Mohamed Bouazizi: One Year Later

First published at BIKYAMASR, republished at 5PMBAHRAIN

CAIRO: What was it that “precisely” happened a year ago on December 17, 2010?

That day, the idea of human freedom, in full color, took to the center stage of TV screens all over the world. We witnessed an unprecedented event in the contemporary history of the Middle East: Revolution with capital R.

On December 17, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, a humble Tunisian vendor, set himself on fire, protesting the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal officer.

Serving as the catalyst for the Tunisian revolution that overthrew the country’s entrenched leader Predident Zine el Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, Bouazizi’s death, misery, and a call for change resonated throughout the region.

As we observe the uprisings and revolutions taking place all over the Middle East, all of them still nascent or unfinished and going into the second year; it seems as if what the protesters were demanding was not simply a political transition, but that under the slogans of freedom, justice and peace, they wanted to change life.

Political transitions we have seen already, however, are hardly encouraging:

In Libya, Ibrahim Ali, chairman of the Libyan Transparency Association – an NGO founded in May 2011 – has lodged major complaints of corruption with the National Transitional Council. He has expressed great concern about slowness of the new authorities to investigate and prosecute and said that “It’s better now than under Ghaddafi, but the revolution will be for nothing if we are not successful in stopping corruption”.

In Egypt, the “temporary” hold on power of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has turned into a de facto military dictatorship in which political dissidents are put on trial on charges of insulting the military and without a fair trial. Foreign journalists are subject to endless harassment and protesters are constantly attacked. At least once a month, clashes erupt in which Egyptians are killed in cold blood.

Lastly, in Yemen, a deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council has given immunity to long-time dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh and all of his family. It has not entirely been able to put violence to a halt, angering many in the revolutionary youth who are not formally affiliated with the opposition parties. The irony of the GCC deal in Yemen is only too evident when absolute monarchies with a faulty record on human rights and political freedom oversee democratic transitions.

In the meantime, Syria remains engulfed by the fire and a resolution is nowhere to be seen in the horizon, as the international pressure has very little effect and it can be said with certainty that Assad still receives support from some players in the international scene.

Stability has been slow, if not unlikely, to return to the tiny Gulf-kingdom of Bahrain.

In Bouazizi’s own Tunisia, in spite of being the shining star of the Arab revolutions, some incidents have made people hesitant about future clashes between religious fundamentalism and secularism.

These are so far the results of Arab Spring, that more often than not, is a very ambiguous and sometimes condescending term, “that does not only strike us as too Romantic a way to describe complex political processes that often led to bloodshed but also constitutes neither a novelty in the genre of political journalism nor does it belong to the repertory of 2011’s inventions:

According to Joshua Keating, the term was first used by conservative political commentators in the United States during the Bush administration, to describe a short-lived flourishing of democracy movements in the region, particularly in Lebanon with the Cedar Revolution in 2005.

In reference to the same article, Foreign Policy’s own Marc Lynch, published a brief op-ed titled “Obama’s Arab Spring,” alluding to the short-lived momentum of 2005, two days after Bouazizi’s death and long before this so-called Arab Spring was in full swing. The term then became popular all over international media around March, and not without irony, after the initial euphoria was already wearing out.

Arab Spring or not, it cannot be denied that what was witnessed since the desperate act of Bouazizi and all through the events that ensued in the course of one of the longest years in Middle Eastern history was a transition, not necessarily of the political and immediate kind, but one in which the map of the Middle East unmade itself and demanded an immediate renovation.

“The mood that prevailed during the early days of 2011 could be more aptly expressed by Hannah Arendt with words from her last public appearance, commemorating the bicentenary of the American Revolution and with deep reservation about the state of affairs of the revolutionary treasure:

We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points in history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the diving lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past.

At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands.”

It is unthinkable that we would have got so far in the story without the courageous act of Mohamed Bouazizi, and whose act – that cost him his life – is now in the books of history as the iconic symbol and powerful trigger of the Arab Revolutions.

The now prominent Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil – sentenced to two years imprisonment and who stands as the symbol not of the Egyptian Revolution but of the military counterrevolution still continuing today, with the sole intention to silence all critical voices at any price – wrote about Mohamed Bouazizi in September, 40 days after he began his hunger strike, using the example of Bouazizi as an example and precedent for his struggle.

Many of his critics – and sometimes friends – tried to convince Nabil to end his strike because hunger strike is a type of suicide. However, he invoked Bouazizi, expressing the idea that perhaps his “death changes the lives of others”.

In words of Nabil: “The most prominent example on this idea is the incidence of Mohamed Bouazizi committing suicide. The Tunisian youth who was subjected to injustice, so he set his body on fire in front of the building of the municipality of his Tunisian city, so his death erupted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and the rest of the Arab countries…

The Egyptians who have suffered Mubarak injustice, and who lived for decades in Mubarak’s prisons, all those owe their freedom to Mohamed Bouazizi’s suicide… If there were a God, I don’t imagine that this God would throw Mohamed Bouazizi in hell, because God is benevolent and likes benevolence for people, and the religion came for the benevolence of mankind, so why would God sanction a person for bringing goodness for the tortured mankind?”

The truth is that as it stands today, it is not only Mohamed Bouazizi whose death stands now as the price for the freedom of an entire region, but also the hundreds and thousands of people all over Libya, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia that met their deaths in the course of this struggle. In that sense it can be said that Bouazizi – wherever he is – he is in good company.

Not only is he in the company of remarkable freedom fighters and revolutionaries, but also in the company of countless women, children, elderly people and many others whose lives were taken in the course of violent unrest leading towards freedom. Many of these people might not have known why or when they died, they might not have heard of Mohamed Bouazizi or of Arab Spring at all, but the fact remains that they are no longer among us.

Among the endless casualties of the Arab Revolutions, no one has suffered more than the youth – the future – whose life stories, whose contributions to their countries, whose place in society, were taken by the ruthlessness of those who fail to understand the moment of the change and cling to power with greed and blindness, depriving not only families but also entire countries, from their most precious asset – young people. What has remained of all those lives other than memory? Nothing but what Maikel Nabil expressed: “When your death changes the lives of others.”

