More than a quarter of a century after independence, the Maghrib’s Francophone literary output is flourishing. If one adds to this the Beur literature produced by second and third generation immigrants of North African heritage, Maghribi literature in French appears to be the single most important literary and aesthetic phenomenon permeating French culture today. One of the most important exponents of this literature is Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Moroccan recipient of the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1987. The warm critical reception of his two novels, The Sand Child and The Sacred Night (translated by Alan Sheridan, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1987 and 1989), epitomizes the increasing popularity and success of Maghribi literature in French.
During four months in Oxford last fall, I spent part of my time pursuing the charge of my editorial colleagues to seek out new and distinctively British approaches to the Middle East. My main finding is that British nostalgia for empire, which many North Americans came to know in the popular television series The Jewel in the Crown, has expanded its geographic ambit beyond the Indian raj and encompassed the Middle East as well. The prominent display of large quantities of several new books of this genre in the book shops of Oxford and London suggests that they appeal to an audience beyond Middle East specialists.
For the people of Şirnak, a Kurdish town of 15,000 located at the foot of the Cudi Mountains in southeastern Turkey, the grave of 16-year old Zayide is something of a shrine. A guerrilla fighter with the separatist Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK), Zayide was killed five years ago in a skirmish in Şirnak between the PKK and the Turkish army. Local myth has it that bulldozers trying to break the ground for her grave were mysteriously unable to do so in the spot ordered by government authorities. Zayide was buried instead in an empty lot on the outskirts of the town, and her grave is now surrounded by half a dozen smaller ones — parents believe it is good luck to bury their dead children nearby.
“There’s not much talk about the Kurds because we have never taken any hostages, never hijacked a plane. But I am proud of this.” So wrote Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou, the Iranian Kurdish leader who was assassinated in Vienna last July. The Kurdish Institute of Paris and France-Libertes, a human rights foundation sponsored by Danielle Mitterand, organized a conference in Paris October 14-15, 1989, precisely to remedy the cynical international neglect of the Kurdish question. Some French government quarters clearly had misgivings, particularly concerning the impact on relations with Iraq. A measure of French sensitivity and Iraqi pressure was an attempt to introduce into the conference the president of Iraq’s so-called Kurdish Autonomy Zone.
Since the regime of King Hassan is a long-time ally of the United States, what little attention Morocco’s human rights record receives in this country is usually hidden under a haze of comparisons with egregious violators like Iran and Iraq. Yet Morocco detains hundreds of political prisoners. Some have been held incommunicado since 1972. Arrests of student activists continue, and judicial and legal proceedings remain perfunctory at best.
Editorial from the English-language Kuwaiti paper, Arab Times, December 26, 1989:
The proverb says, “When your neighbor shaves his beard you should prepare your beard also for shaving.” Similarly many leaders should prepare themselves to face the same fate as the deposed Romanian leader.
People of many countries will certainly learn from the Romanian lesson and will severely punish their leaders. In the Middle East, there are many such regimes who have oppressed their people, destroyed their economic resources, suppressed their personal freedom and turned their countries into beggars seeking gifts and aid from others.
Satanic Comics A Tunisian writer’s attempt to spread the message of the Qur’an in comic book form has incurred greater wrath than he could have anticipated. Youssef Seddik, a Tunisian academic living in Paris, has been branded “a new Salman Rushdie” by the head of Islamic jurisprudence at Kuwait University, AP reported. Seddik created the comic, “If the Qur’an Were Told to Me,” narrated with exact quotes from the holy book, in an attempt to popularize Islam among young people.
The Prix Goncourt, always the biggest literary event of the year in France, became even more so in 1987, when the venerable Goncourt Academy named Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun as its eightieth laureate. In French literary circles, reaction to the selection of Ben Jelloun’s novel, La Nuit saerde, contained an unmistakable current of relief, as if to say that the situation of the Arab community in France really could not be so bad if a North African received the Prix Goncourt. Within that Arab community, the optimism was somewhat more guarded (about the book as well as the prize), but certainly no one regretted the increased visibility that the award brought to French-language North African literature.
In early 1989, the movement toward Maghribi integration, coupled with signs of a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Western Sahara, generated a great deal of optimism. The reality a year later is far less rosy. The major factor is Morocco’s procrastination in moving forward with the UN peace plan which it, along with the Sahrawi independence movement, Polisario, agreed to in August 1988.
