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Ed Webb

Are books and movies promoting smoking and drinking? Erdogan thinks so - Al-Monitor: th... - 1 views

  • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan created a new controversy on Feb. 9, Turkey's Quit Smoking Day, when he appeared to link addiction to alcohol and tobacco to poetry, literature and cinema. In a country where censorship is already rife, his remark sparked concern that fresh restrictions might be in store.
  • Why did Erdogan’s words stir controversy, concern and criticism? To better understand the anxiety, one must examine some practices that became widespread in Turkey after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power.
  • Erdogan is known as a politician who never reads a book from cover to cover, but only summaries written by his aides. He is not known as an avid cinema fan, either, but is famous for reciting poems that mesh with his ideology and worldview
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  • Any image of cigarettes in movies aired on television must be blurred, even the smoke. The censored imagery has come to include drinks and bare female breasts. Subscription TV channels have also adopted the practice, blurring images of tobacco, alcohol, breasts and buttocks, despite their subscribers paying for a private service.
  • let's entertain the idea that Erdogan may be justified in associating smoking and drinking with literature, poetry and cinema in Turkey. Not so, according to scholars in the field.
Ed Webb

Arabic literature and the African other - 0 views

  • In 1992, Mazrui had a proposal: “The French once examined their special relationship to Africa and came up with the concept EURAFRICA as a basis of special cooperation. We in turn should examine the even older special relationship between Africa and the Arab World and call it AFRABIA.”
  • The project of “Afrabia,” as I interpret, would allow Africans to revisit a long history of the Islamic empire in Africa, its intersecting points with colonial projects subcontracted to Arab and South-Asian masters, as well as a shared history of decolonial struggles and anti-capitalist ambitions. For Arabs, it would mean a much-needed and long-overdue revision of their history, as well as of language and artistic expression that deal with Africa, blackness, and Afro-Arabs in reactionary, racist, and apolitical terms
  • Arabs, like their western teachers, when discussing anti-black racism and black issues, seem fixated on skin color, ideals of beauty, and visual representations; in a sense they express their own racial anxiety. It is as if anti-black racism has no history, trajectory, or realities beyond the stigma assigned to it, or the rhetoric surrounding it.
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  • When I use the term “Afro-Arab,” it is just my American lingua, not an actual term that Arab thinkers are trying to adopt or even consider. It is the kind of term you find in US academia but not in Arabic letters or political discussions. Even on the e-margins, young East and North Africans have been embracing their Africanness in opposition to Arabness, often citing Arab racism and exclusionary politics as reasons to depart from that historical bond.
  • I noticed how often Arab writers, including those North and East African, seem at ease when othering Africa—the bordered continent is harder for them to grasp than an imaginary “Arab World” made up by the French, and later appropriated by Arab nationalism. Moreover, the wildly inaccurate treatment of black experiences and cultures as one sum; from Zanzibar and Lagos to Havana and Detroit.
  • the Arab-Afro encounter seems more connected to the Americas and France, than to Africa itself
  • translations, references, and intertextual conversations, even by black Arabs, look toward Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, as well as African-American literature, and the civil rights era.
  • From one panel title “Black writer, White reader,” in a nod to Fanon, it was clear how the Arab fixation on black skin functions as an erasure of race, therefore assuming Arab is White
  • Arab writers, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and its apolitical introduction of identity politics into the region, have found an opportunity in writing about these groups which could get them translated and serve as primary literature for western academics and NGOs alike. Their white translators whisper to me “oh my god, this shit is racist” sometimes mediating in the process to clean up the language
Ed Webb

Translation project offers Israelis look into Palestinian literature - 0 views

  • Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews
  • The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.
  • The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.
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  • The first story in the compilation is by Gaza resident Sama Hassan, titled “No." It tells the story of a woman whose husband repeatedly rapes her, sometimes until she is bleeding, but she cannot utter the word “No." “… Over and over he cut into her flesh, which grew increasingly tough until she emitted a groan of pain. … You are nothing but the family’s property, was the first grating thought. Hands and womb, hands and womb." I told Burbara that the story had shocked me. I put the book aside and could not continue reading for a few days. “We put ‘No’ first on purpose,” she explained. “We wanted readers to feel and tell themselves, ‘Wow, what is she telling us? How will we learn more about the women in Gaza who are not heard.’”
  • Given the nationalistic climate in Israel, with a prime minister who incites hatred of Arabs, I asked Burbara how many Jewish Israelis she thought would read the book. “That is the million-dollar question,” she answered. “But I believe that if you start to drip water on a stone, it digs into its surface and leaves a mark. 'Amputated Tongue' is the first rain that will drip onto the Israeli stone and dig into it deeper and deeper.”
Ed Webb

