Who is an Arab? In Answer to Rafi Feghali

An answer to this question very much depends on what frameworks of inquiry we apply. Semantically speaking, in the Arabic language the three letters ‘عرب refer primarily to a waterless, deserted and barren land. For thousands of years they stood more specifically for the landmass naturally bordered by the Sinai, the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Fertile Crescent. Following this the Arabs are then seen to be the nomadic people that have inhabited this land for millennia.

Traditionally these have been divided into three groups according to lineage. The first are the Perishing Arabs, like the Ad, Thamud, Emlaq, Jadis etc. of whose history is little known. The second are the Qhatanian Arabs who are descendants of Ya’rub bin Yashjub bin Qahtan. And thirdly the Adnanian Arabs who are seen as the son’s of Ishmael, son of Abraham. Some people have described the Qhatanian Arabs, who originating somewhere in Yemen as the ‘Pure Arabs’ and the Adnanian Arabs as ‘arabized’ people of another origin. Today, anybody who can claim to descent from any of these people is in genealogical terms an Arab.

It has to be noted that each connection of a people and a land, is no more than a snapshot in time, and at different times different peoples have claimed the very same territory. However an interesting question that arises from the general orthodoxy above is from what moment in time did Ya’rub bin Yashjub bin Qahtan call himself an Arab and what was he before that? Or from what point onwards were the Adnanian Arabs thought about as Arabs and what were indicators of their arabness?

Another classification of which genealogy forms one pillar is that of ethnicity. An ethnic group has been described to be biologically self-perpetuating, sharing cultural values and forms, makes up a field of interaction and communication and has a membership that identifies itself and is identified by others as constituting a category distinguishable from other categories of the same order. These definitions deserve greater consideration.

As much as we love to claim clear patrilines, biological coherency is difficult to claim for two reasons. Firstly, as shown above, Arabs are by definition not of one people. Secondly, if one considers the history of conquest of the area that the Arab people inhabit, it becomes clear that being Arab today, means to being a biological and cultural hybrid

Despite this great diversity, we do share some cultural commonalities. A most popularly invoked aspect of which is based on the third pillar of ethnicity, that of communication. Following this Arabs are seen to be those people who speak Arabic as their first language. This would however include many people that don’t consider themselves as Arabs, such as Copts and many Lebanese Maronite Christians, and exclude many second generation emigrants.

Be that as it may there are other cultural denominators that we share as a people, although these are not exclusive to us as Arabs. Hospitality as a value and custom is one, of such. Connected to this is food and drink. We do share some dishes throughout the Arab World, like Tabouhle and Houmous. Tea, or coffee drinking and smoking- or rather excuses to socialize and talk are other activities that can be observed from Baghdad to Nouakchott. To a degree an identity will always be a construct of differing and factors which overlap with other identities.If we look at the emergence of other regional identities in different parts of the globe we can see the relative construction of cultural coherence. For example when the European Union was created at the beginning of the 1990’s, the questioned was posed, “What does it mean to have a European identity?’ The discussions that followed generally focused on a common geography notion of ancient Greek political heritage, the conquest of the Romans and following this the spread of Christianity. These variables seem vague, and would allow the inclusion of some countries of the Levant and North Africa.

The fourth pillar of ethnicity seems somehow crucial and following it, Arabs are those people that define themselves as such and are also defined as such by others. Historically, especially Kurds, Persians and Amazigh have been known to cross ethnic boundaries and arabize, but technically everybody could do so.

Being an Arab is a non-essential identity. It exists beside the fact that one is of a certain family, tribe, city, region, country, religion or occupation. The point of religion has to be stressed as many western observers confuse the Arab with the Muslim world. Despite the great influence that Islam had on the Arab World, it has to be clear that an Arab can be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Druze, Buddhist, Secular, Gnostic or whatever he or she likes to be. Thus to sum up, Arabs can be described, as a group of people that is loosely connected by culture, habits and customs, however doesn’t correspond to a particular religion, race or ethnicity.

