freely taken up-- became the public face of this debacle. Multitudes of women covered up and “stood emancipation on its head.” But, in truth, the real high stakes were in the web of canons and precepts and customs and caveats that intertwine to define a woman’s position at home and out. For these, personal status laws became both shield and sanctuary. Meddle with them and you would be meddling with much more than the old way of doing things; you would literally be opening the backdoor to foreign conspiracies. Worst still, you would be challenging the word of God himself.

However diverse the histories of women in various countries of the area, this same story more or less played itself out wherever they lived. It did in Egypt.

Between 1919, when Egyptians revolted against colonial Britain, and 2011, when they rid themselves of Mubarak, is close to a century of activism for and against women’s rights. Every victory came with a pack of setbacks and a throng of accusations; and change, when it happened, was always hard fought and piecemeal.

As the 21^st century drew its first breath, Egypt yielded some more and finally allowed its women to apply for a passport or travel without permission from a male guardian (2000), to give citizenship to children from foreign husbands (2004), to become judges (2008)…

Still, if you were to stack up the results, the tally, for those sympathetic to the cause, is sure to be very disappointing. The discriminations are not only spotted in the huge gap between the “in principle” and “ in practice,” but in the actual paper trail itself. Exceptions and conditions come with every established right. While Islamic jurisprudence qualifies the “equality” of women in citizenship, the penal code is no less bold about its prejudices even at their most ridiculous, as they are in Article 277 of the penal code which states that the “man is guilty [of adultery] only if he commits the act at his marital home, a woman is guilty regardless of where the act takes place.”[1]

To be sure, some aspects of this protracted struggle for gender equality echo others East and West against entrenched patriarchy. And yet, from the outset, here, in this angry patch of the earth, the issue has always been just as much about fortifying “Muslim” identity and safeguarding indigenous tradition against perceived Western assaults as it has been about preserving male privilege.  

****

It is in fact this shared sense of injury and indignation against an imperialist West that rallied Iranian leftists and secularists of most stripes behind Khomeini before the revolution—at last the dawn of an “ethical Muslim society,” they thought. Certainly, it is what rendered them mute when, immediately after toppling the Shah, Khomeini moved to topple the freedoms women had gained under him. Whatever was achieved under a despotic regime backed by the US became the kiss of death. As Janet Afary explains in Sexual Politics in Iran, “For the Ayatollahs, the modern woman was a source of ritual pollution; for the radical lay thinkers, the apolitical westernized woman was a duped agent of imperialist cultural hegemony…” (p.237). And hence, as Iranian women, in the tens of thousands, descended on the streets of Tehran on March 8 and 12, 1979, to protest Khomeini’s flurry of edicts and actions, the left demanded that they put their claims to rest. “Not Now,” was the message.

Khomeini issued his pronouncements, much like one ticks off a long overdue to-do list: On February 26, he suspended the Family Protection Law; on March 3, he put a stop to decrees appointing women as judges; on March 4, he deemed divorce solely the man’s prerogative; on March 6, he froze women out of the army; on March 7, he brought the veil to the workplace; on March 29, he segregated sports; on May 21, he banned co-education; on June 3, he told married women they could no longer attend regular high school; on June 13, he shut down daycare centers, admonishing working mothers to quit their jobs and attend to their households.

By 1981, the ground rules were all set. For those women who had hoped for a freer life, the new constitution and penal code coalesced as bars do in a prison. For those who enjoyed so little to start with, khomeini’s blessings and tokens, though few and miserly, were enough to win more legroom in very oppressive environments.  From the start, the revolution would crow about and rely on its own female cadre.

****

If Islamist Iran stood in 1979 as a spritely promise, in 2011, it stands as a feat with a few gray hairs in its beard: thirty two years as telling about the limitations of Islamism as they are about civil society’s own remarkable bounce.  

Today, austere as the regime still is, women are walking around with fewer shackles. In fact, they can pretty much tick off their accomplishments over three hard decades, much like Khomeini ticked off his strictures at the beginning of them. They are

ü  palpably more literate (88%);

ü  more educated, comprising 60% of university graduates and the majority of students in Medicine, Basic Sciences, Experimental Sciences and Humanities and Arts;

ü  more literary (in the mid-1990s, there were 20-30 female writers; in 2009 they topped 450).

Iranian women have yet to sit on the bench or run for the presidency but they are in parliament. By 1986, their participation in the formal sector fell to 9%; by 2010, it had climbed back up to 14%. In the 1980s, they presided over a trickle of publishing houses; in 2005, they boasted 100 of them.