Standard Arabic is on the Decline: Here's What's Worrying About That - 0 views

  • Standard Arabic, or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), is on the decline, and some are happy to see it go. However, it is important to note the factors driving this decline, and what this means for the region.
  • Though some rejoice in the strengthening of vernaculars, the so-called colloquials or dialects, as a sign of local identities gaining prominence, the withdrawal of MSA is in fact a warning about the weakening social infrastructure and declining education system.
  • When people speak of the decline of MSA, they generally refer to decline in literature, literacy, and increasing predilections to use dialects or foreign languages instead of MSA
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  • Even those who are not leaving often favor foreign languages over MSA. They see foreign languages as more functional, prestigious, and likely to guarantee them a job. Youth across the region often work entirely in a foreign language and are not comfortable in MSA
  • Censorship drives intellectuals abroad
  • Syria, once known for its Arabic academy for the study and development of the language, as well as for the fact that its entire education system up through university was in Arabic, is now destroyed. Refugees find themselves in countries where Arabic is not used in education. Even neighboring Lebanon uses English and French in its education system.
  • it is not contradictory to say that functional literacy is on the rise, but that access to and use of MSA—such as sophisticated literature and academic texts—is on the decline. The Arab world is now publishing only between 15,000 and 18,000 books annually, as many as Penguin Random House produces on its own. Egypt was once the largest producer of books with an output between 7,000 and 9,000 per year. Although its output was previously on the rise, it dropped by a whopping 70 percent after the 2011 revolution, and as of 2016 was only "showing signs of recovery."
  • With the depletion of educated classes, MSA is more and more limited to political and religious contexts, which are often associated with oppressive and conservative systems
  • the most popular TV shows and movies are done in the vernaculars. On social media, dialect dominates, though MSA is also used.
  • much of the media (articles and videos) that talk about MSA’s decline are in English
  • Local identities are not necessarily national identities, but are often subnational, so rather than showing strong national cohesion, it shows the failure of the Arab states to unite their populations.
  • In the past, when their economies were stronger, Arab states were able to build an educated class that was comfortable with MSA.
  • Hossam Abouzahr is the founder of the Living Arabic Project, a platform devoted to making Arabic more accessible by developing dictionaries for Arabic colloquials and MSA
Ed Webb

Israeli and Palestinian textbooks: Researchers have conducted a comprehensive study tha... - 0 views

