Science Fiction by, about, and for Arabs: Case Studies in De-Orientalising the Western

Imagination
Author(s): Emad El-Din Aysha
Source: ReOrient , Autumn 2020, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 2020), pp. 4-19
Published by: Pluto Journals

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/reorient.6.1.0004

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Pluto Journals is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ReOrient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR
ARABS: CASE STUDIES IN DE-ORIENTALISING
THE WESTERN IMAGINATION
Emad El-Din Aysha

Abstract: Orientalism is a much maligned concept. While geared to the service of the
Western colonial sense of superiority, Orientalism is, at base, a loose set of symbols and
motifs that is more geared towards an introspective critique of the West itself. It repre-
sents certain internal antagonisms and Western anxieties that emerge in confrontations
with the East over gender and sexuality. This becomes evident when it comes to Western
science fiction (written and filmed) among other popular genres and specifically when
applied to Arabs and Muslims (the “classical” East). Hitherto, most literature on the Ori-
entalism evident in Western SF has focused on the Far East, via Techno-Orientalism and
Cyber-Punk. The growing strength of Arab and Muslim SF, however, can counter these
Orientalist tendencies in the genre; taking Egyptian SF as a test case. Western SF, more-
over, can set its own house in order in the meantime, since SF allows for symbolic substi-
tutes to existential threats traditionally posed by the East in the Western imagination.

Keywords: Edward Said, pop art, Techno-Orientalism, classic Orient, Arabic science fiction,
agenda-setting, male sexuality

“From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had
become science and regulation.”

Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

The late Edward Said designated Orientalism as a self-serving, ethnocentric

image of the East, constructed in the West to further Western colonial interests
(Shabanirad and Marandi 2015). This image designates the East as necessarily
primitive, backwards, superstitious, and chaotic, and therefore in dire need of
Western intervention to rescue the natives from their faith and cultural heritage
(Abu-Lughod 2002).

Contributing editor to The Levant, a publication of the Beirut Center for Middle East Studies,
a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction and the Egyptian Writer’s Union. Personal
email: em14aysha@gmail.com

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 5

This is not the end of the story, however. This is because Edward Said never
fully adapted his research to the topics of American literature, with its emphasis
on social science and its geographical isolation from the Near East, and popular
culture and genres; Said’s field of specialisation was always nineteenth-century
classical literature (Rowe 2011). Even when it came to classic literature Said
identified a paradoxical feature of Orientalism but without fully exploring or
explaining it, namely, the sexual anxieties posed by the East in the Western imagi-
nation. To cite a key passage in Said:

Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and
threat) . . . is something on which one could speculate . . . Nevertheless one must
acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes
even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists . . . (Said 1979: 188; my italics)

There has been work generated about Orientalism in the realm of science fiction
(SF) but the focus, sadly, has been predominantly on depictions of the Far East in
Western sci-fi – the subset of Orientalism known as Techno-Orientalism, a term orig-
inally coined by David Morely and Kevin Robins (1995). From the 1980s onwards
SF was bombarded with portrayals of coldly scheming and non-individualistic East
Asians who posed a threat specifically because of how advanced they were, eco-
nomically and technologically (Morley and Robins 1995: 6, 151, 161). Hence, the
role of the Yakuza as the criminal policers of cyberspace in William Gibson’s works
and the all-powerful Japanese Zik Zak mega-corporation in Max Headroom.
Alas, the classical East – the Arab world, Middle East, India, and Central
Asia – is not touched on nearly enough in literary studies on SF. Two authors
who have done considerable work both to highlight the role of Arabs-Muslims
in SF and popular art, along with tackling the paradoxical anxieties Edward Said
highlighted, are Marei Lathers and John Carlos Rowe. Lathers’s seminal Space
Oddities: Women and Outer Space in Popular Film and Culture, 1960–2000 (2010)
explored the place of women in Western science fiction and related Orientalist
motifs, while Rowe dealt with sexuality and political paranoia in American pop
culture works, including I Dream of Jeannie, 24, and Homeland (Rowe 2011).
This article endeavours to expand on this work and fill critical gaps in Edward
Said’s initial analysis of Orientalism by focusing on science fiction.
It emerges that Orientalism is not as hostile to the East as was once thought,
while the Arab-Islamic East has imbibed a considerable measure of Orientalism
itself. Remember that a key plank in the Orientalist assault on Islam is the “history
of science”. To quote nineteenth-century American missionary and medical doc-
tor, Van Dyck: “Although great praise may justly be given to the Arab nation as the
preservers of science . . . they deserve none as discoverers” (quoted in Determann

