A nation without a flag?

Part 1

As a result of an unfortunate provocation by a well meaning but fiery young advocate of the Syrian opposition, I became embroiled in an argument over the proposition that the flag of Syria as displayed on a University's Arab society's logo should be changed to reflect the contested nature over which political body is the legitimate government of Syria. I challenged the assumption that we, as Arab expats or members of the Arab diaspora had an inherent right to dictate what does or doesn't represent the Arab people. On what basis, I asked, do we decide whether a national symbol as emotive as the flag be said to exclusively belong to the realm of the government or people? In any case, probably due to a misunderstanding, some interpreted in my concerns, a tone of accusation towards the motives of those in charge and I've since learnt to keep my mouth shut and instead leave what may be interpreted as passive aggressive commentary to my newly founded blog! But the unfortunate incident wasn't all in vain, for it fuelled what was to become a discussion on what, if any flag could represent the society, and potentially the Arab people.

 I've been thinking about the Arab people as a nation for a while; as a result of my recent readings of key Arab nationalist thinkers, having undertaken numerous sociology courses on nationalism as well merely following the unrest throughout the region in current years. Thinking about the Arab nation is nothing new. In fact, if we accept Anderson's Imagined communities theory, then the Arab people are bringing their nation into existence everyday, by means of a common language, mutual concerns, hopes and affinities are read, consumed and articulated in a manner that is far more prevalent than any mode of religious expression. But this kind of modernist understanding must be applied with caution when approaching the Arab world. After all, theories of print capitalism don't quite correspond to the experience of national awareness among the Arabs who have shared a single language for over a thousand years. Al-Arsuzi and Aflaq both stressed the uniqueness of Arabic as an organic language, in conformity with nature and vitality of the vernacular to the awakening of the Arab people. A sense of "Arabness" cannot be reduced to a practical need to structurally reorient society into harmony with a new economic order. But whether or not the modernist interpretation is legitimate, an interesting dilemma remains. Imagining the Arab people isn't new but imagining the Arab people as reduced to a vexillological symbol?

Unlike the Iranians or Turks, the very definitional condition of Arab as pan-ethnic and comprising a wide array of disparate cultures, as well as religious, social and political differences makes the task of infusing a highly symbolised appeal to political unity, as manifested in a flag rather difficult. The sort of banal nationalism that neighbouring middle eastern nations taken for granted is reduced to the domain of the twenty two individual political entities that make up the Arab league. Even during the heyday of Arab nationalism, the flags employed by the various unified regimes such as the United Arab Republic and the Arab Federation, were primarily political and never extended beyond the reach of their territorial dominion. Nasser famously abolished the All-Palestinian government and the Arab revolt flag they had employed upon the founding of the UAR and imposed the flag of unity over Gaza which remained until the formation of the PLO to which it was abandoned in favour of a modified flag of the All-Palestine government which neatly brings us to our next point, the initial popularity of the flag of the Arab revolt.

Nobody knows exactly when the Flag of the Arab revolt (علم الثورة العربية الكبرى) was founded, or by who exactly it was designed. Several theories exist attributing it to various Arab secret societies active during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, modelled after the Young Turks who successfully pressured the Empire into a constitutional model before sowing the seeds for the Turkish nation following the failure of that enterprise. One of these societies were the Arab literary club, based in Constantinople during the early years of the 20th century who formulated the Pan-Arab colours based on a poem by Saif al din al Hilli;

بيــض صنائعنا سود وقـائعـنا خضر مرابعنا حمر مواضينا


White are our deeds, black are our battles,
Green are our fields, red are our swords.


Other sources attribute the foundation of the flag to Al-Fatat, another Arab nationalist society within the Empire which developed close connections with Iraqi officers within the Ottoman military, many of which would join Faisal's Arab revolt which brings us to our third candidate, Sir Mark Sykes himself who supposedly created the colours to bestow a sense of nationalism among the Arabs. The last of course many simply be claims as a result of the obsessive, parental impulse of the coloniser to take credit and subdue any sense of autonomy among his subjects. That being said, it became extremely popular among Arabs who had no part in the revolt, specifically the Palestinians who readily adopted it despite having sided with the Ottomans in the conflict. It briefly served as the Lebanese flag as well as laying the foundations for the Pan-Arab colours which have been adopted by most nations in greater Syria as well as Egypt and a few gulf countries. The enthusiastic adoption of the colours coincided with the national anthems adopted by many of these newly founded nations, which often shared a common lyricist or musician such as those by Mohammad Flayfel who composed the anthems of Palestine and Syria. It's indicative of a very unique component of Arab nationalist sentiment which retains diversity under the threats of uniformity, organic and fluid, permeating the seemingly manufactured structure of modern Arab political boundaries.       