Finally, but maybe most importantly, people who live in the area described as the Arab world face similar obstacles to the expansion of their full human potential. Although I’d like to refrain from uniting a region in the framing of problems, we have to recognize the common challenges that we face. Being an Arab today frequently also means to live under authoritarian rule, old or new forms of colonialism, distortion of history, endemic underdevelopment, lack of education, technological underdevelopment, intellectual and economic impoverishment, non-emancipation, informational isolation etc. More positively expressed it means that we have to join in the same battles, that we share the desire to take the future with our own hands and form from it what we wish.

Indicators for Human Dignity

Reading the news this morning, I am wondering what are meaningful parameters for human development. The most powerful country in the world, one that is supposed to fight for the equality and liberty of all human beings, is openly using methods that were employed by the Inquisition in 14th century Spain. The critical circumstances demanded Americas sidestepping of human dignity. Is dignity attached to each human being or does it come as a pool for the human species? Making one of us suffer to possibly save others reduces our lives to a mere calculation. Mathematics that, in the hands of a child that has not yet learned to count to three, have proven incredibly dangerous. Sadly, this infant's logic has become an inspiration for our constitutions.

When Saddam Hussein was hanged, as little sympathy as I had for the man, I wanted to cry. In the midst of killing and bloodshed, the most important official act and long hailed symbolic ‘new beginning’ of our country was built on the suffering of a human being. As we aspire to an angry child’s definition of human dignity, we create empty nursery rhymes in our constitutions. These keep us busy, but hinder our development. It is time to openly discuss what human dignity means to us in the Arab World and what we are prepared to do in order to protect it.

Respecting the State

…metal spikes and barbed wire on the Egyptian-Palestinian border have effectively murdered Gazans’ hope for manumission, and mine for a respectable government in the Arab World.

I positively disagree with Suleiman Awwad, spokesman of President Mubarak of Egypt, when he says: "Egypt is a respected state. Its border cannot be breached and its soldiers should not be lobbed with stones". On the contrary Mr. Awwad, I’d say that the Egyptian state just missed the opportunity to become a state that deserves my respect. Let me remind you Mr. Awwad, that ‘respect’ is a feeling of deep admiration towards the achievements or abilities of a person or organization. And please excuse that in my eyes, locking inn 1.5 million people in their misery, if you are the only person with the key to their prison, doesn’t qualify as an action that deserves such admiration.

I would have admired a state and thus leader that stands for justice in the presence of cruelty, a leader that would accept the bombardment of his cities for having taken the right decisions, and a leader that would once again publicize the absurdity of the situation in Palestine, a leader that stands with the weak.

I am deeply sorry that this state doesn’t deserve my respect Mr. Awwad.

Hello My Sumerian Friend. This Is Your Phoenician Friend

Joking about issues that caused wars in the past is very prevalent among the educated new generation of Lebanon. A couple of the undying objects of our jokes at the office, for example, are identity and Arabism (or the Arab cause and what derives from it).
As much as the two terms are related in Lebanon, they are equally not related. Also, considering that I come from a family of a Maronite father and an Orthodox Armenian mother, I don’t think that my experience in Lebanese identity can be generalized. Add to it my mingling and close relationships with Druzes, Sunnis, Shiites and numerous non-Lebanese and you’ll get an extremely rare philosophy about identity. I like to think of myself as a “global citizen”. Maybe I am not and I just wish to be. The layered history of the different identities the area of land now known as Lebanon has had, makes the identity of current Lebanon already very complex. This may be one the very few things that make me proud to be Lebanese; it’s amazing to know that one of my grandfathers might have been Ottoman (also ironic considering my mother’s side), his great grandfather might have been a European Crusader, whose wife might have been Byzantine or Roman, who in turn fell in love with an Arab or a Persian before marrying. I should have added Phoenician somewhere between those, or probably at the end, but that idea is already over-suggested. It doesn’t need me to highlight it.
As if this debate and the comprehension of this complex structure needed any more intricate factors, modern media had to kick in. Satellite TV, internet, and open global economy made Lebanon a street in the “global village”. Being a citizen living on this “street”, I can’t but be a citizen of that “village” as well.
Of course, a very big component (or layer, so to speak) in the current Lebanese identity is Arab. Throughout history (being part of the empire back when it started to rise) and now as part of its geographical existence and its dominant (and official) language. But what Arab is exactly more than that is also debatable in itself. There are many who tried to define that and many who adopt different definitions. Among all those who claim to be Arabs, very few show commonalities among each other. A Saudi Arabian is an Arab (it would be very funny if he wasn’t), and a Moroccan is an Arab. Of course, there are other countries in between that also differ but not as much, but I think considering these two “Arab” countries makes my point. Lebanon adopts a certain definition of Arab as well (not considering those very few who don’t and are not very convincing with why not). All this makes me feel that I haven’t really made up my mind yet about what an Arab really is. I definitely know what I would like the Utopia of the Arab Union to be like, though.
By Raffi Feghali

