Why Arab Region

Lena Meari

August 26, 2022

The MPK project maps the production of knowledge on women and gender in/on the Arab region over the past fifty years. It carries out critical analysis of knowledge production as reflected in published scholarly work focusing on the thematic of socialities.

One of our project’s points of departure is location and the political significations that location entails.  The MPK faculty research team is composed of researchers who inhabit or are originally from the Arab region and are committed to the interests of its people. Adrienne Rich (1984) asserts that the politics of location, which begins with the material, raises the questions of “where, when and under what conditions have women acted and been acted on as women” (Rich 1984, 31). In this sense, the Arab region is “a place on the map” and it is also “a place in history” within which women exist and “created and trying to create” (ibid, 30).

We recognize the heterogeneity of the Arab region in terms of ethnicities, sub-cultures and languages.  Its heterogeneity is its richness and offers potential for mutual and respectful relations among the Arab majority and all minorities that inhabit the region. Yet, strategically, we envision the Arab region as a unified location with shared history, language, common popular political interests and cultural production including literature, poetry, media and cinema. We stress the unity of the Arab region in the face of continuing colonial projects aiming at fragmenting. Historically, during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Arab region between British and French colonial spheres of domination and exploitation. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 stated the British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” It implanted a settler colonial entity in the midst of the Arab region. These colonial projects have critical ramifications on the economic, political and social composition of the region and the interests of its people, their unity and their forms of socialities. They profoundly affected knowledge production and representations of the region and its people.

In contrast to Western colonial projects fragmenting the Arab region through material and knowledge production tools, the 20th-century rise of Arab nationalism strengthened unity among Arab states.  The year 1945 witnessed the foundation of the Arab League (the League of Arab States). Despite the conflicting interests among some of the Arab regimes, the establishment of the Arab League expressed the aspirations for unity and cooperation of the people of the Arab region. In the sphere of knowledge production, the year 1975 witnessed the establishment of the Centre for Arab Unity Studies (CAUS). CAUS was created to produce knowledge for and by the Arab region and in service of Arab unity. Prominent Arab scholars still recognize the importance of knowledge production in/on the Arab region. In 2008, Arab scholars and researchers established the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), a regional organization dedicated to strengthening social science research and knowledge production in the Arab region.

A premise of the MPK project is that knowledge is not separate from the material conditions of its production. The MPK project of mapping and analyzing the production of knowledge on the thematic of socialities is in the context of the historical material conditions of the Arab region. Historically situating gender analysis for the Arab region entails a deep understanding of the structural forces forming the Arab region and the life conditions of its people. Here we offer a broad structural analysis of the Arab region that to historically and materially contextualize knowledge production on the thematic of socialities. We begin with the materiality of the politics of naming regarding the Arab region.  We consider the material conditions that shape the Arab region that are preconditions for the production of knowledge on the region.

The Arab Region: Politics of Naming

The naming of world regions is a verbal act embedded with political significations. The Arab region is referred to with multiple terms including the “Middle East”, the “Near East”, “MENA” (Middle East and North Africa) and “SWANA” (Southwest Asia and North Africa). The territory and the characteristics that have been used to delimit and describe this world region have varied over time and space. The current popular and political discourses on the “Middle East” are so commonplace that their politically constructed origins and implications are rarely scrutinized (Culcasi 2010, 583). Culcasi calls for critical examination of naturalized geographical concepts.  He argues that world regions have been taken for granted and naturalized as “groupings of contiguous states that have some cultural, historical, economic, and even physiographic similarity” (ibid).

The term “Middle East” was originally coined in the late 19th century by the British, along with other Eurocentric geographic terms such as the “Near East” (the Eastern Mediterranean region closest to Europe). The “Near East” has somewhat fallen out of favor, but is often deployed interchangeably with the term “Middle East.” (Middle East Policy Council, nd). The term “Middle East” originated from the British imperial geopolitics. “Great Britain’s possessions in South Asia made the Middle East not only a geo-strategically important region but also the middle of the journey east to India; hence the term ‘Middle East’” (Culcasi 2010, 585).

