Asia

Imagined by
the Arabs
Khristine E. Cuaresma
Discussant
 I was raised to love the West and to
admire its civilization. I have spent my
most significant formative years in
Europe which reinforced my love and
the pillars of my admiration. When I
went to the East and returned to my
country, my love and admiration of the
West was transformed into a certitude.
-Mona Abaza
al-sharq
East or the Orient
al-gharb
 West
Taha Husayn
Dean of Arabic culture
one of the most significant
intellectuals of Egypt’s renaissance
and liberal age
In 1938, published a posthumous
work, ‘The Future of Culture in
Egypt’.
 Taha Husayn
 wanted to convey the message that at that time
Egypt indeed belonged to the West, rather than to
the East. Egypt was part of the culture and
civilisation of the Greek-Roman Mediterranean
world.
 there were two fundamentally different
civilisations: that which derived from Greek
philosophy and art, Roman law, and the morals of
Christianity, and that which derived from India.
 Egypt is belonged to Greek-Roman civilisation.
 Between The
Orient And The
West
 Taha Husayn
 since Egypt was part of Europe and of the Greek-Roman realm
the ancient Egyptian mind was not ‘oriental’, if one
understands the ‘Orient’ as meaning China, Japan, and India
and that which is related to these regions.
 the confines of ‘near’ Asia were Palestine, greater Syria, and
Mesopotamia. But Persia is described as an Oriental nation,
located in far-away lands. Persia seemed to be remote and have
little to share with Egypt.
 Egypt had little contact with Asia and much less with the far
East in comparison with its ties to the Mediterranean world.
 Indeed, he laments that he never understood the aims of the
Society of the Oriental League in Egypt, which emphasized
solidarity with the Far East instead of the near West.
Husayn Fawzi
a French trained medical doctor
 one of the most significant modern
historians of Egypt
a pioneer in the genre of modern travel
accounts
 publisheda book on his voyage to the
Indian Ocean which he called ‘A Modern
Sindbad: a Tour of the Indian Ocean 1938’.
 Husayn Fawzi
 had sailed out on a collaborative mission consisting of forty
British and Egyptians sailors and scientists.
 appointed by the Egyptian government as the medical
doctor responsible for the crew. The account is written in
an anecdotal style and is full of details about the
interaction between the British crew and the Egyptians.
 provides detailed description of the places he visits, but his
style reflects a feeling of astonishment and bewilderment
towards these ‘exotic’ cultures. Fawzi’s nine-month voyage
departed from Alexandria, passing Aden, the Hadramawt
and Sri Lanka on route to the subcontinent.
 also visited Colombo, Kandy, Bombay, and Karachi.
 Husayn Fawzi
 he is indeed fascinated by its aesthetics. However,
his narrative of India and Hinduism is paradoxical
because it simultaneously reflects both his
fascination and distaste.
 Malabar’stemples evoked only nightmares and the
fear of death.
 concluded that Egypt, its civilization, and even he
himself, all belong to the Western European world.
 concluded his account by contrasting Western
civilization with Hinduism, which to him represented
an Oriental and above all alien, despotic culture.
Husayn Fawzi
 wascertainly fascinated by Gandhi’s
peaceful resistance to British colonialism. He
reminds us that Gandhi’s spiritualism was
important in pointing to the injustice of the
Brahman caste system.
 insiststhat the British were not entirely
harmful in advancing their civilizing mission
ideology. Their doctors, for example, had
introduced vaccination, their engineers the
irrigation system.
Taha Husayn and Husayn Fawzi
 tell
us much about the perceptions of
Egyptians towards the vague notion of the
‘Orient’, and their even more vague, self-
reflexive positions.
 Asia
played a crucial role in the on-going
project of identity construction.
 They unconsciously reproduced inherited
notions of a despotic Orient, which itself was
part and parcel of their naive attitude
towards enlightenment and rationalism.
Taha Husayn and Husayn Fawzi
 Their writings were extremely inspiring when
they concerned issues of self-perception and
the Other at the level of South-South
intellectualism.
 constructed
a vision of an Orient that was
much tainted by the spirit of the time.
 were both fervent advocates of the belief
that Egypt belonged to the Greco-Roman
Mediterranean culture.
Taha Husayn and Husayn Fawzi
 adoptedan uncritical position with respect
to the West.
 were naive believers in enlightenment is
evident, but perhaps also inevitable, given
that many anti-colonial thinkers adopted this
stance as the only path available for
generating social criticism within the
confines of a reform.
 were both firm believers in Western
enlightenment and progress.
Husayn Fawzi
 concludes his account by counter-posing Western
civilisation to Hinduism, which he saw as
representing an oriental despotic culture
impossible to identify with.
 Thisposition, however, changes with his second
trip to India in 1978.
 India was a dear and beloved neighbour to Egypt.