On the anniversary of Bouazizi’s courage and heroism, there might be too little to celebrate, especially in Egypt when it becomes clearer and clearer each day that the army is not going to let go of its grip on power and that will find every excuse and will enter every political game available, only in order to take away from Egyptians the legacy – controversial or not – of Tahrir and once more, send an entire nation, with its 5000 years history, down the path of more tyranny and destruction.

Many of the opponents of Tahrir and of the many other iconic symbols of the Arab revolutions perhaps have forgotten that exactly a year ago, even the idea of raising one’s voice against tyranny was not even a far-fetched dream and those few who did, met their deaths early or spent their entire lives in exile or locked behind bars.

Long as this path seems – and it seems longer each new day – it is in the hands of the peoples of the Middle East not to let the torch ignited by Mohamed Bouazizi die out. He and so many other people have given for this struggle the only thing that no one can give more than once – their lives, and because of that, the only tribute possible is not in memorials, or being the person of the year in any magazine or shedding tears and lighting candles.

The only tribute worthy of Mohamed Bouazizi’s struggle is to pass on the torch of the revolution until that new life that we all envisioned during January 25 will become a living reality for all the people that are not involved in the revolution.

“Amidst the stalemate of political discussions, enfranchisements and ideological dead-ends that have taken now to the center stage, replacing freedom and the revolutionary promise, whenever I think about Mohamed Bouazizi, I doubt that he would have joined the procession of political analysts in drafting proposals for new constitutions, democratic republics and transitional councils.

It seems to me that as if collectively reading the thoughts of many in his generation that had never experienced freedom, he saw that the elements that constitute our “vita activa” on earth stood in need of redemption from and within the inevitable quest for meaning.

Only the possibilities of human action possess the power to remedy if only temporarily the helpless fragility of human affairs and as such, they redeem not man but allow man to redeem the world from its inherent meaninglessness – making it into that hospitable man-made home where politics can happen.

The pointer of redemption always glitters when the voice of a man reaches into the direction of history, compelling men to act together, even as he is being consumed by the fire. Symbolic as it was, Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act brought into the world something that was not there, something of a miracle – he promised them the world.”

*Excerpts in quotation marks are taken and adapted from: Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Revolution or Redemption: The Middle East, in “Finished and Unfinished, from Primal to Final”, eds. P. Caringella, W. Cristaudo, G. Hughes. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, due spring 2012.

The Zaydi manuscripts of Northern Yemen

First published at BIKYAMASR

In recent articles on Bikyamasr.com, it was reported at length on the diversity of cultural sites, part of Yemen’s vast cultural heritage, that were threatened with neglect and destruction, partly because of the inability of the Yemeni authorities to preserve them and partly because of the state of unrestcaused by the Yemeni uprising – namely the ancient cities of Sana’a, Shibam and Zabid, in which thousands of years of rich history are likely to become yet another casualty in Yemen’s struggle for freedom from the 33-years old dictatorial rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

It is fortunate however that these three ancient cities are considered UNESCO world heritage sites, due to the fact that they have received attention from international organizations – most prominently the government of Germany – and some degree of action has been taken in order to minimize the damage, or at least, that was the case until the beginning of the Yemeni uprising. The extent of the real damage done to the sites in the course of 2011 remains yet to be properly assessed in a post-revolutionary scenario.

More unfortunate is the fate not only of other sites but of something much more intangible but equally valuable: The rich intellectual Islamic heritage of the country embodied in over 50000 manuscripts held in many libraries and private holdings. The astounding numbers and the nature of the manuscripts make Yemen one of the most important archival collections in the world, easily rivaling similar holdings of Islamic manuscripts in the national libraries of Cairo, Istanbul and Teheran.

Since Islam was introduced in Yemen around 630, it has been a fertile region for the greatest diversity of Islamic scholarship as exemplified by the now neglected Zabid, where schools of Shafi, Hanafi, Hanabli and Ismaili Islam are known to have existed in different periods and sometimes next to each other.

The central and southern regions were dominated by Shafi Islam – and to a lesser extent by the distinctively Yemeni Tayibite Ismailism – and because of the relatively easy accessibility, many manuscripts and traditions survived the test of time.

The northern part of Yemen however presents a different story: The Zaydi school of Islam – a Shiite school of thought – settled in the inaccessible northern highlands and there developed lines of thought that were neglected in the rest of the Islamic world.

They are a branch of Islam that has survived only in Yemen because of great isolation and whose roots can be traced to the 2nd century when Zayd bin Ali – great-great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad – was killed in Kufa(Iraq) and they separated from other Shiite groups.

Later on they moved onto Iran around the Caspian Sea and the grandson of Al-Qasim, the greatest Zaydi scholar, al-Hadiila l-Haqq founded another imamate in the north of Yemen with capital in Sa’ada. This happened as early as the 3rd century. With time the seat of Zaydi Islam moved progressively from Iran to Yemen and a few centuries later it became an entirely Yemeni phenomenon.

The writings of Zaydi Islam committed themselves since then to the principles of Mutazilism, a school of thought based around Baghdad and Basra. It was one of the most important rational schools of thought in the history of Islamic theology, and provided an epistemological and philosophical basis to explain the nature of God and that later on influenced many other schools.

Because of their isolation in the Yemeni highland, they preserved very ancient materials drawn from other traditions, including works in nearly every field of knowledge. This rational tradition is now known to have published treatises on natural philosophy and sciences unparalleled in their outlook and unknown elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Zaydi scholarship in Yemen was characterized by a great degree of plurality and eclecticism that integrated many new and old schools of thought and that makes Zaydi the most rational school of Shiite Islam and brings it very close to Orthodox Sunni Islam. If anything, it could be called a ‘radically’ monotheistic philosophy that condemned anthropomorphism and derived the existence of God and the world from philosophical principles.