Prior to the Second World War, the term “Near East”, denoted the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in addition to regions centered around Turkey (WorldAtlas nd).  Winston Churchill, who established and led the Middle East Department of the British Colonial Office, officially institutionalized the term in 1921. “The department was concerned with British post-World War I territories in Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, and Egypt; thus Syria, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, and Iran were not part of his vision of the Middle East” (Calcusi 2010, 586).

Other designations used in tandem with the “Middle East” are “MENA” and “SWANA”. SWANA does not relate geographically to Europe but has less popularity. We witness a resurgence of SWANA in recent decades. The terms “Islamic World” or “Muslim World” which are a legacy of the Muslim empires, including the Ottoman Empire “refer to a geographic area that includes all of the Middle East and North Africa as well as a wider area of Asia and Africa whose populations are predominantly Muslim” (Middle East Policy Councel, nd).

The concept of the “Middle East” is deeply embedded in colonialist-Orientalist discourses that signify the production of knowledge on this region. Talal Asad’s (1995) edited book Anthropology and the Colonial Encounterdocuments the ways in which anthropological thinking and practice were influenced by British colonialism. Edward Said (1978) employed the term Orientalism to describe the discourse of dominance, superiority, and control that continues to have profound implications on today’s geopolitical landscape. The “Orient,” Europe’s invention, is “the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies” (Said 1978, 1). It has a special place in European experience and constitutes an integral part of European material civilization and culture. In Western imagination the “Orient” and its inhabitants are constructed as timeless, backward, violent, and inferior (ibid, 54-55). This imagination presumes a cultural continuity and relies on culture and religion to define the region. Orientalism “lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental” (Ibid, 2).

The MPK project is interested in the political economy that shapes the discourses and images of the Arab region in academic work. It considers the material conditions of the Arab region formed by permanent wars and continued practice of colonialism, imperialist aggression, re-colonisation, and resistance. These types of wars waged against the Arab region “are not an accident of history unrelated to the necessities of world capital” (Kadri 2016, 249). Ali Kadri uses the term “Arab World”. In Arab countries, the designations “Arab World” and “Arab Homeland” are much more commonly used. The term “Middle East” is often seen as linked to imperial powers concerned with access to oil, military bases, and strategic waterways. The “Middle East,” conceptually and materially, has become a site of escalated economic, diplomatic, and military engagement.  The ensuing scholarship has often been shaped and influenced by those engagements.

In contrast to Western colonial politics of naming that reflects material interests, the project of Arab Nationalism strengthened unity among Arab states.  The Arab nationalist movement aimed at bringing Arab states together across colonial constructed borders. Arab nationalism, as a political project that evolved during the sixties, was targeted and weakened by imperial powers and their local allies in the region. The goal of those divisive policies was to foster the development of separate identities in Arab states.

The MPK project employs the term “Arab region.” This choice does not presume an essentialized homogeneity within the region.  Rather it is a historical-political choice that reflects our commitment to the interests of the people inhabiting this region, including the non-Arab populations of the Arab countries.

The Political Economy of the Arab Region

Geopolitical power relations shape the production of knowledge production in the Arab region, as in all world regions.  Understanding the political economy of the Arab region is critical to understanding knowledge production in/on the region.

In his classical study Islamic Roots of Capitalism, Peter Gran (1979) challenges the ethnocentric perception that modernist thought and a capitalist economy could only be transferred to the peripheral states through direct contact with the European center. Gran argues that the capitalist transformation of the Egyptian economy was launched by Muslim merchants and Mamluk rulers in the eighteenth century.  The Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi A’mel (1976), on the other hand, differentiates capitalism in the Arab region from classical Western capitalism. A’mel formulated the concept “colonial mode of production”. The colonial mode of production did not emerge naturally from feudalism, but rather was the product of colonial violence that destroyed the previous relations of production and produced the colonial relations of production. It produced structurally dependent capitalism, and disrupted internal development. The new dependent capitalist mode coexisted with the patterns that preceded it. In contrast to what happened in the countries of classical capitalism where capitalism was born with revolutionary violence carried out by the bourgeoisie, in the Arab world, it was born with colonial violence. A’mel employed the colonial mode of production as a critique of national liberation movements in the 1970s.  He emphasized the inseparability of the economic and political spheres.