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
6 REORIENT

2018: 55). Tragically a great deal of early Arab SF was openly hostile to sci-
ence, taking it as a modern and invariably Western import, positing the presumed
spiritualism of the East – itself a Western construction – as an antidote. It is the
argument of this article that the real antidote to Orientalism is a newer breed of
Arab-Muslim science fiction that openly embraces science, but on its own cul-
tural terms. The very threat posed by Japan in the Western imagination is that
it “offers a way beyond that simple binary logic that differentiates modern and
traditional . . . between Occident and Orient” – a country that is both modern but
calls “white modernity” into question (Morley and Robins 1995: 171). Legendary
SF theorist Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. adds that SF from the Global South opens
up opportunities for the marginalised peoples of the world to usurp the very “tools
of hegemony” from the West; in the past Western literature imagined bright tech-
nological futures where they predominated over alien worlds just as they did over
the coloured races of this world (2002: 17).
In the following pages the author will first present an alternative reading of
Orientalism to tease out both the good and the bad, relying on numerous works of pop
art, SF included. Instead of understanding Orientalism as nothing but an imperialist
project, the case will be made that it is more a mode of self-exploration, directed at
the West, relying on external signifiers (Orientalist imagery). Given the complexity
of the subject-matter, this first section will be divided into two subsections. From
there the article will move onto the contemporary Arab literary scene as regards SF
and how Muslim authors, old and young, are actively engaging with Western literary
norms and artistic motifs. (The emphasis will be on science fiction produced in Egypt,
the country the author is most familiar with, and where most Arabic SF is written.)
The final section contains a reappraisal of Western SF in light of the conclu-
sions reached earlier in the paper. This will drive the final nail into the coffin of
Orientalism; the badly conceived variety of it, at the very least.

Sex, Sameness, and Difference in the Oriental Mirror

Between Occidental and Oriental masculinities
Two points must be understood about Orientalism and Western science fiction
from early on. The first is that the “classical” Orient of colonialism has always
been evident in Western SF and almost from the very beginning. Metropolis
(1927) opens with the “Eternal Garden” sequence, reminiscent of the hanging gar-
dens of Babylon, with the classical Orientalist motif of peacocks as well. There is
the cabaret sequence where the robot version of Maria titillates the hungry male
onlookers with her sexualised antics, while black slaves hold up the seashell-like
box she comes out of. Science fiction is about fantasies, after all, and white male
fantasies more often than not (Rieder 2008).

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 7

The second point is that when the Orient makes its way into Western literature
and popular art, it is the West that is on the defensive half the time.
Following from the Edward Said quote above, John Carlos Rowe goes even
further, clarifying that the anxieties evident in Orientalism are over male sexuality
specifically (Rowe 2011). Men holding hands or kissing each other are com-
mon practices in the East, behaviour that was zeroed-in on by Orientalists, and
frowned upon. Hence, the frequent depictions of Oriental men wearing earnings –
an effort to make them look effeminate. Part of the ideology of imperialism and
the vanquishing of other inferior nations involved sexualising conquest, like a
man dominating a woman. Rana Kabani has documented this in Western travel
literature too in her books Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myths of Orient (1994) and
Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (1986).
This carries on almost by necessity into the world of science fiction. As Marei
Lathers explains, women in SF movies for the longest time were invariably tied
to “mother” earth as much as women were tied to the household in non-genre
fiction and art (Lathers 2009). Watch minor classics like It! The Terror from
Beyond Space (1958), Outland (1981) and Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962),
and you will find women consigned to tediously domestic roles – even if they are
scientists on board a spaceship – or sneaking away from their (macho) husbands
to head back to earth, or being used by alien intelligences to tempt an all-male
crew from their mission; in that order. It was almost taken for granted that the
frontier-like domain of space is a place meant for men only. The whole point
of I Dream of Jeannie, cited by both Rowe and Lathers, was to keep women at
home; they were to satisfy themselves with magic, whilst leaving the science to
the men – sharing in her man’s glory, as it were, as the dutiful wife supporting
(but not participating in) outerspace exploration. Very comforting for men, espe-
cially in an era when women began agitating for their rights; action flicks in the
1980s also resulted in part from a need to reassert manliness thanks to women
entering the workplace.
The fly in the ointment, however, was Oriental men. Note that the original front
cover of Edward Said’s Orientalism was taken from the classic Orientalist paint-
ing, The Snake Charmer (1880), by Jean-Léon Gérôme, which depicts a naked
boy in front of a bunch of dirty old men. This is a recurring motif in works of
popular art. In the comic-book adaptation of Blade (1998), for instance, with the
(half-human) vampire hunter Blade making his way into an Asian nightclub only
to see Japanese teenage girls doing a rap performance in front of a bunch decadent
old men, Asiatic gangster types dressed in business suits. The guests notice who
has just entered the club, but recline further into their chairs, expecting the staff to
take care of the problem for them. (Vampires are a traditional stand-in for decadent
aristocrats and financial capitalists.)