These precious manuscripts were little known in the Islamic world and had been unheard of in the Western world until the 17th century when different exploration missions set for Yemen – in such difficult geographic conditions that only very few explorers returned alive from these missions – and brought with them some information about them.

In the 19th century it captured the interests of the European Arabists and many manuscripts found their way to private collections in Europe. Many holdings from Sa’ada were transferred to Sana’a in the early 20th century and can be found even today in the library of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, what was followed by Egyptian missions that prepared inventories and microfilmed the most significant manuscripts – the first in 1951 headed by Taha Husayin, then Minister of Education and the second in 1964, by Muhammad Ahmad Husayin, then Vice-Minister of Culture.

Though the missions were fundamental in exposing the Yemeni treasures to the world, they were limited to Sana’a and Ta’izz and did not include manuscripts from either the north or the south of Yemen. In the 1970’s an interest arose in Yemen itself with many scholars, but in particular Ali Al-Akwa (for many years president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority and who passed away in 2008) collected many of the manuscripts and wrote many works on the subject. With time many of the private holdings were also cataloged and partially digitalized.

A couple of local organizations and European governments took an active interest in this legacy that runs to tens of thousands of manuscripts, since the 1970’s until today. The German Foreign Office funded a very large project to train Yemenis in the assessment and conservation of manuscripts, in light of an amazing discovery made in 1972, when during the renovation of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, one of the earliest fragments of the Koran was discovered.

In the 2000’s major contributions were made in documenting, exploring and researching the Mutazili manuscripts from all over Yemen, and, in 2009 began an ambitious project called “Yemen’s Cultural Heritage: The Yemen Manuscript Digitalization Project” – that emulates dozens of successful cases carried out in other countries – sponsored by the German Foreign Office and the Free University of Berlin.

Encouraging as these projects are, the sad reality is that the vast majority of the manuscripts – tens of thousands – outside Sana’a are badly under threat, particularly in the restless northern governorate of Sa’ada. It is not limited to poor storage conditions and the constant sale – for very little money – of the manuscripts to collectors from the wealthy Gulf states – that later on end up in international auctions where they are sold for tens of thousands of dollars, such as a famous auction at Sotheby’s in 2008 that included dozens of Jewish and Islamic manuscripts from Yemen, usually torn off from folios still extant in Sana’a.

Religious strife in Yemen also plays a significant role in the on-going destruction: It was reported in 2010 that Salafi extremists opposed to Shiism, have targeted these manuscripts and collections for deliberate destruction. In some case they have even purchased entire collections from library owners facing great economic hardship around Sa’ada governorate, with the only purpose to burn and destroy them.

On the other hand, the Shiite insurgency in the north of the country has also put many of these manuscripts under risk, since the radical interpretation of Shiism – almost univocally imported from Iran – has targeted Zaydi cultural heritage for destruction no less than Sunni Salafists. Constantly the manuscripts are destroyed because of being considered unorthodox for Islam, and the obvious rational resemblance to mainstream Sunni schools of thought.

Lastly, the Yemeni uprising has also placed a strain on the conservation of the manuscripts: The state of unrest that has damaged many houses and public institutions has affected them significantly, and the constant electric black-outs have forced people to tear folios from precious books in order to start fires, for a variety of purposes, not all of them related to the basic functioning of the household.

It is unsurprising overall that radicals in any sect would be so bent on destroying a heritage, little known and little explored, that could offer the opening of radically new and innovative interpretations of Islam that have been dormant in the north of Yemen for hundreds of years – now ironically one of the most conflicted, poverty-stricken and violent parts of the world.

The conservation and study of the mostly unknown Zaydi literature preserved in Yemen, could provide the elements to find a purely rational Islamic epistemology and that would be of great relevance today when even Muslims themselves are so concerned about the use and abuse of their own tradition at the hands of fundamentalists that have little to do with the ancient tolerance of Abrahamic religions. Many Muslims seeking for a renovated vision of Islam, traditional and yet compatible with the modern world, will find themselves at home in the theological rationalism of Mutazilism and could easily find in it, an authoritative source for a long-deserved reform,embodying the words of Yemeni Nobel laureate Tawakkol Karman from her Nobel prize acceptance speech last week: “Mankind’s feeling of responsibility to create a decent life and make it worth living with dignity, has always been stronger than the will to kill life.”

In times of political transition when the question of Islamism takes to the center stage of all discussions about the future of the region and while the radical factions are making quick advances in clamping down the dreams of many revolutions for a tolerant and free Middle East, this great heritage will be key in defining the agenda of reform in Islam in the near future, however since we do not speak of great buildings or cities but of nothing but books, there is no international body or organization or law that can protect them from destruction.

The possibility of living in a decent world, so eloquently expressed by this curious and forgotten heritage, as much as by the Yemeni uprising, could be translated back in time to what Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote the year after the end of Second World War and the concentration camps, to her mentor Karl Jaspers:

“What I learnt from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one’s little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form is only a will-o’-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being”.

Letter to Maikel Nabil

"Maikel I", postcard, "On Steep Waves"

Dear Maikel,

It has been over nice months since you were arrested and slightly over four months since I became involved in the now rather helpless cause of your liberation. I never thought of myself as an activist or as someone who actually was involved in politics at all, Middle Eastern or otherwise, but I think it was your great example as a human being what convinced me that beyond what I considered the spectacle of political activism - the most fashionably of all professions in 2011, that can be practiced by anyone -, there had to be some sort of social ethics by means of which people would be able to translate into words and actions that they cared for the world.

In the beginning, after you were arrested, I thought that perhaps it wasn't the right place or the right moment for a person of Jewish background and who was virtually a nobody to raise any concern about the uncertain fate of an Egyptian, however it seems that the times demanded something else that was no longer framed by the social and political conventions of the selfsame times. As months went by, I watched in a mixture of amazement and disappointment that there could be found no more than a few people all over Egypt who would even dare to say in public that you had to be released. The reasons and circumstances no longer need to be explained, as they are public knowledge by now.