Esoteric-Ethnicisation

Part 1

For those with a familiarity of the Sufi orders which existed throughout the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, esoteric manifestations of Shi'ism among the Turkic communities of Iran and Anatolia, or even a passing knowledge of what are often erroneously called the "ghulat" sects of Islam, the Bektashi's may initially appear to the layman as a largely turkified expression of more traditional Sufi orders, syncretising elements of Anatolian folk beliefs with heterodox Shi'ism. It's an order I've become particularly attracted towards in recent years, and through which I've been alerted to a curious phenomena concerning the relationship between ethnic or national identity and religion in the Islamic world. Although existing primarily in Albania as a result of the Tanzimat modernising reforms of the 19th century which sought to break the powerbase of the traditional and military elites to which the order was strongly associated with; as well as the subsequent banning of Sufi orders by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk upon the founding of the Turkish republic, there nevertheless exists a perception (from both westerners and often non-Bektashi Turks) that the teachings of the patron saint Haji Bektash Veli are something of a Turkish redemption of Islam, cleansed from a dogmatic Arab praxis and reoriented towards a Turkish understanding of spirituality.

 While in Antakya (Hatay), I was even told that the Bektashi-Alevi faith in Turkey is used as a legitimiser by Turanian advocates to appropriate Bektashi traditions as modernist concepts (feminism, humanism etc.), both to decisively sever any cultural association with Arabs and Iranians, as well as infusing what they interpret as authentic Turkic religious expressions, such as that of the animalist faith, Tengrism. As I conducted more research into the faith, I noticed this trend, being raised by orientalist scholars who have unfortunately been responsible for much of the misinformation about the order, as well as by Bektashis and Alevis themselves. This is no doubt similar to claims by Iranian nationalists that reinterpret Shi'ism as a distinctly Persian phenomena, Neo-Zoroastrianism in a thinly veiled Islamic visage, imagining and encouraging a false sectarian dichotomy between Arabs and Persians based on a supposedly ethnic understanding of Islam. The same could be said of the existing accusations in Arab discourse of the cultural customs (often the finger is pointed towards Pakistani and Indian communities) which have supposedly been confused with the purity of Islamic doctrine as exemplified by the Arabs.

Of course, such postulations are preposterous and completely ignorant of actual historical (probably deliberately so) circumstances surrounding the evolution of those varying expressions of faith as well as an overstating of the cultural boundaries and the translatability of those theological innovations between Arab, Turk, Iranian and beyond. After all, how is it that an order founded by a Persian born mystic, though liturgically Turkish and theologically Arab be explained within a pan-ethnic understanding? The ethnic nationalist will no doubt stress the supposed Turkic roots of the patron saint but the ideas that are supposedly so cherished as unmistakably Turkish are in reality a synthesis of already existing doctrinal Islamic traditions with origins from South Asia and the Qalandarriyya as well as the Iranian Hurufis. Indeed, even the identity of the Bektashi order during it's time under Ottoman patronage is one of constant fluctuation and resistant to definite identities, being presented at times as a Sunni order, heterodox Shia-Sufi movement and an essentially syncretic religious ideology. The idea of Shi'ism as an Iranian answer to Islam also fails to account for the long period prior to the Safavid conversion of the region, whereby Iranian remained a stronghold of Sunnism while those lands often associated with Islamic orthodoxy, namely Egypt and Syria were at times under the banner of what would today be described as the heterodox Ismailis.       

These unfortunate reconstitution of the symbolic identifications of faith is no doubt the result of the paradigmatic shift brought about by rapid modernisation, new ideological developments  and the looming spectre of the dominant European example of statehood, all of which contained an implicit rejection of religion as a fluid phenomena, existing in an impenetrable sacred space, for use at the sovereigns own peril. The exact moment in which variations of Islamic esotericism were selected and segregated into individual national or ethnic models is difficult to pinpoint. One could see the national awakenings during the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire as necessitating a nationalist individuation of a now dominant belief, using the European national churches as a model to emulate, or as a product of bio-power and the manipulation of faith as a means to subjugate a population and reorient them towards nationalist goals. Both these theories have merit but what I intend to argue, is that segregation, labelling and defanging of spiritual movements by mostly secular-nationalist regimes in the Islamic world was the result of a neurotic crisis of identity brought about by the realisation that those newly established states, rested upon precarious and often contradictory internal factors.              

Dracula as an Islamicate other?