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
8 REORIENT

More explicit still is a rather uneventful espionage thriller by Norman Lang, The
Last Ramadan (1991). The protagonist of the story, Ibrahim Khalil, is an aristo-
cratic Egyptian hired by the Russians to assassinate Abdel-Nasser in 1960s Egypt.
He enters the country disguised as a Syrian businessman and a local hotel barman
tries to get on his good side and tells him of a seedy nightclub with a blonde,
English snake charmer who can pleasure him if the price is right. (The barman is
willing to get the customer anything he wants, including boys, and his sweet sister
is the go-between in his dealings with the snake charmer; Lang 1991: 3).
The Orientalist themes become most evident, however, in a Turkish bath
sequence. You are told how Khalil accidentally spies two men there “who looked
like Musselman warriors. Baggy pants, broad, naked torsos, one with a shaven
head. They looked at Khalil impassively” (Lang 1991: 54). A martial standoff,
then, with muscles on display, although the men in question are comfortable get-
ting undressed in front of other men. Ibrahim Khalil is in tiptop shape himself
and the other attendants are “impressed” at how well developed he is, and in a
completely non-sexual way, as the author himself goes to great length to state.
This admiration seems to turn the hero on, giving him a slight erection (Lang
1991: 54–5). Khalil also spies a young boy there masturbating and has the near
uncontrollable urge to sodomise him, although he’s as heterosexual as they come
(Lang 1991: 55).
The same sexual connotations are evident in the screen adaption of The Day of
the Jackal, where the quintessentially British assassin (played by the very blond
Edward Fox) dyes his hair black and heads off to a Turkish bath. (He finds a
homosexual man there, on purpose, to hide out at his place from the authorities.)
No such scene existed in Frederic Forsyth’s original novel. Instead the hired gun
goes to a Parisian gay bar, dressed as a transvestite. (Who is going to be able to
identify him with a wig and makeup on?) The same gendered depictions emerge
in Occidental SF. In John Brunner’s The Web of Everywhere, for instance, you
have an Egyptian who has a taste for boy eunuchs. In his classic The Shockwave
Rider there is an Iraqi snake-eater at a circus scene (more on this below). Given
the above analysis, however, it emerges that Orientalism is not so much concerned
with the East as it is with the West.
Even with the Orientalist and colonial imagery on display in Metropolis, we
must remember that the story is about Utopia-dystopia, with the thematic emphasis
on class distinctions and science in the service of power. Workers are objectified,
turned into things and treated like mindless robots, as much as Maria is trans-
formed by the (very Faustian) inventor C. A. Rotwang.
To cite Edward Said himself, Flaubert commented to a friend once that “the
oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one
man and another man” (quoted in Said 1979: 187). In Metropolis, however, this

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 9

is condemned, meaning that the Orientalist imagery in the movie is just imagery.
Much the same holds true of the equally anti-mechanistic Blade Runner, as we
shall now see.

Differentiating good from bad Orientalism

A key sequence in Blade Runner has the twenty-first-century bounty hunter,
Rick Deckard, tracking and gunning down the replicant Zhora, playing at being a
stripper/exotic dancer whose “act” involves a python. (Her character may as well
have been torn out of the Gérôme painting, and the director admitted in the Final
Cut audio commentary that the creation of “exotic” women was a theme in the
movie, hence Rachael and Pris.) But to get to her Deckard first has to go to the
animart, where he is directed by an old Cambodian woman to Abdul Bin Hassan,
the Egyptian who makes artificial snakes; a bloated individual sporting a fez who
is the spitting image of the late King Farouk. (There is also a statue of a black slave
boy with a fez in the sequence at J. F. Sabastian’s.)
This encounter leads him to a seedy nightclub in Chinatown run by Taffey
Lewis, a thinly disguised pimp stereotype. In a deleted scene you learn that
Deckard, before becoming a blade runner, used to police the streets at strip
clubs just like Taffey’s. Heading back there is a trip down memory lane for him.
What is really on display in Blade Runner is the capitalist commodification of
women. When Deckard meets Zhora – her stage name is the biblical “Salome” –
he pretends to be an official from the American Federation of Variety Artists,
the made-up confidential committee on moral abuses. (He’s not interested in
making her join the union, however.) In a deliberately ironic piece of superb
scriptwriting, Deckard asks her (stripper that she is) if she has ever felt herself
to be “exploited” or forced to do anything “lewd or unsavory, or . . . otherwise
repulsive to your person?” Then he pretends to look around for holes in the
walls: “You’d be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a
beautiful body.” Zhora/Salome’s correct reply (given the nature of her job) is:
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Zhora was originally a pleasure model replicant reprogrammed for assassina-
tion. When she makes a run for it, bursting out of the door of her dressing room,
you see another stripper dressed identically to her, signifying how generic her
function is as eye-candy. When she is finally shot by Deckard, she is running
through a display of mannequins, highlighting her status as an object.
The director, Ridley Scott, to his considerable credit is exploring the Western
obsession with the Orient, what it is that Occidental travellers are looking for in
the East; he is not endorsing it. They’re looking for what they can’t get at home, a
land of lustful excess instead of the puritanical land of industrial restrictions that
they operate in daily.