To the state goes the credit for embracing literacy and health care, especially in the rural areas. Everywhere else, applause has to go to the tenacity of Persia’s women who ran with every windfall and opportunity: a devastating Iran-Iraq war that changed the dynamic of marriage and family; the harsh economic realities that made it easier for them to go out and earn an education and a living, a tired Islamist idea that gave way simply because it had to…

On their own, these strides may seem modest—and they are if measured against ambition and possibility. But they tower when compared to where it all began back in 1979. This, in an Islamist state that, as recently as 2006, declared with a straight face feminists along with “mystics, dervishes, devil worshipers, journalists, bloggers, secular students and intellectuals, reformists, as the main threats to the national security of the country.”[2]

At present, Iran may well be post-Islamist, as Assef Bayat describes it. You can tell by the constant jostling for space between system and   society that the ruling elite is well aware that after “a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy, and sources of legitimacy of Islamism” have been “exhausted even among its once-ardent supporters.”

---

[1] Mariz Tadros, The Status of Women in Egypt: What Would the Post-Mubarak Era Offer Them, Freedom House, 2010, p.4.

[2]  Classification was made in a security report produced by the political bureau of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Mentioned in Fatimeh Sadeghi’s Foot Soldiers of The Islamic Republic’s Cultural Modesty. MERIP, The Islamic Revolution At 30, Spring 2009, no.250, p.51.   

"Not Now!" On Arab Women and Revolution

This is a long piece (please tell me I don’t need to apologize for it), so I have erred on the side of caution and split it into three parts which I will post over the course of the next few days.

Two episodes back-to-back--Alia Magda al-Mahdi’s nude stare beckoning a challenge to Egyptians and their uprising, and the beating of columnist Mona Eltahawy in the Interior Ministry that smacked of sexual assault—have thrust women back into Egypt’s burning arena after months of fade out.

Eltahawy’s is the very old and depressingly familiar story that Arab women have been living on the streets, at home, in the fields, at work, in jail...: sexual intimidation or violence for the specific purpose of humiliating, demeaning, and finally dehumanizing. Of course, this is an argument that almost every society has long had with its women; in some places the method is restrained, in others it is ferocious. But Arab society’s spat with its own comes with a nasty twist. Call it the female and the question of identity.  

Which makes Alia’s subversive act among the most provocative—and frankly weird--instants of the Egyptian revolt. If the attack on Mona jolts us backward, the unusual audacity of Alia is egging us forward. She might not belong anywhere in the political fervor of Tahrir Square, but she certainly has crashed the party and forced the supposedly revolutionary discourse to take notice.

She poses naked; her expression is neutral, almost childlike. There is no come-hither look, no call for quick love--just a nude model’s posture playing its part for the lens. Only the red hair clip and shoes are a concession to color in an otherwise black and white world, as if she is harking back to a forgotten past.

At first look, Alia’s mischievousness seems self-indulgent, distracting. And yet, the remarkable boldness of the photo and its author compel a second look. Hers is at once a statement against hypocrisy--“Put on trial the artists' models who posed nude for art schools until the early 70s, hide the art books and destroy the nude statues of antiquity”—and a combat-ready attachment to “freedom of expression.”

Through this photo alone Alia has reminded us of the very generous meaning of revolution--and our own very stingy definition of it.

Among Egypt’s liberals, there is as much rage against Alia as there is against the SCAF. And therein may lie her point. That sexual harassment has become a particularly acute problem in an increasingly conservative, if not downright Islamized, Egypt is one of Islamism’s most bitter and telling ironies. But there is not much to debate about female nudity with the Muslim Brotherhood. There is, however, plenty to mine and expose in a liberal’s fury. Alia transcends politics and reaches for Egypt itself. She is speaking to life’s many tyrannies, of which politics is but one.

I really doubt the saboteur in her will go far. Not now. Not here. Alas, she is way, way, ahead of her times, and with that, history has taught us, comes a very heavy price.   

These are the incidents surrounding Mona Eltahaway and Alia, and they are just the latest in a series that, combined, help tell the fascinating story of the modern Middle East and its women, a story that is at its most nervous in Egypt and its most daring in Iran.  

****

Revolution

You could tell by the evening’s debris that Tahrir Square on that day, March 8, was not in the mood for liberation. Strewn here and there was the litter of a demonstration gone wrong. On some placards, the furious in the crowds wrote “Not Now,” on others they settled for shoe prints and the X sign. Had you been there earlier, you would have heard words and witnessed behavior to match the harsh verdicts on those posters.