  • “Dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other were very rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books.” The research team found 20 extreme negative depictions in the Israeli state books, seven in the ultra-Orthodox books, and six in the Palestinian books. An example of this rare occurrence from an Israeli book: A passage saying that a ruined Arab village “had always been a nest of murderers.” And an example from a Palestinian book: “I was in ‘the slaughterhouse’ for 13 days,” referring to an Israeli interrogation center. This could be a lot worse, right?
  • 84 percent of the literature pieces in the Palestinian books portray Israelis and Jews negatively, 73 percent of the pieces in the ultra-Orthodox books portray Palestinians and Arabs negatively, and only 49 percent of the pieces in Israeli state schools do the same. In an Israeli state school text, a passage reads: “The Arab countries have accumulated weapons and ammunition and strengthened their armies to wage a total war against Israel.” In the ultra-Orthodox, it ratchets up: “Like a little lamb in a sea of 70 wolves is Israel among the Arab states.” In the Palestinian case: “The enemy turned to the deserted houses, looting and carrying off all they could from the village that had become grave upon grave.” These statements aren’t necessarily false, but they are just one-sided and fearful—and they are rarely balanced by anything sunnier
  • The research team found that 58 percent of Palestinian textbooks published after 1967 (the year in which Israel took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria) made no reference to Israel. Instead, they referred to the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine. In the Israeli state system, 65 percent of maps had no borders and made no mention of Palestine or the Palestinian Authority, while in the ultra-Orthodox system that number was a staggering 95 percent.
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  • One striking difference between the Israeli state books on the one hand, and the ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian books on the other, is their willingness to engage in self-criticism. For the Israelis, this is an evolution that began in the late 1990s, after many historians began to re-evaluate early Israeli history, and a left-wing member of the Knesset became education minister. Israeli state textbooks began to admit that some Palestinians left their land within Israel because they were expelled. And they began to make reference to the Arabic name for Israel’s War of Independence in 1948: the Naqba, or Catastrophe. They also began ask Israeli Jewish students how they would have felt about Zionism if they’d been in the place of the Palestinians. There is still far less of this in either the ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian books. For example, the Palestinian texts don’t deal in any significant way with the Holocaust or its relationship to the founding of Israel.
  • just how politicized the teaching of history and geography has become for Israelis and Palestinians—with both sides at times quite literally wiping each other off the map. Not that Israelis and Palestinians are alone on this score. Think of Cyprus, where for decades Greek and Turk Cypriotes did not consider themselves part of a single people, or Northern Ireland, where even the name used to describe the territory continues to be highly charged. (Is it a province? A state? A region?) The process of ending such misrepresentations, the authors of the study find, is therefore “exceedingly difficult and requires deliberate and courageous effort.” It also takes time.
  • Palestinian textbooks are still in their first generation
  • Sociologist Sammy Smooha of Haifa University, who conducts an annual survey of Arab and Jewish relations, says that the goal now should be to write textbooks that do more to expose each side to the other’s narrative. “You have to engage with the other side’s arguments in a serious manner and not just build up a straw man in order to break it.” Eyal Naveh, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and the author of several textbooks for middle-school and high-school students, agrees. “If you ignore it, it’s as if it doesn’t exist,” he said.
  • a book called Side By Side that included a “dual narrative” of all major events in the region since 1917, through the Second Intifada in 2000. Naveh calls the book “a successful failure:” Though it had been lauded by the international press and continues to sell abroad, the book was banned by both the Israeli and Palestinian education ministries. Naveh now believes that getting such a textbook to become part of the Israeli and Palestinian curricula is “impossible.”
Ed Webb

Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere | Berkman... - 1 views

  • We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks.
  • Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously.
Ed Webb

How Putin's worldview may be shaping his response in Crimea - 0 views

  • The recent literature on Putin is correctly in drawing attention to his pro-Soviet imperialistic views: remember, to Putin the collapse of the USSR the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of 20th century. But what exactly this pro-Soviet worldview means is fairly poorly understood. To get a grasp on one needs to check what Putin’s preferred readings are. Putin’s favorites include a bunch of Russian nationalist philosophers of early 20th century – Berdyaev, Solovyev, Ilyin — whom he often quotes in his public speeches. Moreover, recently the Kremlin has specifically assigned Russia’s regional governors to read the works by these philosophers during 2014 winter holidays. The main message of these authors is Russia’s messianic role in world history, preservation and restoration of Russia’s historical borders and Orthodoxy.
  • another Putin’s favorite that was rumored to be very popular in his close circles a few years ago: “The Third Empire: Russia that Ought to Be” by Michael Yuriev. It’s a utopian fantasy written as a history book from a perspective of a 2054 Latin American narrator. The book describes how 2054 world order was established, and the process has a striking resemblance with contemporary Ukrainian events. It begins with a Recovery period of 2000-12, when the Great Russia starts its resurgence under the rule of Vladimir II the Restorer. Importantly the First Expansion that leads to reunification of significant territory occurs when Eastern and Southern Ukrainian regions rebel against west-organized Orange revolution (supported by western Ukraine). To help the revolting Ukrainians (that want to rejoin Russia) Vladimir II offers to include their Eastern territories into Russia. He then passes a referendum on those territories, and replaces the Russian Federation with the Russian Union (refer to the Custom Union) that also includes Belarus, Prednestrovie, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia
  • Again, it may sound implausible but that is exactly what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order“: alignments and wars among various civilizations — Western, Islamic, Chinese, Orthodox/Russian Latin etc. Notice that the Orthodox/Russian unity has already been restored in Russia. In response to the Ukrainian Church’s call to stop the Russian troops, Saturday a representative of Russia’s Orthodox Church suggested that Ukrainians shouldn’t resist the Russian military “peacekeepers.” Their mission – as was pointed out – is “to restore Russia’s historical unity.”
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  • This helps us to understand why western analysts keep misreading the motivation behind Putin’s actions. His reality is very different from the reality in which these analysts live. His goal is primarily to “recollect Russia’s historical territories” (which specific version of historical Russia he has in mind is for us to rediscover in the next episodes)
  • the concept of cultural clash has been deeply ingrained in the minds of today’s Russians
  • Surveys show that 88 percent of Kiev’s Euromaidan participants came from outside of the capital. Of those only half originated from the country’s western regions, while the other half came from the central and eastern Ukraine. Specifically as many as one fifth (20 percent) of protesters came from the eastern regions alone
  • country-level data is also against the Ukrainian cultural divide concept. A survey from the Razumkov Center, shows that as of late December 2013 an absolute majority of the population in both the Center (two thirds) and West (80 percent) of Ukraine supported the Euromaidan; this is in contrast to about 20-30 percent in the East and South. However, the share of population that did not express support for the Euromaidan protests remained undecided regarding the alternative option: not supporting the Maidan did not automatically equal supporting the Russian vector or Yanukovych
  • the preponderance of pro-Russia oriented media in the Russian-speaking East
  • these media actively emphasized the cultural divide. If anything, the notorious divide exists primarily within Eastern Ukraine alone
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    Outside our area, but note the importance attributed to media in shaping opinion, and also the apparent limits on its ability to do so.
Ed Webb