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
10 REORIENT

That is the restrictive, grey, smokestack kind of world that we see in Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). The exotic there is represented by the theme song,
“Brazil”, along with Orientalist signifiers, presented side-by-side with other
imagery taken from European history. In the scene where Sam Lowry is talk-
ing to his mother, while the plastic surgeon literally stretches her face, you see
Ottoman architecture and wall tiles, making the place look like Topkapi Palace
or the Blue Mosque in Turkey. Later you have a fancy ball party where the pillars
in the hall look ancient Egyptian. The security guards, however, are dressed like
decadent eighteenth-century aristocrats (with the wigs and tights). Even in that
first scene, you have a naked Greco-Roman statue in the background. (Not to
be outdone, the snake tamer in The Shockwave Rider is at a Roman-style circus;
Brunner 1995: 160).
Orientalism is a colonial project, as Edward Said says, but at base it is a lan-
guage of symbols and visual signifiers that Westerners can recognise and use to
better comprehend themselves, and those symbols can be used in any way you
like – even turned on their heads. Such is the case with Prince of Persia: Sands
of Time (2010). The wisdom and mercy of the Persian Empire is extolled from
the word go, probably as a rejoinder to American imperialism with the Iraq War.
And while you do have a stereotypical rough and tumble Arab (played by Alfred
Molina), with an African servant, you learn later that the servant is loyal to the
Arab merchant because the man saved his life. He’s not a slave and does not pro-
tect the Arab’s harem, as it were, in marked variance to Orientalist paintings that
often juxtapose black slaves to Arab lords and their pasty white women.
The bigger problem, it emerges, is not so much the vilification of Arabs and
Muslims in Western sci-fi but how unimportant they are. There is a long history
of this in Western literature, as John Carlos Rowe catalogues in “Arabia fantasia:
U.S. literary culture and the Middle East” (2012) and “Orientalism in Poe’s early
poetry” (2018). In his study of Edgar Allen Poe in particular it emerges that, as
in love as Poe was with the mysticism and heroism of the Orient, nonetheless his
“romantic Orientalism seems more stylistic and rhetorical than a commentary on
the culture, politics, and religions of the Middle East” (Rowe 2018: 3).
Even when Arabs and Muslims are depicted in a positive light, as in Frank
Herbert’s Dune Chronicles or Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and
Starship Troopers, it’s still tongue-in-cheek. The Islamicite Fremen,1 as central
as they are to Herbert’s epic, never seem to be able to get their act together with-
out the help of House Atreidies (descended from Agamemnon). With the pending
release of the movie remake of Dune, some in SF circles have noted how Herbert’s
epic fits into the “white savior” narrative, to the detriment of the invariably
coloured natives (Asher-Perrin 2019). As for Heinlein, the Muslims that people his
worlds are portrayed in a good light, but by his standards, since they are invariably

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 11

Assassins (Hashshin). That is, heterodox Ismaili Shiites who are hardly represen-
tative of mainstream Islam, busily drinking alcohol, having extramarital sex, and
not taking the Qur’an as the literal and final word of God. How convenient for his
purposes when it comes to condemning the established faiths and opening the way
for the prophet-to-be Valentine Michael Smith.
Again Poe is instructive, since his “Orientalism is typical of English roman-
ticism’s use of Middle Eastern and Asian characters and settings to allegorize
Western problems” (Rowe 2018: 13; my italics). Arabs and Muslims, in reality, are
tangential to the concerns of these authors. They are mentioned in passing, almost
as stage props, meant to facilitate what the author is trying to get at elsewhere
entirely in terms of subject-matter. These works have Arabs and Muslims in them,
but are not necessary “about” Islam and the Arab world as such. Still, the lesson
learnt here is that there is no necessary animosity between Western SF and the East
and that there is much that is praiseworthy and salvageable in Orientalism itself.
One such example of this in Blade Runner is the scene where Zhora dies. The
camera eventually pans out and you find a neon dragon over Deckard’s head. You
later see a metal dragon statue when Deckard is buying a drink, to wash away
his sense of guilt. (There is also a neon dragon in the background when Deckard
fires his first shot.) Querying a Chinese friend on what dragons symbolise she
explained it was an emblem used exclusively by the emperor; a solar motif signi-
fying his divine rulership. Deckard, then, is exercising the power of life and death
over others, something he clearly should not be doing.
As Morley and Robins themselves speculate, the “resentment expressed against
Japanese technology” in Western SF could very well be an “unconscious and pri-
mal hatred” of Western modernity, the totalitarian encroachment of modernity
against the individual (1995: 170). Now to move to the rejoinder of Arabic and
Islamic science fiction.

Agenda-Setting in Old/New Egyptian SF

Picking apart Orientalism is one thing, putting forth a viable alternative is some-
thing else entirely. What would a pro-Muslim science fiction look like? At bare
minimum, it must be scientifically empowering. Arguing about the pitfalls and
dangers of scientific arrogance is in proper order but Muslims have to stake their
claim to the future, to scientific and technological advance, to good governance
and women’s rights, ecology, etc.
Fortunately, Arab SF has been moving in this direction, if slowly, at least in
Egypt to the author’s knowledge. (Unless otherwise stated, all translations are
the author’s own.) Early Egyptian SF was originally very anti-scientific and anti-
modern, fearful of the Faustian bargain implicit in scientific advance. The great