A Martial People?

When I was born in 1981, my country was at war with Iran, and bombed by Israel. When I was 10, I remember my father constantly occupying the phone, while the television displayed greenish night-vision pictures of Baghdad showered by a firework of cruise missiles. As throughout my lifetime, today my country is at war. Considering the reasons for this, our mess, the media lend an easy explanation. Our condition is somehow innate.

Especially popular western media have a tendency to depict the conflicts of the Arab world as primordial, essentially ‘tribal’ or ‘sectarian’, to use the expression of the day. And increasingly we, the Arabs, seem to agree. Our television sets are sources of great comfort, to us. We turn to them to create artificial order, whenever chaos has visited our doorsteps. Currently Iraq occupies the prime-position in this bloody spectacle of chaos, and we increasingly believe the representations that are shown to us.

Having lived in Syria and Lebanon, our neighbors say, that Iraqis have some kind of warring sentiment, a “lingering passion that has to be satisfied with the blood of our enemies”, as a Syrian friend of mine once put it, talking about the Iraqi tradition of killing our presidents.

It is true that we are a people that hail their warriors and glorify their battles, but so does the rest of the world. The obscene picture of a general parading his medals, won for acts of violence against fellow human beings, can be seen from Baghdad to Berlin, from Warsaw to Washington.

What sets us apart as Arabs, and as Iraqis especially, is the fact that we’re actively and passively essentializing the violent aspects of our culture. In doing so, we aid the depiction of our conflicts as being devoid of history, somehow hanging in a socio-economic vacuum, as perpetual, endless cycles of violence. We are co-directors in the creation of our own self-fulfilling prophecies, historical prisons that don’t allow us to escape.

How important the self-image of a people and its depiction to the outer world can be in the development of a free society, was taught to me by the history of the people that make up another part of my family, that of the German people.

When my grandfather was born in Germany in 1913, his country was at the brink to of the First World War, a conflict that would cost 2000.000 people their lives. When he was 10 years old the Nazi party leaders of the Kampfbund tried their first move to power in the ‘Trinkhallen Putsch’. When he was a young man he went to fight as a soldier on the eastern front of the Second World War. His live and times have been characterized by ongoing conflict, and things would not have looked different if I would depict the lives of any of my ancestors before him.

Thus, German people have in recent history- not unlike most other Europeans at different times - displayed remarkable aggression against ‘enemies’ within and outside of their state. They have quite arguably started, or had a major hand in the start, of the First and Second World War. Yet, despite these minor historical facts, German people today are not known, for their war-mongering tendencies, but for ‘efficiency’, ‘precision’ and their, ‘time-keeping’. These labels are not a mere post-WWII construction, but have long been part of the German stereotype. However post WWII sentiment of renewal, picked them, quite consciously out of the collective psyche. This representation allowed the German nation to reinvent itself as productive, rather than destructive.

Further, Germany was permitted particular historical reasons for it’s wars and not reduced to mere genetics or racial stereotypes, despite its short lived insistence on their importance. Today World war One is being framed as a matter of cause and effect, the so called ‘treaty-alliance system’, while the Second World War was a ‘natural response’ to the countries destitute in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is true that we, the Iraqi people are prone to violence, yet this is not what makes us.
What can be witnessed in present day Iraq is the reaction of an occupied people. A people, that went through the so well known Middle Eastern mix of hyper militarism and extreme nationalism (which itself has not been unknown to Germany). Violence has literally been a major form of governance in Iraq for the past century or so. Despite this we have to remind ourselves of the many positive attributes our culture bears, and have to make them known to the world.