After those many months in which in some way or another, your message went all over the world, little remains to be said about the things you wrote, for it is the writing on the wall in the mind of every Egyptian with a drop left of common sense - and let us begin by saying that those are a minority - that your analysis, which predates Arab Spring and the Revolution, was fully accurate. On the other hand, many people in Egypt who know this to be the case in all certainty, decided to turn their back and to continue living in the deluded promises of a reality that was nowhere to be seen in the horizon. What that tells us today is not only that people might have been right or wrong, but that revolution - the keyword of 2011 - requires more than politics and slogans.

I've been always very wary of that thing journalistic jargon calls "politics", for it seems to me that what they refer is only to operations, instruments and means that little have to do with the lives of everyday men and women. When I became acquainted with your blog, long before Twitter and months before that day we all saw on TV all over the world when protesters arrived in Tahrir, I thought to myself, this is a man who is not only using reasoning, clever arguments and wits to explain away things; what we are dealing with here is a person whose sense of humanity has compelled him to think without crutches and without the impositions of self-censorship, of tradition or of any consensus that surrounds us, whatever it may be.

With the passage of time and the helplessness behind it, you became a frequent guest not only at my writing desk but also a partner in the solitary moments of thinking, that shield us from the turbulence of the world and offer us the possibility to both think and imagine that it is possible to live better; then your extended companion moved also onto my dinner table as I tried to tamper my despair by talking to people, and ultimately you became also a travel companion, when my best friend and I carried your message to Athens and Vienna with the only hope that something that stands so far beyond politics like art, would bring people perhaps not to get to know you, but to ask themselves those difficult questions, about which kind of world is it that we live in, how have we come down to this and whether the aspirations of a better life are totally without a place in reality.

Great as the frustration was, there were some moments when we learnt to love the world if only a little more, when more and more people began doing reality checks and for whatever reason, became sympathetic with your cause. Many things happened in Egypt that even if only for a while, made people reconsider what they had been thinking all along. Endless sadness followed as we witnessed how time and again we were lied, fooled, deceived by the tyranny about your freedom. No matter how much they attempted to kill you slowly and silently, you battled on, and made manifest what British philosopher Gillian Rose wrote from her deathbed in 1995: "For what people seem to find daunting in me, I discover, is not my illness or possible death, but my accentuated vitality". 

So many times we read your letters and even once heard you chanting for the fall of the illegitimate authority as you were being sent back to prison from those courts, that are courts of law but not of justice - in the words of Goethe - and kept wondering how long you would live, in a mixture of perplexity and miracle. I even sent you a letter once to prison, in which I asked you to reconsider the idea of the hunger strike, since there was nothing we wished more desperately than you to live. On second thought, had you not been so brave and strong, your case would have fallen into immediate oblivion and with it, a great deal of the revolutionary aspirations of many Egyptians, less concerned with the role they are going to play in politics than with the possibility to live a different life, more decent, more free, with more dignity.

I could write on forever, but at the very least I want you to know that there are many people all over the world who have heard your voice - silent as it is - and that have come out of their ordinary lives to act together, in a world made turbulent enough, seizing at every opportunity they have, to express their desire for you to be free and with it, give voice to the most elementary condition of one's humanity - this freedom. We're not entirely sure what the future is going to bring to this land of Egypt, and to the rest of the Middle East - Israel included - but we do know that whatever happens to you, you've already done the impossible and will continue to do so. You represent a basic expression of humanity so badly absent from Tahrir: Thinking without ideological enfranchisement and not fearing anyone when in the pursuit of truth. If more people like you had been out there in the world, we would have never fallen into this abyss in which we have to witness how a young person is locked behind bars for no reason other than an idea. You among many others.

How I wish there was anything else we could do, but as long as you are in this captivity, there's not a single day that goes by without thinking of you and your plight and your great courage and sense of honor. Amongst all this frenzy of madness, it is people like you who remind me daily of the real duties of our humanity that we so easily begin to take for granted, and that faith that comes with your struggle, gives us a little hope in the idea that decency will be possible once. Reading back into the books of philosophy that I read when I need to step away from the horrible circle of history, I found a letter that a Jewish philosopher wrote to her mentor, and today I would like to read to you, because it represents the naked courage behind which you stand, without anything else to protect you from the world:

"What I learnt from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one's little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form is only a will-o'-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being". (Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1946)

Yemen’s heritage under threat: Zabid

First published at BIKYAMASR

Heir to an ancient culture spanning through several millennia and that goes back to the 3rd millennium BC, time by which it is believed to have been inhabited by a Semitic tribe – the Qahtani, modern Yemen is home to innumerable treasures of history and archaeology, most of which, due to the slow and early modernization of the state, are available to the visitor in plain view, even if not properly taken care of and subject to constant looting, expropriation, demolition and above all, oblivion.

Closed to the Western world for centuries and vastly unexplored, not only because of its difficult topography but also because of a turbulent history, Yemen is today known to be the place where the Arabian Peninsula and Africa met, and the home of the Sabean civilization, a rich and powerful culture distinct from that of mainland Arabia and that rapidly vanished after the arrival of Islam, leaving much to be imagined and some traces in the language and culture of the place that diverse as it is, can still be seen today.

Known to Greek geographer Ptolemy as “Arabia Felix” (Happy Arabia) because of the fertile land, moister climate and great wealth, there seems to be something of irony today in the term: After gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1918, it was ruled by a monarchy and then followed a brief revolution in the aftermath of which we have witnessed continuous armed strife, civil wars, secession, reunification, and in more recent times two equally unfortunate phenomena: The long-claimed status of the country as the home-base of Al-Qaeda and the Shia insurgency in Sa’adah governorate since 2004. From its ancient status as a place of great wealth, Yemen remains today one of the world’s poorest countries.

In 2011 the Yemeni uprising – part of the Arab Spring – the people demanded the resignation of long-time President Ali Abdullah Saleh and after the signature of a power transfer deal brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council, there seem to be some steps pointing in the direction of a possible democratic future for the country.

