Muslim and Arab Writers Are Challenging Western Imperialism's Narrative

[cbabe]

https://truthout.org/articles/muslim-and-arab-writers-are-challenging-western-imperialisms-narrative/

Muslim and Arab Writers Are Challenging Western Imperialism’s Narrative

In a new anthology, writers from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) tell the stories the West tries to erase.

By Peter Handel , TRUTHOUT
Published May 25, 2024

The recently released anthology Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction (City Lights, 2024) collects short stories written by a variety of Arab, Iranian and Kurdish writers, as well as authors with varied identities and experiences, including people whose parents have been immigrants, and writers with multinational and multilingual backgrounds.

Anthology editor Jordan Elgrably, who identifies as Franco-American-Moroccan, has been engaged in cultural work based in diasporic Arab, Muslim and Middle Eastern communities since the ‘90s. With other Angelenos of Middle Eastern and North African heritage, he opened a cultural center in Los Angeles devoted to the region prior to 9/11. As the founder of The Markaz Review, he has published literature and political analysis from some of the most trenchant voices in the Arab and Muslim world. Elgrably is an outspoken advocate for the protection of writers and the right to free expression.

In this exclusive interview with Truthout, Elgrably explains the problem with the term “the Middle East” as coined by Western imperialists and discusses how Israel’s systematic murder of writers and poets in Gaza is part of a concerted effort to limit public knowledge about its crimes. The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

…more… interview transcript…

[xocetaceans]

1. He seems relatively unaware of things or might just have an ax to grind...in addition to a few reasonable points....

Examples of this — and there are hundreds — are Ben Affleck’s Argo and Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. In both films, Iranians and Iraqis are utterly dehumanized, and I don’t recall seeing any mainstream media critics calling this out. In Argo, for instance, the Iranians speak Persian throughout the film, and there are no subtitles (until the very end), which has the effect of making the antagonists even more menacing, but also more two dimensional. In American Sniper, all the Iraqi characters are presented as “hajis” and brutes, including women and children. I could go on, but you get the point.

It is funny that he thinks speaking Persian minimizes the Iranian roles. Speaking Persian is hardly a western narrative, but he seems to be grasping at straws and seems to be fairly imprecise in some of his statements in the interview.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, we lost our greatest enemy, and the evil Russians were soon replaced by Arab/Muslim terrorists. This has become such a trope that the dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims is rarely noticed and protested by U.S. film critics.

Who was it again who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993?

World Trade Center Bombing 1993

On February 26, 1993, at about 17 minutes past noon, a thunderous explosion rocked lower Manhattan.

The epicenter was the parking garage beneath the World Trade Center, where a massive eruption carved out a nearly 100-foot crater several stories deep and several more high.

Six people were killed almost instantly. Smoke and flames began filling the wound and streaming upward into the building. Those who weren’t trapped were soon pouring out of the building—many panic-stricken and covered in soot. More than a thousand people were hurt in some way, some badly, with crushed limbs.

Middle Eastern terrorism had arrived on American soil—with a bang.

...

https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/world-trade-center-bombing-1993

Of course, those acts of terrorism are among many other incidents:

• World Trade Center 9/11 (2001)
  
  
• USS Cole (Aden) (2000)
  
  
• US Embassy Bombings (Kenya and Tanzania) (1998)
  
  
• World Trade Center Bombing (as noted above) (1993)
  
  
• Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing (Scotland) (1988)
  
  
• La Belle Discotheque Bombing (Berlin) (1986)
  
  
• Beirut Bombing (Lebanon) (1983), etc.

It would be interesting to know if any of those stories in the analogy of fiction are about Middle Eastern regional cultural practices such as honor killings or FGM, etc.

[cbabe]

2. Your list is valid. And so would be a list

of western ‘atrocities’.

I don’t think is about bothsideerism but seeing ‘others’ as human.

I look forward to reading the stories to learn and imagine.

Irish vs British for generations, for example.

Or the current Kanak uprising in New Caledonia against colonial French rule.

[xocetaceans]

3. True, there is a lot to be learned from reading other perspectives.

One question that might be worth considering (...including by me) is how lived history versus reported history affects one's views of situations and personal and political circumstances. None of us have a universal perspective if that is even remotely possible. So, your statement regarding seeing people's humanity might be the best that can be done.

If you want more perspectives, here is a translated collection that is an interesting read:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Iraqi_Poetry_Today.html?id=xKMnAQAAIAAJ .

[NanaCat]

4. Strawman

It is funny that he thinks speaking Persian minimizes the Iranian roles. Speaking Persian is hardly a western narrative, but he seems to be grasping at straws and seems to be fairly imprecise in some of his statements in the interview.

The objection is not to the speaking pf Persian. It's that the filmmakers DID NOT PROVIDE SUBTITLES ABOUT WHAT THEY WERE SAYING. It dehumanized them to have them speaking, but not sharing with the audience what they were saying, as if their words didn't matter, only how 'threatening' their foreign-ness made them.

[xocetaceans]

5. All caps helps your argument immeasurably. If you feel fear in the presence of a foreign language, that's on you. n/t

[NanaCat]

6. Another strawman

I'd like to know how you can make the obnoxious claim that I'm afraid of hearing foreign languages, when I read foreign language at uni. I mean, do you really think I could have a degree in a foreign language (Japanese, if you're curious) if I were in any way afraid of hearing foreign languages?

You had no business whatsoever putting such ignorant and hateful words in my mouth when you knew bloody bugger all about what I think, never mind what I actually know, of foreign languages.

Furthermore, in your rush to misrepresent what I said by putting words in my mouth that I didn't say, you failed to recognise that the reason I condemned the lack of subtitles is because I know, better than you realise (thanks to numerous required cross-cultural courses to achieve my degree), how they did it to dehumanise those speaking Persian. Someone deciding the content of those films made the wilful decision to render the words those characters spoke incomprehensible to the viewers, simply to make those characters seem more frightening or even wholly evil. If they had translated the subtitles, we would have gotten something other than a cartoon representation of the characters.

Do you understand that point--at all?

By the way, the font in which I present my words has zero bearing on the validity of what I said. Saying 'THE SKY IS BLUE!' doesn't change that the sky is indeed blue. Attacking how one says something rather than addressing what one says is a cheap rhetorical device known as the style over substance fallacy.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Style-Over-Substance

So you were guilty of not one, but two logical fallacies in one post. I hope you realise that's not a good thing.

[xocetaceans]

7. You're too invested in this. Step away from the keyboard. n/t