Out in Tahrir, in rather small numbers to mark International Women’s Day and declare their cause a daughter of the Egyptian revolution, women activists were heckled, harassed and then chased out of the Square. A few were cuffed and sent off to jail. “Go back home and cook mahshi!” (stuffed Zuchini), was the stalest of the insults. A forced virginity test for the arrested single women was arguably the most alarming, not to mention demeaning.

The implication of the encounter was clear enough: yet again, women were called in for a people’s freedom and called out for their own. This revolution would leave her behind, much like revolutions before it. And, of course, because of who and where we are, no revolution is resonating louder to the skeptics today than the Iranian one of 1979. For the power of the Persian example lies not only in that initial inspired moment that brought the Pahlavi dynasty down, but in the three decades that came after it, a time as emblematic of radical change as it is of retreats and letdowns, none more so than for the daughters of Iran’s uprising.

So, now that it is our turn in the Arab world to flip the page, eyes look back at Iran as they look now at Egypt for any hint of what might come. Because serious as the differences are between the two countries—and they are serious—at first look the similarities are one too many, especially on that incessant question of women and identity.

Much is at stake here, and not only for Egypt’s female gender. As the pendulum threatens to swing everywhere in this East, nervous talk of counterrevolution is actually outpacing upheaval itself. Egypt is standing at the door of an Arab reformation as it has at that of every contemporary Arab cause--good or bad. The way Egypt goes, so very likely shall many in the region. 

Where Do We Go Now?

On Nadine Labaki"s film

I imagine a tiny village, a singing blurb, a fine painter’s sketch of that other mess that goes by the name of Lebanon.

I imagine this village simpler, earthier, more endearing than its larger agitated self.  

I imagine its knack for humor much stronger than its taste for cruelty; and if this last must be, then I imagine it bashful, apologetic, almost child-like in its expressions and intent.

I imagine it in the here and now and yet suspended in space and time, its hoary face practically intact, its connection to the world an old, beat up TV, its physical contact with it through a couple of teenagers and their rinky-dink motorbike.

I imagine its daily rhythms as Cinema Paradiso’s, its mood Il Postino’s, its chatter Il Mediterraneo’s. 

I imagine it split between Christians and Muslims. I imagine all its Muslim women veiled so that the viewer can tell them apart.

I imagine its men basic, stupid, one-dimensional creatures, ready to pounce for the silliest of reasons, to fist fight for the flimsiest of slights. And I imagine the war—yes, that war whose history is everywhere in mind but nowhere in sight—all theirs, the proverbial cross to carry around.

I imagine all the villages’ women wise, nurturing, funny, wily matriarchs. I imagine them--to a woman—free of all that taints their men.

I imagine the village’s priest and sheikh truly above the fray, even happy to exchange places on any given day.

I imagine angry scenes all of a sudden springing up just to prove a point; a few funny scenes to lighten up the pace; a few Ukrainian blondes to remind me of today’s Lebanon that lives somewhere, somehow beyond.

I imagine a single, tragic death, but I imagine it taking place far away, because who among these good people could be guilty of such an ugly act.

And so, I imagine a story about an atrocious sectarianism in an atrocious Lebanon, but I imagine narrating it with the sweetest of voices, because mine is the sweetest of visions.

There you have it: Where Do We Go Now?

*****

You might imagine by now that I didn’t like Nadine Labaki’s movie, but actually I didn’t mind it much. She did well with the casting, she didn’t do that badly with the dialogue, and the sentimentality wasn’t over the top. There isn’t a single original idea in the entire script; still there is talent to be had, and that is good enough to applaud.

But who am I to talk? The movie is a hit. In Lebanon, people just can’t get over that fuzzy feeling that the country may yet be good, although everywhere you look it might look all bad. The people will get the message, some are no doubt thinking, although why a movie would do any better than 70 years of hatred and violence and death is, I guess, too cynical of a question to ask.

To her, I say bravo for turning something very real and hideous into something that we have it in us to overcome. That’s what I call suspension of disbelief in the service of a mighty dream. To the Lebanese, I say cheering a movie is not enough of an excuse or a pass. If you truly support the message, why are only a handful of you joining the actual call for all this to end?  

Then again, this might be asking too much and just to poop on everybody’s party and make a fuss. After all, surely the accolades in Toronto’s film festival—much like those idiotic puff pieces about Lebanon in the New York Times—should do the trick.