Yesterday, long-time activist Tawakkul Karman received the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to receive the prestigious award. As little attention as the Yemeni uprising received from the international community, it is possible that Karman’s status as a Nobel laureate will bring her at the forefront of the international scene and help her promote some positive change in the country.

Among the many things that need to be built or re-built and protected in Yemen is its ancient heritage. Three places in the country have been declared UNESCO world heritage sites: The Old Walled City of Shibam – known as the Manhattan of the desert – in 1982, the Old City of Sana’a in 1986 and more recently the historic town of Zabid in 1993.

Other than that, there are dozens of places of archeological interest spread all over the country and the now famous Socotra Archipelago, added by UNESCO in 2008 to the World Heritage Marine Program. The archipelago lies in the northwest Indian Ocean near the Gulf of Aden and comprises four islands and two rocky islets which appear as a prolongation of the Horn of Africa; famous for its rich biodiversity and unique flora and fauna.

The iconic Shibam is a 16th century city surrounded by a fortified wall and seems to be the oldest example of vertical construction out of the cliff edge of Wadi Hadramaut, from which the governorate where it is located, takes its name. Shibam has been ensured protection through the General Organization for the Preservation of Historic Cities in Yemen (GOPHCY), anchored in the Antiquities Law of 1997 and the Building Law of 2002. A joint-project run since 2000 with the German GTZ has improved the small city’s overall condition.

The Old City of Sana’a – inhabited for over two millennia –on the other hand, even though it has received substantial investment from public and private sector and international organizations is rapidly becoming more and more vulnerable because of social mobility and threatened by modern hotels and telecommunication towers in the surrounding landscape. Other than that it has also been the site of constant gunfire in the course of the Yemeni uprising and has been susceptible to significant damage. The case of Sana’a has received little attention but the UNESCO has requested from the Yemeni government to avoid further deterioration since a great deal of the structures are still intact, however they might be under threat.

The last case and most recent addition to the list – Zabid – remains largely forgotten and of almost impossible resolution: Located on Yemen’s western coastal plain – the Tihama – and named after Wadi Zabid, it was of great importance in the Arab and Muslim worlds for many centuries because of its Islamic university. It was the capital of Yemen during the Rasulid period and its unique and colorful architecture is a mixture of Arabian, East African and Indian styles, nowhere else to be found.

With the establishment of Ottoman rule, Zabid was neglected when the seat of government moved to the capital, Sana’a. In spite of everything, the city enjoyed a reputation among religious scholars of both the Shafi and Hanafi schools of Islam, what came to an abrupt end in 1962 after the republican revolution when many of the religious institutions moved to the regional capital, Hodaida. Similar has been the fate of local commerce, partly due to bad planning in urban and agricultural policies that has significantly impoverished a once more or less wealthy region.

Traditional houses in Zabid evolved around a small courtyard – qabal – and built more and more rooms as were needed, around the “qabal”. They were built with bricks made from local clays and the water used in the indigo tanneries of the city was mixed with the clay, giving it a characteristic bluish color, adorning the facades with different patterns of bricks imitating Cairo arches, Indian floral patterns, African animals and also Arabic calligraphy. The external surface of the facades was covered with layers of lime, adding more and more layers through the years, giving the impression that the houses were part of the local nature.

This unique and particular style changed ironically right after it was declared a world heritage site (1993) and the city suffered a great loss of its historical identity when many emigrants returned during the Gulf War, causing population growth that in turn led to increasing demand of more and more housing. Cheaper materials were sought for and in the total absence of strict protection of the heritage; the distortion of the city began unmolested.

Even though it is the second Yemeni city in number of mosques after Sana’a – some of which are over 14 centuries old – and has about 4000 houses ranging between 200 and 600 years, it was estimated in 2009 by the General Authority of Protecting Historical Cities (GAPHC) that over 40% of the houses had suffered distortions from their original form with the widespread usage of modern materials, and over 60% of the original houses were abandoned or ruined.

Already in 2000 the city was placed in the list of endangered heritage sites and in 2007 a Mission Report of UNESCO’s World Heritage stated that Zabid was then at a critical point of no longer having world heritage value: The degradation of the city was described as on-going and an initial survey revealed than over 50% of the original historic buildings were already completely destroyed. The permanence of Zabid in the list, at least temporarily, was based on the fact that there are still many monuments and areas of national and international value in terms of world heritage. Needless to say, UNESCO consultants became enervated by the inability of the Yemeni authorities to preserve the site.

At the alarming news, a German-sponsored mission – following from the success of Shibam – was established for Zabid in 2009, in order to avoid the removal of the city from the list that would indefinitely harm Yemen’s place in the cultural and touristic map of the world, with devastating effects for an already impoverished economy and that would set the mood for the ultimate destruction of the entire site. According to its director, Omar Hallaj, most of the damage done to the site was reversible and some conservation plans could be put into action.

Two years later, the city is still protected as a world heritage site by UNESCO even though it retains the endangered site status and unless action is taken, it is very probable that it will be removed from the list in the very near future. After several months of unrest in the course of the Yemeni uprising, the plight of the city remains unheard, unemployment and poverty are even more widespread than before and a collapsing state infrastructure has made it impossible to follow up on the different initiatives taken in 2007 and 2009.

There might be still some chance for Zabid not to fall into oblivion if the newly appointed Yemeni authorities and the prominent activists do not forget the great potential that historical sites in Yemen have in bringing revenues from tourism and in establishing the future Yemen as a destination for historical tourism.

There are still dozens of cities and hundreds of scattered sites all over the Yemen, deserving articles of their own, to tell their stories and to call for action in order to prevent further damage. It would be at the same time realistic to think, that Shibam will continue to receive funding from Germany in purview of its apparent success and that any new initiatives would look at the Old City of Sana’a rather than other places.