In a similar gesture, Adam Hanieh (2013) argues that the political and economic spheres of capitalism in the Arab world are fused and cannot be separated. The forms of authoritarianism that are so prevalent across the region are a functional outcome of capitalism itself, particularly in the neoliberal period. Hanieh identified two interlinked dynamics that shape the contemporary Arab region:

First, since the mid-twentieth century, the region has represented a vital zone within the wider global economy. Its vast supplies of hydrocarbons, coupled with the prodigious financial surpluses that accompany them, mean that control of the Middle East is a source of enormous strategic power and thus a longstanding flashpoint of global conflict. Second, however, the dynamics of the Middle East’s own social formation, and the struggles that are inevitably bound up with them, form a crucial counterpoint to the rivalries and collusion of foreign powers. For this reason, the region is much more than simply an object of external domination- the histories and struggles of the region are supremely relevant, existing alongside and within the story of foreign rule (Hanieh 2013, 19).

Hanieh argues that the agency of the people of the region is reflected in their struggles against foreign domination. The political project of Arab unity and independent development during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the continuing de-colonial aspirations at the popular level, are examples of the agency and defiance of the people of the region. In his writings, Ali Kadri (2015, 2016) focuses on the violent mechanisms employed by global powers to control the Arab region and disable its development. He asserts that the Arab region had been facing a combination of war dislocation or anti-developmental macroeconomic policies.  Kadri “attributes the demise of Arab development to the subordination of the national bourgeoisie to American global power, its transformation into a comprador class prospering from setting ablaze its own national economy, and its adoption of neoliberalism”(https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/human-rights/people/ali-kadri).These destructive tendencies, according to Kadri are systemic and rooted in the global crisis of overproduction.

Like Hanieh, Kadri appreciates the resistance attempts of the post –independence era. He asserts though, that these attempts were defeated. Kadri writes:

Conditions of malnutrition, conflict, or a combination of both, characterize most Arab countries today. But things were not always as bad. As in much of the developing world, the immediate post-independence period represented an age of hope and relative prosperity. Yet, imperialism does not fall asleep while the Third World develops. No sooner than it could intervene with the assistance of its class allies to destroy Arab post- independence achievements, imperialism did so in a big way. Two principal defeats by, and losses of territory to, Israel in 1967 and 1973, and many others that followed, left behind more than mere destruction of assets and loss of human lives; the Arab World (hereinafter the AW) lost its ideology of resistance, Arabism, and its associated socialism. (Kadri 2016, 1)

            

            As the works by A’mel, Hanieh, Kadri document, the Arab region is structured by a long history of Western capitalism and colonialism.  That history has been riddled with wars of destruction, displacement, neoliberal formations, and de-development. These structural conditions have profound ramifications for social formations in the Arab region, on socialities.

Scholarship produced on socialities often reflects this structural and material history of imperialism, neoliberalism, and colonial domination. The hegemonic forms of knowledge production on women and gender in the Arab region, for example, often approach women’s life conditions as constituted by cultural-religious factors. The MPK project looks to map, document, and critically analyze the frameworks adopted in scholarly works on women and gender in the Arab region over the past fifty years. Of concern is the extent to which culturalist approaches that ignore structural conditionscharacterize knowledge produced on women and gender in the Arab region. Towards this end, the MPK project maps, documents, and analyzes the full range of analytical frames deployed in scholarly works on socialities in the Arab region.

 

References