R22 | News - 0 views

  • undeterred by the overwhelming evidence that such policies are always destined to fail, governments continue to announce plans to block access to X-rated websites, often with large scale public support. In 2011, when many thought the days of Ben Ali-style censorship were coming to an end, a Tunisian court decreed that porn sites would henceforth be banned, as they “contravened the values of Arab Islamic society.” And just a few months before its overthrow, the Islamist government of Muhammad Morsi in Egypt thought nothing of dedicating endless hours to discussing a new $3.7 million anti-porn initiative. Clearly they didn’t think their country had bigger priorities
  • Put simply, porn is BIG in the Arab world. According to Google AdWords, the 22 Arab states account for over 10% of the world’s searches for “sex”; A total of 55.4 million unique monthly Google “sex” searchers in the 22 (ignoring a further 24 million searches for “sex” transliterated into Arabic) that matches both the United States and India, two countries often cited as world leaders in porn consumption
  • when these numbers are adjusted to reflect people’s ready access to the Internet (which ranges from 85% of the population in the UAE to just 1.4% in Somalia) Arab Google searches for “sex” outweigh those from almost anywhere else worldwide. As per AdWords, for every 100 Arab Internet users, an average of 52 searches are made each month, compared to 21 in the United States, 36 in India, 45 in France and 47 in Pakistan
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  • But how should we interpret these figures? In the West, where the Muslim world is often seen as a place that doesn’t “do” sex, stories that reveal supposedly traditional societies to be hotbeds of depravity gain wide traction in the media as amusing exposes. Religious conservatives in the Arab world meanwhile draw on evidence of a growing porn habit as proof of the “corrupting” influence of Western values, and the need to return to the supposedly pristine morals of the past. For example, the leading Saudi Internet “expert”, Dr Mishal bin Abdullah al-Qadhi, regularly warns that porn sites are part of an insidious Western plot. “The people of the West”, he wrote, in one particularly damning diatribe, “with their corrupt values, reprehensible principles and pernicious sicknesses, are not content to reveal their vices and sins […] to themselves alone, but continuously strive to spread these afflictions and sicknesses to the lands of Islam.”  In reality, both reactions rely on ahistorical ideas about the role of sex in Arab society. Instead, as the writer and academic Shereen El Feki, author of Sex and the Citadel, points out in a discussion with Raseef22, there really is nothing shocking about the revelation that Arabs watch porn. Before the twentieth century and the rise of the modern state, Arab culture had a long tradition of erotic imagery in literature and music. Medieval books such as The Perfumed Garden and the Encyclopaedia of Pleasure may have had a factual purpose, but they were also read for pleasure. “They are meant to arouse,” explains El Feki, “they are pornography. These notions of pornography as some sort of alien entity to Arab culture are completely untrue.”
  • Sexual desires are a universal phenomenon, and when conventional means to fulfilling those desires are restricted – for example through strict rules about pre-marital sex and an accompanying range of socio-economic impediments to getting married – it is hardly surprising, that people turn to their computers for help.
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