That goes not without saying that it would be a great loss to the Middle East if such an important – albeit forgotten – place like Zabid would ultimately succumb to terminal destruction and end up having no world heritage value at all, as it has been the case with many sites in Afghanistan and Iraq. The number of issues to be tackled in a post-revolutionary Yemen scenario are too long to be listed in one article or in a dozen, and probably culture and heritage is not even near the top of the list; nevertheless it is important not to forget that heritage is not only a question of tourism, but also one of the most elementary forms of nation-building.

Can Sana’a survive the Arab Spring?

First published at BIKYAMASR

In 1971, during a brief stay in Yemen to film scenes from his already classic “Arabian Nights”, the controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed a short and little known documentary about the astonishing beauty of Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, under the title of “The Walls of Sana’a”. Even though it has been rarely screened, this documentary was Pasolini’s appeal to the UNESCO to help save the incredible architecture of the almost 3000-year-old city.

The curious film ended with a passionate speech of Pasolini himself saying:

“For Italy, it is all over. But Yemen can still be saved entirely.

We appeal to UNESCO – Help Yemen save itself from destruction, begun with the destruction of the Walls of Sana’a.

We appeal to UNESCO – Help Yemen to become aware of its identity and of what a precious country it is.

We appeal to UNESCO – Help stop this pitiful destruction of national patrimony in a country where no one denounces it.

We appeal to UNESCO – Find the possibility of giving this nation the awareness of being a common good for mankind, one which must protect itself to remain so.

We appeal to UNESCO – Intervene, while there is time, to convince an ingenuous ruling class that Yemen’s only wealth is its beauty, and that preserving that beauty means possessing an economic resource that costs nothing. Yemen still has time to avoid the errors of other countries.

We appeal to UNESCO – In the name of the true, unexpressed wish of the Yemeni people, in the name of simple men whom poverty has kept pure, in the name of the grace of obscure centuries, in the name of the scandalous, revolutionary force of the past.”

Pasolini’s appeal resonated through and through in Europe and in 1986 the city of Sana’a was declared by UNESCO a world heritage site. It seems however that his appeal, followed by the decision of the international body, did little to rescue the ancient buildings from their disastrous condition.

In 2006, photojournalist Eric Hansen published in Saudi Aramco World an impressive travel photo-log of his journeys to Sana’a between 1978 and 2006, concluding that even though many significant changes had been made, roughly 40 percent of the ancient city was gone or in a very bad state.

In his reportage Hansen further added that Sana’a “has survived flash floods, earthquakes, massacres, repeated looting by tribesmen, civil wars and even, in 1991, Scud missile attacks. The city’s architecture has been demolished, damaged and rebuilt innumerable times, but in every instance, Sana’a has risen from the debris and survived”. It is unclear whether Sana’a this time will be able to survive Arab Spring on its own.

As a part of the collective movement sweeping through the entire Middle East, protests erupted everywhere in Yemen around mid-January, demanding the resignation of long-time President Ali Abdullah Saleh, desiring to bring to an end his 33-years-old dictatorial rule. As it has become commonplace, the protests were met with increasing violence and especially with a very polite silence on the part of the international community. Even though protests continued for months, no other country engulfed by the Arab Spring has received less attention than Yemen.

Cultural destruction is already the norm rather than the exception in the Middle East and can be seen live everywhere from Morocco to Bahrain: Luxury hotels, skyscrapers and office buildings take the place of ancient shrines, cemeteries and centuries-old living quarters.

Many examples come to mind: The area surrounding the old city of Jerusalem known as Mamilla, where in intolerant fashion many ancient Muslim and Jewish graveyards are being desecrated and turned into a modern tolerance museum; in Beirut the legendary neighborhood Wadi Abu Jameel – the old Jewish quarters – is being transformed into sleek condominium complexes with staggered rooftops and hanging gardens, and lastly – the most prominent example – the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia is famous not only for the annual hajj pilgrimages but also for having destroyed nearly everything Islamic and otherwise to make space for comfortable hotels and other luxury residences.

The American occupation of Iraq unleashed an unprecedented destruction of many ancient sites and actively promoted looting of hundreds of Babylonian and Islamic treasures that were stolen from their rightful heirs and found their way to museums and private collections all over the world.

The destruction of Sana’a however has been seldom reported anywhere. According to eye-witnesses writing for an American newspaper in November, nowadays the tanks, mortar and firefights rumbling and cracking through the ancient city of Sana’a are endangering not only the future of the country but also its magnificent architecture.

The Old City of Sana´a has been inhabited for at least 2500 years and contains dozens of mosques, baths, gardens, orchards and markets, some of which date back to pre-Islamic times, among thousands of houses estimated to be between 6000 and 12000.

The particular style of architecture seen in Sana’a is thought to have existed already in the 10th century when Persian geographer Ibn Rustah – who travelled extensively in Arabia – wrote that “It is the city of Yemen – there not being found in the highland of the Tihama or the Hijaz a city greater, more populous or more prosperous, of more noble origin or more delicious food than it. Sana’a is a populous city with fine dwellings, some above others, but most of them are decorated with plaster, burned bricks, and dressed stones.”

Despite the urban sprawl, the city has managed to remain more or less intact and the architectural style that Ibn Rustah described has been preserved well into the 21st century. After the end of the civil war in 1969 traditional life in Yemen began to change radically as many expatriate workers returned and began to fuel an uncontrolled modernization of the city. In line with this development – a pattern in many cities – many wealthy families fled the historical downtown looking for homes with better public services; this of course contributed to further deterioration when working-class families moved into the buildings at the same time that the tax base shrank – bearing in mind Yemen is one of the world’s poorest countries.

After Sana’a was declared world heritage site many conservation plans were put in action in a combination of public and private initiatives, international organization and foreign investors – all of which has been put to a halt since around 2007.

Even though efforts were underway to preserve the old city itself, right outside, both Bir al-Azab – the historic Turkish residential and garden quarter – and al-Qaa’ – the Jewish, Christian and Persian neighborhood – lie neglected because in the words of a government official “there is no money to preserve them – and little interest”.