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
12 REORIENT

Egyptian author, playwright, and literary critic Tawfik Al-Hakim was one of the
first to write Arabic SF in the 1950s, but his stories tended towards clichéd con-
demnations of science interfering with preordained fate. In his radio play If Only
the Young Knew a medical doctor finds a way to regenerate organic tissues and
so rejuvenate the old. Yet the old man who regains his youth becomes shunned
by society, even his own family – no one recognises him, thinking he killed the
old man and stole his identity – and the man eventually goes back to the doctor to
make him the way he originally was. Then he wakes up and we discover it was all
just a bad dream (Al-Sharouni 2002: 102–5).
The great Islamic thinker, Dr Mustafa Mahmoud, who is credited with penning
some of the first Arab SF novels, was also worried about science. In his otherwise
brilliant The Spider (1965), you have an engineer who has found a way to tap into
genetic memories (using radiation treatment to stimulate the nuclei of brain cells).
The engineer comes to a sticky end, having used the technique one too many times
on himself. But the narrator of the story – a medical doctor who was treating him –
takes his place, travelling backwards in time through his inherited memories. (He
couldn’t stand the temptation, like a kid in a candy store, or Adam plucking an
apple from the tree of knowledge, to borrow the author’s own phrasing.) But the
doctor himself dies through a tragic accident at the end (Al-Sharouni 2002: 143–
6). As if by the hand of fate, the electricity wire feeding the radiation machine was
faulty and burnt the whole place to cinders.
Even well into the 1970s you had similarly themed novels and stories like
Saad Mikawi’s “The Living Dead” (1973), where a doctor devises a drug that can
bring the dead back to life, only to discover that he’s produced living carcasses
with no souls. Again, he’s disturbing the God-ordained natural order of things
(Al-Sharouni 2002: 132–3). The Dean of Arabic SF, Nihad Sharif, was always
worried that humanity, in its scientific arrogance, would blow itself up through
a thermo-nuclear war. Spiritualism and humility in the face of God are called for
to counterbalance this too-rapid technological advance, in his explicitly stated
opinion (Al-Sharouni 2002: 44). This was in reference to Sharif’s classic novel,
The People in the Second World (1977), about a colony at the bottom of the
ocean created by scientists desperately trying to prevent the Cold War turning
into a hot war. Yousef Al-Sharouni, a famous Arab literary critic and patron of
SF, compared Sharif’s novel to the dystopian novel, The Blue Flood (1976),
by Moroccan author Ahmed Abd Al-Salam Al-Baqali (Al-Sharouni 2002: 190).
Here a group of rebel scientists isolate themselves, in a secret mountain hide-
away, also wary of a world heading towards nuclear disaster. The only catch
is that the supercomputer to which they entrust their fate decides to wipe out
mankind and control the chosen few remaining. Science always seems to be an
avenue to self-destruction regardless of who is using it, the idealist rebels or the

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 13

powers that be. (An earlier novel by Moroccan author Muhammad Aziz Lahbabi
has the secret of immortality also leading to the unmaking of humanity as poor
and rich fight over The Elixir of Life; Campbell 2015). And Baqali’s novel deals
very explicitly with the issue of modernity versus tradition, with the residents of
the scientific colony also enjoying a very explicitly Western hedonistic lifestyle
(Campbell 2017: 44).
There was also The Crime of a Scientist in 1990, a novel by a female author,
Dr Umayma Khafagi, an Egyptian studying genetic engineering in the Soviet
Union. Her novel was published in Moscow, just before the fall of communism,
and tells the tale of a devilish scientist who produces a human-chimpanzee hybrid.
Everything goes wrong in the end, with the mother carrying the baby (the doc-
tor’s own wife) dying during the Caesarean birth; the resulting girl hybrid refuses
to speak and expose that she is intelligent to the authorities (Al-Sharouni 2002:
75–81). The critics noted how pessimistic the overall story is, with no positive
applications of bioengineering touched upon whatsoever, even in horticulture
or pharmaceuticals or livestock. Progress is roundly condemned in the novel
(Al-Sharouni 2002: 80), and the scientist in question decided to sacrifice love in
the pursuit of knowledge.
If you watch Egyptian movies, one of the actors they insist on casting to play
the character of the scientist is Hussein Fahmi, an actor of Circassian extraction
who is blond and blue-eyed – as if science is foreign and so antithetical to our
values and customs.2 This recollects the aforementioned Orientalist narrative that
depicts the scientific revolution as a purely Western enterprise, with the Muslims
doing little more than preserving the heritage of the ancient Greeks, handing it over
unsullied to the West and (conveniently) just in time for the transformations of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Iqbal 2000: 536). One could accuse Arab
and Muslim authors of imbibing this Orientalist perspective, however implicitly.
South Asian literature in English also gets charged with recycling and perpetuat-
ing Orientalist notions (Lau 2009), and intellectual dependency on the West for
scientific education has been an all too common complaint in modern Arab history
(Determann 2018: 83–4).
Note that the “phrasing” of the dilemma facing the narrator in The Spider –
Adam and the tree of knowledge – is not the Qur’anic phrasing. In another novel
by Mustafa Mahmoud, Out of the Coffin (1967), the theme of a confrontation
between Western materialistic modernity versus the spiritualism and humility
of the East is posed from the word go, following the adventures of an Egyptian
archaeologist visiting India. While there he witnesses a Hindu guru levitating,
defying the laws of nature through sheer will power and inner spiritual enlighten-
ment. (The man can commune with the dead and see the afterlife, a far better world
than this one will ever be.)