The first months after Habib Bourguiba’s overthrow in November 1987 witnessed an ambiguous honeymoon between the new regime and the Islamists. Bourguiba himself was under a form of house arrest in Monastir, his native town. Squares named after his birthday, August 3, 1903, were renamed November 7, the day of the coup. Some of his statues were pulled down, but many streets were still named after him and his grand mausoleum and mosque were well tended in Monastir. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the coupmaker who had worked as minister of interior and prime minister under Bourguiba, presented himself as a man of “renewal” and called for political pluralism and respect for human rights. He opened a dialogue with the opposition forces, socialist and Islamist.
Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco constitute a geocultural entity. They all went through a period of French colonization and they became independent during roughly the same period in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the similarities, though, the three countries engaged in markedly different policies in regard to family law and women’s rights from the time of national independence to the mid-1980s. Tunisia adopted the most far-reaching changes whereas Morocco remained most faithful to the prevailing Islamic legislation and Algeria followed an ambivalent course.
Until October 1988, the most severe challenge to Algerian President Chadli Benjedid’s perestroika came not in industrial plants or in party forums. Instead, it came in the form of street protests by masses of disaffected, unemployed and marginalized young people refusing to be manipulated by the state. The most important was the November 1986 protests of students in Constantine which led to riots throughout the eastern region. [1]
Mahfoud Bennoune, a contributing editor of this magazine, is a veteran of the Algerian war of independence and currently teaches at the University of Algiers. He is the author of The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830-1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Nabeel Abraham spoke with him in Detroit in December 1989.
Was the FLN [National Liberation Front] party congress in November 1989 a special event, an outgrowth of the October 1988 riots?
The startling changes that have transformed the political landscape of Eastern Europe in 1989 may have no equivalent in the Middle East exactly, but that region has seen some remarkable developments nonetheless. The Arab versions of perestroika, or restructuring, while less profound in comparison with those of Czechoslovakia or Poland, reflect certain realignments of political forces. No regimes have toppled — yet. But from Palestine and Jordan in the Arab east (the Mashriq) to Algeria in the west (the Maghrib), a phenomenon of intifada, or uprising, is challenging the static politics of repression that have prevailed for many years.
Events elsewhere in the world — elections in Nicaragua, death squads in South Africa and recent decisions by the European Commission — hold much instruction for people concerned with the Middle East. Elections, after all, are not the same as democracy. After ten years of US armed intervention and economic aggression, a majority of Nicaraguans voting on February 25 chose an alternative to 10,000 percent inflation, to pervasive shortages, to the killings and sabotage of the Contras. “Sandinistas Lose the Hunger Vote” was the accurate headline in the Financial Times. The winning opposition front was cobbled together and financed by the State Department.
Invaluable Analysis
Since late 1988, MAPAM (The United Workers’ Party) has been among the Israeli political forces favoring Israeli-PLO negotiations which might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Yossi Amitay’s Ahvat amim bamivhan: MAPAM 1948-1954: emdot besugiyot araviyei eretz yisra’el [Brotherhood of Nations on Trial: MAPAM, 1948-1954: Positions on Palestinian-Arab Issues] (Tel Aviv: Tcherikover, 1988) provides a timely opportunity to place MAPAM’s current views in historical perspective. Amitay examines MAPAM’s stand on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the first six years of Israel’s statehood, when the party represented a kibbutz-based alliance of all the socialist-Zionist tendencies to the left of Ben Gurion’s MAPAI.
Back in 1976, a college student acquaintance of mine, Jay Pollard, used to talk in great detail about his work for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. I listened for hours, even if I never quite believed his stories. Eleven years later, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would tell the court that convicted Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, of stealing 360 cubic feet of classified material for Israel: “It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”
From its very beginning, Western cinema has been fascinated with the mystique of the Orient. Whether in the form of pseudo-Egyptian movie palaces, Biblical spectaculars, or the fondness for “Oriental” settings, Western cinema has returned time and again to the scene of the Orient. [1] Generally these films superimposed the visual traces of civilizations as diverse as Arab, Persian, Chinese and Indian into a single portrayal of the exotic Orient, treating cultural plurality as if it were a monolith. The Arabic language, in most of these films, exists as an indecipherable murmur, while the “real” language is European: the French of Jean Gabin in Pepe le Moko or the English of Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca.
Foreign Aid? In a story which the US media largely ignored, sources within the CIA say that the French government loaned two of its top chemists to Lebanese drug dealers early in 1988 as part of a deal to secure the release of three French hostages. The Toronto Star reported in mid-November 1989 that the French chemists provided technical assistance for processing heroin, in return for which the drug dealers used their good offices to get the hostages released a few months later. The same sources also insist that there was a secret cell within the CIA itself which was running a drugs-for-hostages operation.