The UNESCO has urged the government of Saleh to protect the architectural character of the old city, and they have expressed their “deep concern” about the state of preservation; the same polite “deep concern” expressed by the UN security council on October 21 when they passed a resolution urging Saleh to sign a power transfer deal proposed by the Gulf Cooperation Council. That the signature of this deal will be translated into any real transfer of power or that the government will lend an ear to the concerns of the UNESCO remains easier said than done.

Residents and shopkeepers in the old city are increasingly anxious about the unrest since the inflation and sense of insecurity have driven out all tourism and radically ruined the local economy. In the meantime Yemen remains a question mark in the cultural geography of the world:

The Western imagination cannot make up its mind whether it is the unlimited trope of Oriental charms that bewitched Pasolini and the earthly home of the Arabian Nights or if it is the home base of the United States number one ghost enemy – Al Qaeda and a thick forest of tribal, political and religious alliances for which the most prominent analysts always fall and remain proudly trapped in the cage of Madison avenue political discourse, concluding almost universally that Yemen is impossible, unfit for democracy and a lost case.

The vision of Pasolini might seem to us today a little charged with Romanticism; however the appeals that he made to the UNESCO remain today as valid as they were in 1971 and should include not only Sana’a but so many other secrets of “Arabia Felix”: Marib, Serwah, Quernow, Barakish, Djiblah and Shabwa, to mention only a few and whose history dates back as far as 11th century BC. To save buildings alone however, without the diversity of cultures and peoples that live in them, is nothing but a futile and merely aesthetic enterprise.

Many cities in the world have “preserved” their historical heritage by driving away their own working-class population from historical centers and then turning them into lavish palaces for the wealthy, depriving these centers from all the sounds and smells of traditional cultures and turning them into museums that are only open for distant observation through postcards and travel books showing immaculate clean streets next to chain stores and souvenir shops that rather than offering a window into the past, offer nothing but a sad remembrance of its complete extermination.

Yemeni cities and antiquities – abundant as they are, have been threatened and despoiled for centuries, ruined, demolished, burnt. Early in 2011 Ahmed Ali Moharram, founder of the National Musem (Yemen) expressed his concern on how nearly every form of heritage in Yemen is threatened not only by history but by poverty and poor education, and he tried to raise awareness about the necessity to preserve them.

In the same way that Pasolini appealed to the UNESCO, I would like to appeal not to international bodies but to the people of Yemen and to recent Nobel laureate Tawakol Karman to not let their country be ransacked and destroyed by the imperatives of the present, to use their recently gained influence on the international stage to save the old city of Sana’a and other places in Yemen from ultimate destruction.

The preservation of Yemen’s antiquity is not only a matter of aesthetic comfort but rather represents an ideal of political life: The ability to be able to educate the coming generations in the light of a history far greater than the illusions of tyranny to enslave a people on the blind assumptions of a dark present. Of course this ideal – revolutionary as it is – requires not only good intentions but tolerance, not of the liberal kind practiced and preached by the same West that turned a blind eye on Yemen. The tolerance that is needed to rescue the Middle East from the abyss of history is not a political reform or a signature on a piece of paper; it is nothing but a change of heart.

Let us hear the warning of Pasolini in 1974 after he had been in Yemen and reflected about the direction the modern world had taken: “To reach the standards of living of the West, the peoples of the Middle East will abdicate their ancient tolerance and will become horribly intolerant”.

His words, poetic as they are, wouldn’t resound so strong today if they hadn’t become the living reality of the Middle East for several decades now. It is this predicament that a cultural revolution should envision as its struggle and not merely the practical pursuit of politics in which most of us, play no part.

Art and Revolution – Filming the Arab Spring

First published at BIKYAMASR

Only a few days before commemorating a year after the day when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his wares and the harassment inflicted on him by a municipal officer – the germinal seed of the Arab Spring – we were met yesterday with the news that the School of Arts, Letters and Humanities at Manouba University in Tunisia, has been closed until further notice after the Dean of the School, Habib Kazdaghli, was briefly abducted and detained by Salafists protesting the ban on the niqab and preventing female students from taking exams.

That this rather curious event took place in Tunisia – the iconic country of the Arab revolutions – and that has deteriorated into an indefinite closure is not necessarily a thermometer of what is taking place during and after the revolutionary momentum in the Maghreb, but it does raise some eyebrows and the observers – at home and elsewhere – cannot help but ask themselves whether this will become a trend followed by other measures. Unlike Egypt and Libya, Tunisia has a strong secular tradition that preceded the recently deposed regime and it is highly unlike that this will be an isolated incident, or that the Tunisian public will remain indifferent.

The question that needs to be asked here is why arts in general, and art in particular, is important for the revolution and what does it have to do with the Arab Spring. During the years of the Cold War when totalitarianism still existed in its early 20th century form, embodied in the Soviet Union, political theorist Hannah Arendt said as early as 1966 that the clearest sign that the Soviet Union could no longer be called totalitarian in the strict definition was the amazing recovery of the arts during that decade. In other words, the Soviet Union would fall because of art – indeed a radical proposition.

This bold proposition was laughed at by many of the most prominent observers who never thought totalitarianism would collapse during their lifetimes. They were proven wrong.

One of the most outstanding and distinguishable aims of tyranny are always the destruction of private life, which is so safely anchored in the solitude of the artist and the writer and that in protecting private life, prevent the destruction of the public space by avoiding the crafting of that ideal type of superfluous person that is necessary for totalitarianism to win over.

This apparently simple lesson on political science is not without relevance for the movement we know collectively as the Arab Spring: It would require an excess of faith in people to think that it is possible to successfully carry out a revolution that is not preceded by a long period of evolution in which we witness not only change or transformation, but in which reason and the apparatus available to us to understand and experience the world is turned upside down.

The arts in general constitute that visible space in which we can inspect very closely the results of the revolutionary operation.

