Ella Shohat: It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one. For those of us who don’t hide our Middle Easternness under one Jewish “we,” it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness. As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the “mysteries” of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to “make it” into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland. Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes). If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you’ll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque. More here.
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talking about the notion of easternness, i am reading an excellent book called “good muslim, bad muslim” by mahmood mamdani. in the first chapter he discusses the idea of what we call the “west” and how it’s changed over time to become a racial identity rather than a geographical one. whatever exists on the periphery of the west is then called “east” or the orient. he talks v poignantly about this “blank darkness” (africa, pre-columbus america, etc) which cannot be categorized as either east or west. that’s a pretty large part of the world. the otherization of the east, esp islam, goes all the way back to the crusades.
i analyze this misguided need to partition identities into neat little boxes in a paper i’m writing which discusses “fractured identities.” i use al-andalus as an illustration of what that means.
Maria Rosa Menocal: One of the least appreciated features of Islamic culture, that vital part of it that comes directly from the poetry-loving and word-worshipping desert culture of the pre-Islamic Arabs, is the way that from the beginning it embraced the possibility of contradiction–as, I believe, poetry-centric cultures are bound to do. F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said that the test of a first-rate mind was the ability to hold two contrary ideas at the same time. By that measure, which I think is essential for there to be true religious tolerance and the sort of cultural vitality that can come from that, Andalusian culture, and by extension much medieval European culture, was first-rate indeed. There are dozens and dozens of wonderful examples of this, little-known because we tell the story as if they, like us, were striving to be unified creatures: ergo, Arabs spoke Arabic, religious people were pious and would not have cultivated erotic poetry, and Christians spent all their time crusading against the enemy. more here.