For example until today, I have not met one Iraqi of school age who could not recite dozens of poems. Our poets, like our warriors have started revolutions. In Iraq artist, if painters, writers or filmmakers hold a social prestige, unknown to their European counterparts. Among the Arabs we are still hailed for our levels of higher education.
We are a civilized people, a people that have a history that we can build on. This, however, doesn’t mean that we can rest on the laurels of days gone by, or cry over past glories, but that we have to reclaim our history and recognize today’s continuity with the past.

I hope that someday, in the not too far future, we will say with pride “We are Iraqi, we are passionate about life, we love the arts, are proud of our history and above all have hope for our future”

Gaza Under Siege

The siege of Gaza has reached new levels of intensity. Israel has imposed an embargo that effectively blocks the delivery of fuel oil supplies to the strip. Despite the crossing of two lorries carrying cooking gas and three carrying diesel at Israel’s Nahal Oz border, on Tuesday, a humanitarian crisis unfolds. Thousands of homes in the territory have been left without power. People live without light or heating in a bitter cold and wet winter. Bakers haven’t been able to bake bread in the absence of fuel to fire their ovens. Unicef stated that the effect on Gaza city’s main pumping station results in 600,000 Palestinians not having access to safe drinking water. Hospitals are short of medical supplies and paralysed by the power cuts. Medical infrastructure is on the verge of breakdown. If not enough the very habitat of the Palestinians is being destroyed. 30.000 cubic metres of sewage have been dumped in the Mediterranean untreated as a direct result of the embargo.

However it comes just as the latest addition to the already horrendous living conditions that Gaza citizens have to endure. 35% of Gazans live on less than two dollars a day; unemployment is by 50% and 80% receive humanitarian assistance. But the ultimate suffering for Gazans is that they are locked inn in this tragedy. Gaza’s border closures are without example. Palestinian are effectively prisoners to their misery, just that prisoners would receive a more humane treatment.

The Israeli government denies creating a humanitarian crisis, and calls the disaster a plot by the Gazan authorities. However Israel is not trying to obscure the rationale behind the blockade. It is intended to pressure Hamas into stopping the rocket attacks, launched from the Gaza strip onto Israeli territory. There has been a stark increase in the number of these attacks, 200 rockets and mortar bombs have plummet on southern Israel in the past week alone. Although the Israeli government has a right to stop the attacks on its civilian population it can’t do so by all means.

The collective punishment of civilian populations is specifically forbidden by International law. The Geneva Convention clearly spells out that occupying powers have the absolute obligation to supply capture territories with utilities such as fuel or water.

We should aim for the nonviolent settlement of conflicts in the Arab world, if through nonviolent struggle or negotiation. In this respect we urge the leaders of the world to take action against collective traumatisation of a people, the breaking of international treaties and undignified treatment of human beings. The world has become too used to the suffering of the Palestinian people. This is an outcry to remind it of their humanity.

More pragmatically the siege of Gaza undermines peace talks launched with the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas, and drives a further wedge between an already divided county. It is very likely that in the absence of a ceasefire with Hamas and the deficiency of peace talks in general, the rockets will soon fall again in Israel. Peace cannot be build by bringing suffering and destitute to 1.5 million people.

If the cycle of violence is to be broken, serious efforts for peace have to be accompanied by social justice. It is impossible to foster moderation and compromise, or build confidence in peaceful means of conflict resolution among Palestinians in the face of such brutal suppression. The intensity of the siege will again play in the hands of radicals.

What we the Israeli state and the international community should be doing, is treating the Palestinians with dignity and compassion in order to foster moderation and to empowering those people that believe Palestine’s future lies in peaceful resolution of their conflict. Efforts to reinitiate the peace process, the building of civic institutions and the reviving of the Palestinian economy are being emptied of any meaning and effect by the current situation in Gaza.

There has never been a more acute time to change the status quo in Gaza. Suppressed, hungry, unhealthy, traumatized and angry people don’t make good partners in a peace process.