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
14 REORIENT

Dr Ahmed Yusri Fahid, an Egyptian literary critic who specialises in science

fiction, lends some credence to this interpretation of early Arab SF, noting how his
own supervisors tried to discourage him from his planned PhD on SF, given how
unpopular it was in the Arab literary establishment. Even while doing his MA, he
had to change his thesis from the influence of Oriental literature on Edgar Allen
Poe to the influence of Poe on Oriental literature!
Dr Fahid also confirmed that the internal focus, on the inner world of morals
and spirituality, has tended to pervade in Arabic SF, at least until now. Dr Hosam
El-Zembely, an SF author himself and founder of the Egyptian Society for Science
Fiction, adds that until recently most Egyptian SF was a mimicking of Western
SF, at least at the level of stylistics.3 (This might explain the Frankenstein-type
scenarios popular in early Arab SF.)
We can add that the whole stand-off between science and religion is a European
peculiarism, not readily evident in other cultures (Yalcinkaya 2011). This is where
agenda-setting comes in. As Arabs and Muslims, we can’t afford to mindlessly ape
Western literary conventions and have to set our priorities based on our needs and
own set of cultural experiences. The notion that the Arabs just stored Greek phi-
losophy while adding nothing of their own is pure fancy (Pingree 1992: 555). Even
when it came to Greek philosophy, Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes) work on Aristotle caused
a conceptual riot in thirteenth-century Europe (Ullman 1970: 17, 159, 171). The
Catholic Church burned translators of Averroes at the stake because his rationalist
works opened up the possibility of studying a uniform human nature, and deduction
of morals and laws, without recourse to scripture (Ullman 1970: 167–9, 171–3).
Thankfully, things have changed in the world of Arab SF with the turn of the
century. The literature now is pushing in a de-colonising direction whilst openly
embracing progress. One of the most notable examples of this break with the past
is Dr Hosam El-Zembely’s novel The Planet of the Viruses (2001). Here the scien-
tists of the Union of Islamic States are spearheading the effort to find a cure for a
global pandemic. The leader of the medical team, the aptly named Dr Salah Al-Din
(“Saladin” in English) extols Islamic history in one of his pep talks:

“Keep at it. . . man. . . You’re making history. . .” Dr. Salah Al-Din said in an effort
to encourage him. “You’re bringing enlightenment to the world. . . no different
than our heroes and first scientists. . . Abbas Ibn Fernas, the first man to fly. . .
Khalid ibn Al-Walid. . . the great Muslim military leader. . . Ibn Rushd. . . Ibn Sina. . .
Al-Khawarizmi. . . Jabir ibn Hayan. . . and hundreds like them. Then the dark era
began after that, when we contributed little to the world.”

This overturns the Orientalist reading of scientific history while also championing
the cause of the Global South, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. predicted. Note that

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 15

the good doctor also says that Islam is not only lighting the path of humanity once
again but pushing a world order based on nobility and chivalry.
We could add here that the scientific priorities on display are distinctly Arabic
and Third Worldish, such as finding cures for infectious diseases and fighting
desertification. (The secret facility that houses the research team is located, you
are told, in one of the few remaining desert locales in North Africa. This is because
the valiant scientists of the Islamic Union fabricated a drug to turn the deserts
green.) This is not to discount space travel, since it plays a part in the novel, but
changing the nature of Arabs and Muslims and their homelands comes first. In Dr
El-Zembely’s The Half-Humans (2001), Muslims have helped mankind terraform
Mars and Venus and are leading the first manned mission to Titan (but only after
developing medical technologies that have made illness a thing of the past).
This is more significant than it looks, since early Arabic SF usually had the
aliens coming to earth, or the odd journey into outer space that ends with a dis-
satisfied crew making its way back home. But colonisation and terraforming were
never heard of. Even Nihad Sharif, who was fond of flying saucers and alien
antagonists in his works, never ventured off terra firma when it came to the ambi-
tious project of constructing new communities (Al-Sharouni 2002: 234–8). This
always happened at some isolated location on earth – a city at the bottom of the
sea, a castle in the mountains. (In one of Sharif’s UFO stories you have an alien
race that uses ancient Egyptian names and that eradicated deserts on its home
world; Al-Sharouni 2002: 242–9).
That doesn’t mean there aren’t any misgivings about science at all lingering on
in Arabic SF. Dr El-Zembely talks about spiritual values too in his novels, while
mentioning the still unsolved mysteries in the universe, including death. But the
point is that Arab authors have traversed the original set of fears they initially
faced. Things have gotten even better since then. You have post-apocalyptic nov-
els like Malaaz (2017), alien invasion epics like Shadows of Atlantis (2017), and
parallel universes novels like Akwan (2017), and so much more.4
These are all Western genres but the homegrown variety has a distinctive
Egyptian flavour. In Shadows of Atlantis, for instance, the ancient city of legend
is located in Egypt of all places, holding the fate of humanity in its hands. With
Akwan you have an Egyptian scientist trying to unlock the secrets of the Bermuda
Triangle, with Americans as (conspiratorial) onlookers – the country isn’t as pow-
erful as it once was. Malaaz models its post-apocalyptic society on Mamluk Egypt
(1250–1517), with a caste society, and another rival society in the south resurrect-
ing the gods of ancient Egypt. In the prequel, The Black Winter (2018), the mother
of the hero is an Egyptian bioengineer trying to rework animal and plant genomes
to withstand the radioactive fallout that resulted from a nuclear exchange between
the US and North Korea’s allies.