Films in the Middle East have always played an important role in showing us not the change but the ideal place of the change, being that style in art that in venturing between the artistic and the entertaining, succeeds in reaching out for a far wider audience than that of those who read great works of literature and attend exhibits in well-known galleries.

Without forgetting Tunisia, one is compelled to think about that film “Vivre Ici” (2009) of Mohammed Zran who filmed in his hometown of Zarzis the story of an old Jewish apothecary and that when premiered in Abu Dhabi elicited angry reactions about why he had chosen to follow the story of a Jew and not that of an Arab. Armed with a great deal of patience, the artist explained that such was the story of his town, where religion did not play a major role in the life of people.

Regardless of the great deal of prohibition and censorship, even though film production has significantly dwindled in the Middle East in recent decades, production has not been completely halted and we have had a chance to learn about those films especially because they were banned more than because they were successful.

In Egypt, for example, the censorship law from 1947 (that includes “loose morals”, politics, religion, “seditious ideologies” and violence) has appeased the sensibilities of traditional audiences and made nearly every type of films impossible.

However, art never waits for history to fix its constraints and as it is the already famous case of Iranian film, many forms of art have developed that have given voice to many types of expression and feelings without breaking the rules imposed on art. In the West it is unthinkable that art can maintain its dignity and autonomy under censorship but perhaps this is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union to which Hannah Arendt was pointing – the aesthetics of silence. The reactions to films that tackle thorny topics in society are no longer a matter of surprise: More censorship, ban, condemnation, threats and then oblivion.

We are very used to living in a Middle East where issues like homosexuality, nudity, abortion and atheism provoke immediate outrage, for example when Egyptian film-maker Maher Sabry released his film “All My Life” (2008) that he had hoped would be the first balanced representation of homosexuality in the Arab world. The film was never allowed a public screening anywhere in the Middle East and a religious cleric called for the immediate burning of the film. It did not stop there, but went on to become a matter of controversy when the director of an anti-AIDS program in Egypt said the film was a painful blow to their efforts to combat HIV. At the same time that the figure of the “khawal” or overtly homosexual male continued unmolested occupying a prominent place in Egyptian film from all times.

Egypt is not unique in this respect since similar phenomena have occurred in Lebanon when Marc Abu Rached’s film “Help” (2008) telling the triangular story of a delinquent teenager called Ali, who lives in a van in a junkyard with a prostitute called Soraya and her gay friend Janot. It was surprising that a film of the kind – that does not involve sex – would be banned in an apparently liberal place like Beirut but the story goes that the real reason behind it was that it has to do with the participation of actress Joanna Andraos in the film: She was not only one of the stars in the film but the daughter of Antoine Andraos, a member of Lebanon’s parliament from the March 14 Alliance. Politically motivated or not, the film was banned and though it was available in small stores all over the Middle East, what was prominent about it was nothing but silence.

This year we also heard about Maryam Keshavarz’s film “Circumstance” (2011), an Iranian film shot in Lebanon about the underground life of lesbians in Iran and that of course will never be screened in Iran or elsewhere in the region for that matter.

While we remain shocked about the existence of these films themselves or the idea of a woman posing naked – undermining the potential value they have in a cultural revolution – the public does not seem entirely shocked about things far more heinous than “loose morals.”

It is not only the tragic events of the revolutions that have left thousands of dead all over the place but the well-known figures of rape and violence against women and young men, the ignorance and rejection of thousands of HIV carriers, the mistreatment of foreigners, the rampant anti-Semitic rhetoric and xenophobia and widespread poverty only to mention a few. The art that is needed for a cultural revolution is certainly not an art about what we call Arab Spring, only because art loses its value and independence when it becomes a tool of political persuasion and alas, becomes another tool for propaganda – the Soviet Union comes to mind again.

The art – and the films – that will tell the history of Arab Spring will not be Hollywood-style scripting the lives of Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Saaid but rather, those films that will confront us with the real questions that can change and define life as we know: What is our identity? How do we respond to questions of sexuality and gender? Can we lead a meaningful life without religion? What happens when the traditional values of the home break down?

The answer to these questions – or at least the questions themselves – is necessary in order to be able to live in the modern world; it is not only that the revolutions are likely to call into question many of our traditional values and concepts but also that the most elementary concepts of the true, the good and the beautiful have remained shattered in the world for over a century now and in spite of the countless theoretical attempts, the reparative efforts have been to no avail – except in the production of art.

Recently, the Doha Tribeca Festival showcased an uprising of Arab films shot straight from the street and there was the question of whether Arab Spring had managed to liberate filmmakers. The answer to this question, though not complete, can be partially found in the events that took place in that Tunisian university. Yet we should expect in the future a rising constellation of filmmakers telling again the stories that were left untold for so many years and that stand far beyond any political messages.

One of those rising constellations is, among others, Yemeni artist Ibi Ibrahim, winner of the GLAAD award for best emerging artist in 2010, who will release his short film “Sounds of Oud” (2012) that tells the story of a traditional couple that emigrates to America and once there, is faced with the challenges of the breakdown of tradition and with things much more fundamental – love, passion, desire. A film set in New York, in the English language, and yet with the emotional imagery of our traditions and landscapes.

What is striking about his work and others of this generation that we have seen and will continue to see in the future, is not only that the films are still being produced in these times but that we are leaving behind a conception that has plagued Middle Eastern art in general for decades: The ennui of the topics enforced by the constant surveillance and censorship – the village, the family life, the mother, Islam, the fatherland. I would call this a thematic renovation rather than merely aesthetic refurbishing and this is exactly what Arab Spring deals with, not at the level of politics but in the everyday life of the men and women that take part in it.

We must leave behind at long last the thick veil of censorship that we impose on ourselves either for the sake of political convenience or fear anchored in tradition; art in the Middle East should not be an expression of savages trying to convince a Western audience about its potential emancipation as if inviting international organizations to walk through a zoo inhabited by endangered species. What is truly revolutionary about art in dark times is that it bestows upon people the dignity required to do what it takes to carry through what the real demand of a revolution is: To change life.