Posts filed under 'Egypt'

The Ghost of Coexistence: On a Narrative of Jewish-Muslim Kinship

May 20, 2024 | in Essays | by Moumita Ghosh

A Land Like You is a historical rendition . . . but it is also, much more, a testament of a multicultural homeland that no longer exists.

On May 12, Egypt joined South Africa in its International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide. As one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, Egypt has continually occupied a close position in this ongoing catastrophe; the nation opposed Zionism in the 1930s and accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba but, in more recent decades, the government has worked to covertly “normalize” relations with Israel. This seeming contradiction culminates from the complex, multi-cultural, and syncretic history of the region, in which Jewish and Muslim peoples lived with intertwined fates, and it is that increasingly implausible reality which the French writer and psychologist Tobie Nathan explores in A Land Like You, an absorbing, panoramic narrative of Egypt in the twentieth century. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh looks at how the nation of Egypt formed out of an overarching Ottoman unity, and how Nathan’s stirring novel of this tumultuous period can inform our understanding of the region today.

We live beside the Arabs the way a man might live beside his innards. Our tales fill their Qur’an, their tongue fills our mouth. Why aren’t they us? Why aren’t we them?

—Tobie Nathan, from A Land Like You (translated by Joyce Zonana)

In Ottoman Brothers, Michele U. Campos writes about how objective distinctions between empires and nations are often murky, especially as demonstrated in the late Ottoman context. In the years before the First World War, the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Zionism and Arabism were essentially in negotiation with the responsibilities of imperial citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim empire. Rather than separating from the Ottoman empire, there were attempts to preserve its existence. As familiar calls for a two-state solution re-emerge in Palestine, now undergoing a second Nakba, this history of collective identity and a shared homeland in the Middle East—though short-lived, incomplete, and within the context of imperialism—has gained a new relevancy.

In the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the collapse of the old Hamidian absolutist state, the new epoch of democracy linked the individual Ottoman citizen—irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or mother tongue—to the reforming constitutional state, and citizenship to the “Ottoman-nation” became a distinct socio-political identity. Palestine, even under rule, somewhat differed from the other Ottoman provinces in terms of being a site of worldwide religious devotion, as its daily life involved a mutuality whereby local Muslims, Christians, and Jews came together—especially in Jerusalem—to execute the vision of a “modern” urban city.

Sephardi Jews in particular were grateful to the Ottoman Empire for being their historical saviors, and were consistently mediating between the ideological commitments of multicultural, civic Ottomanism and the European import of particularistic Zionism in the years following the 1908 revolution. Shaped by cultural Hebraism, the Sephardi Jews of Palestine believed in the compatibility of Ottomanism and Zionism; they thought that the socio-cultural and economic rebirth of the Jewish community would be enriching for the Ottoman Empire and, most importantly, that such a revival would be taking place within the Ottoman body-politic. However, such views were not free of contentions—especially due to the continual forces of territorial colonialism. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Moumita Ghosh

Language:

French

Places:

Egypt
Palestine

Writer:

Tobie Nathan

Tags:

#3arabizi: Arabic in the Internet Era

July 27, 2017 | in Essays | by Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg

While the classical/dialectal debate rages, crowdsourced Arabic transliteration rises from the Internet, spreading among the multinational youth.

A language is alive—it’s a breathing, blooming entity that metamorphoses as worlds turn. Often, we turn to the literary when charting these changes, but language goes where the people are. Asymptote Editor-at-Large for Morocco, Hodna Nuernberg, writes about the changes that the Internet—blogs, texting, social media—is catalyzing in transliterated versions of spoken Arabic around the world.

According to the United Nation’s 2016 Measuring the Information Society Report, approximately 47 percent of the world’s population are internet users, and nearly 3.6 billion people are expected to rely on messaging apps as a primary means of communication by 2018. Thanks in no small part to the pervasiveness of computer-mediated communication, we are reading and writing more than ever—in fact, Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University and principal investigator for the Stanford Study of Writing, speaks of a literacy revolution in which “life writing” (in the form of texts, tweets, emails, status updates, or blogs) accounts for a massive 38 percent of the average Stanford student’s written production.

For many of us, the distance between our spoken language and its written form is small enough as to seem nonexistent, so converting our speech into print is a fairly straightforward process. But this isn’t always the case.

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of “Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge” by Ezzedine C. Fishere

March 21, 2017 | in Translations | by John Peate

She was a victim of her own mythmaking about the mysterious Orient.

Shortlisted for the Arabic Booker when it first appeared in 2011, Ezzedine C. Fishere’s Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge has already been reprinted eleven times. Ahead of its English publication on 1 April, we collaborated with exciting new publisher Hoopoe to present the excerpt below. Brimming with observation, this vignette provides a searing glimpse into the life of Egyptian diaspora coming to terms with a hyphenated identity.

Though he had spent five years in London writing up his doctoral thesis, he hadn’t met Jane there, but in Cairo, which surprised their small circle of friends. Jane was tall, slim, shapely, and beautiful, with long chestnut-brown hair, which she would either let hang around her shoulders or pin up with whatever was to hand, normally a pencil. She had come to Cairo for a year to learn Arabic, on some scholarship or another. She grew to love the city in all its chaos and ended up settling there. They gradually got to know each other, and grew closer until they ended up more or less living together in an apartment in Giza, behind the zoo.

The thought of marrying Jane had occurred to him early on: she had many of the qualities he sought in a partner. But something about her unnerved him, so he didn’t tell Leila or Youssef about her until he was sure of their relationship.

He traveled with her to Britain to visit her parents, who lived on the outskirts of Glasgow. They walked to the riverbank where she had played as a girl, gazing across the endless pastures. She took him to the local pub, where throngs of young men had pestered her as a teenager. And they met all the neighbors who wanted to see “this Egyptian Jane has fetched back.”

Jane was a good-hearted, decent sort of person, but her relationship with Egypt was confused. She told Darwish when they first met how much she loved the Egyptian people’s good-naturedness, and their warmth and humanity. She found something in them that she had felt lacking from her life in Britain. He laughed to himself, being someone who actually loved the cool standoffishness of the British, finding in their respect for privacy something he lamented as sorely missing from Egyptian life. They found themselves in reversed positions, as he criticized she defended Egyptian life and people: “Yes, she is lying. From a legal point of view, she’s lying. But it’s not a real lie”; “This is not a weakness, it’s caution”; “No that’s not nepotism, it’s really just an expression of gratitude”; “It’s absolutely not a class thing; it’s a different view of roles and responsibilities.”