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
16 REORIENT

There is still a long road ahead of Arab SF but it is no longer resting in anybody
else’s shadow. All that remains is to see what Western SF can do in the meantime.

Concluding Remarks

Western SF may be susceptible to Orientalism, but that does not mean that it can-
not counterbalance its own negative tendencies and find a more productive way
of dealing with the key themes of othering and anxieties that Orientalism is all
about. Remember that gender is a component of Orientalism, and so de-gendering
science fiction is tantamount to de-Orientalising the Western imagination, to rec-
ollect the examples cited by Marie Lathers above. We could add the example of
Alien Nation (1988), a scene where the stereotypical macho cop played by James
Caan is up against a female Visitor, and a stripper no less, and he can’t quite get
his act together as she tries to seduce him into interspecies sex. Visitor females
are just as strong as human males and in the Alien Nation TV series you find that
the males have hot flushes and temper tantrums since they carry the babies in their
later stages of development. (At one point even the human male hero is knitting.)
To quote Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: “Anxiety over sexual power and purity
underlies most articulations of alien-human contacts, as it does most conceptions
of race. Aliens permit the anxiety to be exaggerated or refined in fantastic dis-
placements” (2002: 11).
Ridley Scott’s other sci-fi masterpiece, Alien (1979), deserves especial mention
in this regard as the appropriately named Kane is impregnated, after being orally
raped by the face-hugger. He is the pale-skinned Englishy explorer type who’s
the most eager to go into the belly of the whale, so to speak – the derelict vessel
containing the eggs. (Kane is being de-masculinised and de-humanised, since the
face-hugger obscures his face – his individuality – entirely. When Kane wakes up,
you notice that his skin is flushed, like a pregnant woman.) As for the resulting
alien, it’s androgynous. You can’t tell if it’s male or female, and that’s one of the
whole reasons it’s so threatening. (It’s actually a hermaphrodite and can generate
its own eggs. The insect-like alien queen was an invention of James Cameron’s
sequel, but with its own sexual allusions.) Following Kane’s death, after the chest-
burster pushes its way out, the science officer Ash (an android without a male
organ who later tries to orally rape Ripley, with a rolled-up “porn” magazine)
describes the creature as Kane’s son. In line with Csicsery-Ronay the genius of
that classic, then, is that it transplanted Western masculine anxieties into outer-
space, doing away with the needless Earth-bound confrontation between East and
West altogether.
The creature itself was inspired by the sexual insecurities of its designer, Swiss
artist H. R. Giger, from his bio-mechanoid designs in his art book Necronomicon

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 17

(1977). Even the planetoid they land on, and the derelict vessel, all have organic
(and sexual) overtones meant to contrast to the harsh metallic exterior-interior of
the Nostromo. Having a woman for a hero, repeated in Scott’s latest contribution
to the franchise Alien: Covenant (2017), extends this process of de-gendering,
de-Orientalising even further.
Orientalism is a journey inwards as much as it is outward, and much the same
holds true of science fiction. The important thing is that the motifs not be taken
literally. In science fiction proper this problem can be avoided since many of the
threats portrayed are thoroughly not of this world, and hardly resemble anything
in this world, pulling the rug from underneath the Orientalist enterprise in its very
Western birthplace. Translation is an obvious and necessary candidate for intro-
ducing Western audiences to Arab-Islamic SF but will take time. This, on the other
hand, can be done in a blink of an eye; utilising already existing Western SF.
With all the talk of Orientalism we must be forever wary of the equal temptation
of slipping into Occidentalism and lumping all Westerners into one mould. Poe,
once again, is instructive. In his poem, “Tamerlane”, he deals with the conflict
between the Christian West and Muslim East – during the highpoint of Ottoman
encroachment on Europe. At the same time, however, Poe “offers a poetic alter-
native: a hybridization of Christian and Islamic themes in a poetic space that
emulates the cultural and scholarly vitality of medieval Samarkand”, the capital
city of the veritable melting pot that is the Timirud empire (Rowe 2018: 9). It is
true that Poe saw in the historical Tamerlane his “alter-ego”, projecting onto the
Central Asian ruler the frustrations of his career as a romantic and struggling artist
(Rowe 2018: 7). But, at the same time, Poe creates his own harmonious, transcul-
tural little world out of the scraps of history he relies on by pursuing his artistic
instincts. (Poe didn’t discriminate on an East-West axis, also creating highly fic-
tionalised French, Italian, and Gothic terrains that scarcely resembled reality but
were populated with universal human truths nonetheless.) It was always Edward
Said’s belief that literature could both lead us into and out of Orientalism. Cultural
miscomprehension of the other did not get in the way of human sentiments in
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, after all.
Ultimately, Poe reminds us that “poetic language transcends mere referentiality
to demonstrate the secret relations of all things”, and specifically between “differ-
ent cultural myths and legends” (Rowe 2018: 11, 14). The Nostromo in Alien itself
is replete with Conradian themes and Gothic imagery, at the hands of both Ridley
Scott and artist Ron Cobb, a man who worked on movies as diverse as Back to the
Future (1985) and Conan the Barbarian (1982). So we can confidently say that
what holds true of poetry and classical literature holds true of popular literature
and SF as well. Science fiction, to cite Ron Cobb (The Beast Within, 2003), is the
mythology of the future.