 

Now that I have your attention, I must apologise for that ruse of a title and admit I have no intention in bringing forth evidence for the reconsidering of Bram Stoker's dark prince of Wallachia as Islamic in any tangible sense. That being said, I wish to have the reader consider the character, Dracula as a sort of personality paradox, navigating the boundaries of life and death through the embodying of largely protestant eschatological manifestations of good and evil. Of course there is no denying that Dracula is portrayed as an undead monster, conditionally devoid of redemptive features (which is a part of his tragic existence), and utterly averse to sanctification. While it's credible to consider the tragedy of the character, Dracula doesn't exhibit any semblance of heroism. But why then has the character not only been based on an existing historical figure, and a reputably brave warrior at that but also one of an undeniably Christian inclination? It is through the paradigm of the savage noble which I'd like to interpret the Count, both as the Eastern European Christian other (in the sense that Gothic fiction utilised Catholic aesthetics to stress the maliciousness of the Church) and the Undead anti-Christian, exhibiting many 19th century Western conceptions of Islam.          

 

Some of the characteristics embodied by Bram Stoker's villainous noble  seem (perhaps coincidentally) to be an amalgamation of western conceptions of the noble savage, particularly of the Islamic variety. In life, he is a Prince of Wallachia and member of the Order of the Dragon, a lone bastion of Christendom in the face of what was at the time a seemingly invincible Ottoman Empire. In unlife, he has ...by his very pneumatological condition, rejected Christianity. The character can't tolerate Christian iconography and symbolism, and in later manifestations is outwardly hostile to the faith. Although Stoker left his theological affiliation unaccounted for in undeath, it is stated he acheived vampirism in his study of the black arts, which interestingly enough is a recurring theme in attaining unatural immortality in Islamic mythology. It's not a stretch to imagine that Stoker was familiar with the story of Sidi Nouman, where Amine, the surreally beautiful wife of Nouman draws suspicion from her new husband upon taking notice of her lack of appetite. She is later discovered feeding on bodies in a nearby grave surrounded by ghoulish monsters (contradicting various claims that ghouls are essentially the Arab folkloric variant of the vampire mythos) to which she is confronted and seemingly killed only to return the next night at the foot of a terrified Nouman's bed, displaying inhuman feats of strength. Upon meeting her final death it is explained that Amine had in fact been a student of sorcery in life which no doubt inhibited her transition to the hereafter. 

 

It is also indicative that Stoker's choice of undead company had to take such a sexualised and perhaps even incestuous form. Although the relationship between Dracula and his brides is never explicit (interpretations vary from his sisters, spouses or sexual partners), their transgressive position within Dracula's household is somewhat disruptive to the 19th century western imagination, harkening to already existing obsessions with the sexually perceived courtly life of the Ottoman sultans. The wives are rarely seen outside the Count's embattlements (save for those unfortunate enough to wonder into Transylvania) but exercise an invisible influence which remains impenetrable and even threatening (inciting both fear and arousal) from the reader. It is in this sense I wish to direct the readers attention to Heidegger's notion of Alethia and the potential of it's applicability both in the sexualised brides and the ontological dimensions of Dracula himself. Alethia, being Heidegger's term in explaining the limits of disclosure. An example of which is light, that in it's revelation retreats and is absent. Being as a whole is impossible to consider as a total presence or absence but is at once both in that those which do not appear, or are present must be thought of as absences. Therefore, it isn't merely the sexual vulgarity which is threatening to the male-western reader but the concealment hidden within unconcealment, to which sexual mediation is reduced to a minimum. Dracula also characteristically preys of Christian women, choosing even to relocate to London to emphasis the transgressive danger posed by the noble stranger. The dichotomy between gentleman and monster, Christian and heathen, reserved and predatory condition of Dracula's character, when examined through a Heideggerian lens is truly frightening, for the reflection is not merely that of the noble savage but the noble-savage existence at the heart of being as a whole.

 

There are other comparisons to be made. In Tod Browning's adaption, there is of course the famous scene in which Dracula recoils in disgust at the sight of Mr Harker's crucifix. What is interesting about that portrayal is the reference to the first chapter of the novel, when Harker explains his acquisition of the item from a women upon hearing of his journey to the Count's estate. Harker recalls his protestant upbringing in explaining his distaste for wearing crucifix's. Political collaboration between protestant England and the Ottoman Empire following the reformation was often reinforced with appeals to the similarities between Sunni Islam and the protestant faith in general. Harker's theological objections to the crucifix were echoes of Dracula's conditional inability to come into contact with one. Could this have been an articulation of the nervousness of the English gentleman into his rare encounters with the noble other? Perhaps we're reading into this too deeply. Let us leave Dracula and the orientalised ottoman in peace, let them retreat to their respective courts to brood over their domains while enjoying a glass of......I almost forget......"They never drink........wine".