 Hissecond travel account is an apology towards
the Indians for his previous stand.
Husayn Fawzi
he had been invited to participate in a
UNESCO conference.
Egypt is located at the crossroads of the
East and West, North and South. By
virtue of its geography and history and
through its future, it is to remain open
to the four directions. It is at once
African, Asiatic and Mediterranean.
 thenotion of Asia changes in the 1950s and
1960s sixties with the rise of the non-aligned
movement and the Bandung conference.
 Itwould not be wrong to say that contemporary
Arabs are inclined to be rather parochial in their
views of non-Arabs. In marked contrast to the
Arab-centrism of their co-religionists in the
Middle East, however, Southeast Asian Muslims
have developed an intense curiosity about the
Middle East and in particular its educational
centres.
 There is a whole industry involved in producing translations
from Arabic into Indonesian and Malay, as well as
distributing Arabic music and films among Southeast Asian
Muslims.
 In comparing the Islam of the so-called periphery and that
of the centre in the Middle East one gains the impression
that the dissemination of knowledge, whether religious or
secular, has been rather a one–way relationship. The Middle
East seems to have played a hegemonic role as a donor of
religious supremacy and ‘authentic’ culture as exemplified
in a domineering orthodox discourse, while Southeast Asians
remain cast as its syncretistic recipients. In fact, there
exists a contemporary Middle Eastern gaze towards
Southeast Asia, which is deserving of further attention.
 TheArabic language is much admired by
Southeast Asian Muslims and Arabic intellectual
production is very much esteemed there.
 Indian
films have gained a certain popularity in
the Middle East, but there is no such
appreciation of Southeast Asian culture,
whether popular or otherwise.
 ‘SoutheastAsia’ has appeared only recently as a
region in Egyptian political jargon, and it has
been interchangeably used with a blurred and
vague notion of ‘Asia’.
 Rifa ‘a al Tahtawi (1801-1873)
 wasone of the first Egyptian Azharites to
study abroad. He is today referred to in the
discourse of Egyptian modernity as a founding
father of enlightenment.
 his
five-year of sojourn in Paris (1826- 1831)
and his description of the manners and
customs of the French epitomizes the
crossing of boundaries and bridging tradition
and modernity.
 As
far as Southeast Asia is concerned a
twentieth-century parallel may be found in
Anees Mansur’s Around the World in 200
Days.
It first appeared in 1962
the third edition was introduced by the then
Dean of Arabic culture of Cairo University, Taha
Hussayn
thefourth was given a foreword by Mahmud
Taymur
 Anees Mansur
 travelledduring the effervescent period of the
Bandung conference when Third Worldism was
flourishing. It is an account embedded in the
1960s middle class Cairene constructions of an
imagined and perhaps anecdotal and distorted
‘Far East’.
 was sent as journalist by the government, tells
us that he has been dispatched to report on
the Indian state of Kerala, where the
Communist Party had won local elections.
 Anees Mansur
 startedhis trip in India (Bombay) before going to
Tibet to interview the Dalai Lama, to the Maldives,
Singapore, Indonesia (Jakarta and Bali), Australia,
the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, Hawaii, and
ending with the United States.
 his
style shifts between a spoken, colloquial Egyptian
which could quite often turn to vulgar slang.
 originates
from the South, he is clearly overloaded
with cultural biases and he reproduces the same
stereotypes about ‘Asians’ that he must have
borrowed from colonial accounts.
 Anees Mansur
 His
passages on Bali could be read as indeed
revealing a ‘macho’, misogynist and quite biased
Middle Eastern perspective, where he is constantly
chasing women and trying to seduce them. The
chapter on Bali is titled: ‘I am in the Island of
Breasts’.
 heis constantly mocking the countries he is visiting.
He, for example, remarks that the Indians speak an
esoteric English and their accent is awful.
 Heis proud as an Egyptian to speak it better than
them (which is actually doubtful).
 Anees Mansur
 he was among the first modern travellers to
describe Asia in the period of post-colonialism. The
paradox of this book is that, while overflowing with
non-alignment jargon it is also replete with
personal observations about the ‘indigenous’
populations which could have been uttered by a
former colonial administrator. The book is
illustrated with photos of women in ‘exotic’
dresses, i.e. Balinese and Hawaiian women
dancing, indeed very similar to colonial Western
travellers’ representations or Hollywood
productions.
 Anees Mansur
 His
travel account could be understood as a
landmark of ‘popular’ literature produced in the
time of South-South Third Worldist interaction,
whereby he was sent as a journalist to cover Third
World revolutions and progressive movements,
reading it produces paradoxical effects.
 Heis full of biases and disrespect towards non-
Western cultures. For example he displays a total
lack of respect during his encounter with the Dalai
Lama. As far as Third World solidarity goes there is
much to be desired in his observations.