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
18 REORIENT

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to ESSF Director Dr Hosam El-Zembely, John Carlos Rowe for
providing an early draft of his essay “Orientalism in Poe’s early poetry” (cited
below), and Wen Shuang.

Notes
1 According to Algerian author, Yassin Temlali, the very name “Fremen” is the “translation of the
name a Touareg term” that they used to name themselves – Imazighen, “which means Free men”
(Temlali 2017).
2 A similar charge was made at one point in time against science fiction in Latin America (Ferreira
2016).
3 The author questioned both Dr Fahid and Dr El-Zembely at an event held by the Egyptian Society
for SF (Cultural Salon 2018).
4 “Malaaz” means haven in Arabic, the name of the city where the events transpire. “Akwan” means
universes.

References
Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural
relativism and its others. American Anthropologist. 104 (3), 783–90.
Brunner, J. (1995) The Shockwave Rider. Del Rey, Ebook (accessed December 2017).
Asher-Perrin, E. (2019) Why it’s important to consider whether Dune is a white savior narrative. 6
March. https://www.tor.com/2019/03/06/why-its-important-to-consider-whether-dune-is-a-white-
savior-narrative/ (accessed March 2019).
Campbell, I. (2015) Science fiction and social criticism in Morocco of the 1970s: Muhammad Aziz
Lahbabi’s The Elixir of Life. Science Fiction Studies. 42 (1), 42–55.
Campbell, I. (2017) False gods and libertarians: Artificial intelligence and community in Aḥmad ‘Abd
al-Salām al-Baqqāli’s The Blue Flood and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Science
Fiction Studies. 44 (1), 43–64.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., I. (2002) Dis-imagined communities: Science fiction and the future of nations.
https://www.academia.edu/9963551/Dis-Imagined_Communities_-_Science-Fiction_and_the_
Future_of_Nations:1-22 (accessed October 2019).
Cultural Salon for the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction (2018) Nasr City, Egypt, 2 March. [Arabic.]
Determann, J. M. (2018) Space Science and the Arab World: Astronauts, Observatories and
Nationalism in the Middle East. London: I. B. Tauris.
Ferreira, R. H. (2016) How Latin America saved the world and other forgotten futures. Science Fiction
Studies. 43 (2), 207–25.
Iqbal, M. (2000) Islam and modern science: Formulating the questions. Islamic Studies. 39 (4). Special
Issue: Islam and Science. Winter, 517–70.
Lang, N. (1991) The Last Ramadan. Scranton, IL: Harpercollins.
Lathers, M. (2009) Arabs, aliens, and women: The colonization of outer space in popular culture. Talk
delivered at the American University in Cairo, 31 March.

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SCIENCE FICTION BY, ABOUT, AND FOR ARABS 19

Lau, L. (2009) Re-orientalism: The perpetration and development of orientalism by orientals. Modern
Asian Studies. 43 (2), 571–90.
Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995) Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and
Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge.
Pingree, D. (1992) Hellenophilia versus the History of Science. Isis. 83 (4), December, 554–563.
Rieder, J. (2008) Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. The Wesleyan early classics of
science fiction series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Rowe, J. C. (2011) Edward Said Memorial Lecture: American orientalism after Edward Said. Talk
delivered at the American University in Cairo, 1 November.
Rowe, J. C. (2012) Arabia fantasia: U.S. literary culture and the Middle East. Alif: Journal of
Comparative Poetics. 32, 55–77.
Rowe, J. C. (2018) Orientalism in Poe’s early poetry. In The Oxford Companion to Poe. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Said, E. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Shabanirad, E. and Marandi, S. M. (2015). Edward Said’s orientalism and the representation of ori-
ental women in George Orwell’s Burmese days. International Letters of Social and Humanistic
Sciences. 60, 22–33.
Al-Sharouni, Y. (2002) Science Fiction in Contemporary Arabic Literature: Till the End of the 20th
Century. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation. [Arabic.]
Temlali, Y. (2017) Email to the author, 30 November.
The Beast Within: The Making of “Alien” (2003) Documentary, written and directed by Charles de
Lauzirika.
Ullman, W. (1970) A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages. London: Penguin Books.
Yalcinkaya, M. A. (2011) Science as an ally of religion: A Muslim appropriation of “the conflict thesis”.
British Journal for the History of Science. 44 (2), 161–81.

ReOrient 6.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

This content downloaded from

197.52.34.116 on Mon, 08 Apr 2024 16:16:28 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms