WHERE ARE THE ARAB KILLJOYS?
Post-Arab Critique and
Intersectional Solidarity
by Ahmad Makia
in coordination with
Toufan Al Aqsa
self-published
2023
The case of this essay calls for expressions of Palestinian solidarity from grassroots initiatives and voices from the independent self-publishing community, as external, in alienation and in deference to self-represented Arab governments and nations in the Arab League.
Additionally, it seeks to validate voices and critique of Toufan Al Aqsa without reducing them to impassioned expressions from those who operate under the ghost of pan-Arabism or because of their Arab or Muslim origin.
Rather it builds a position for thinkers and cultural practitioners whose call for freedom in response to Palestine’s brutalization, ethnic cleansing, mass terror and murder is indifferent to their institutional and biographical conditioning.
It is an expansion from frameworks which conceive of the representational and ‘people like us’ as a basis for political solidarity.
A deliberately postnational and postethnic space for defectors, my critique revokes alignment to the nation-state order and the byproducts of Arab governments or political parties. This is a rally for Toufan Al Aqsa and hails Arab solidarity as not panacea but a space for critical reflection and to embrace contradiction in the fight against hegemony
When preparing to revolt, one of the very first things a precarious, dispossessed subject – chief among those who revolt – must be armed with is a change in the narrative. Not only in the narrative but in their identity too. They must camouflage and sabotage to create confusion and destabilize the established status quo. As cultural workers and narrators from or of the Arab region, I believe you like me are being faced with the erasure of our independent voices and critical perspectives, accelerating the homogenization of our subjectivities into gamification.
What I mean by gamification is the professional and metaphorical subsumption of Arab-Islamic narratives toward the war on terror, illiberalism, religious orthodoxy, and armed conflict, given an assumed affinity to a flattened Arab-Islamic world. In this imposed method our bodies become dispossessed and transform into refractive vessels for a monopolizing Enlightenment culture which uses such bodies and the traumatic events they endure to develop debates on what constitutes the observer’s humanity and where it lies. A humanity perceived as self-enclosed, achieved by a select few and struggled for by others.
The gamification of people like us – and this ‘us’ would be the generic ‘Ahmad’ or ‘Muhammad’ or ‘Abdullah’ or Hussein’ or ‘Adnan’ or ‘Ali’ from an essentialized Arab-Islamic geographic plate – renders us divorced from, even antithetical to, the fluid, hybrid, and heterogeneous world. Under this rhetorical schema, our bodies become ‘civilian objects’ directly or indirectly engaged with landscapes of war, repression, and terrorism. Some critics consider this essentialism and dispossession a result of the 9/11 attacks and the Islamophobia attending their aftermath, or of the opposition between democratic free nations and the oppressive illiberal world. While this is true, the gamification of Arabs and Muslims, starts earlier.
My argument borrows from Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), whose title might mislead some into thinking the war never actually happened. To the contrary, the philosopher’s series of papers explicated the evolution of war from a virtuous fight in the barracks into a mediated spectacle transpiring in urban and civilian spaces, televised and consumed from behind the screen.
For Baudrillard, the staging of war, urban destruction, ruinification, human displacement, arbitrary killing, and troops amassed on borders symbolized the rupture of the military-industrial complex becoming a constitutive element of everyday reality. This war was not the beginning of the rupture but its crystallization, according to Baudrillard, with American consumers now able to watch its events unfolding live as they occurred in Iraq, Kuwait, and the broader Gulf region.
In this scenario, military action is detached from face-to-face combat and instead becomes a staging of photo-ops for military personnel in a landscape they are occupying. By ‘the war did not take place,’ Baudrillard means that in the act of televising spectacles of war, people become desensitized to what they are watching and dehumanize rather than empathize with the spaces, people, and acts they are observing.
Illustrating this thinking is twenty-first century warfare in places like Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, in which aerial drone strikes and target-precision killings dominated the United States’ military tactics. War did not take place because it was, and still is, experienced as a terminal affair, conducted and calculated through live streaming and control panels, taking place behind screens that blur the boundary between gaming and reality.
These landscapes of war are visualized not only through real military action but even in speculative scenarios. In Toufan Al Aqsa, we have seen gamified 3D schematics of underground terrorist tunnels as well as deconstructed digital media – from photographs, screenshots, redacted headlines, and videos to audio and tweets – claiming to ascertain the veracity of competing propaganda. The war thus takes place not only in physical landscapes but also in mediated ones and seeps into lived realities, determining or undermining certain actions or outcomes in a given context of war.
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Although there is truth to what Baudrillard conceived, underscored by illustrious examples, it did not envision that those very same subjects who are being mediated, caught, and haunted by the spectacle of gamified war would retort, speak up, and act up. Rather than only narrating themselves as victims of war or its survivors, or as refugees or asylum seekers, many Arabs and Muslims today speak critically about their conditioning as projected recreations and subjects of this gamification. Feeling erased and absorbed into this military urbanism, both within their own homelands and in the places they migrate to, in their encounters with border personnel or policed checkpoints, they express their evaded marginality and context, including their humanity, personhood, and sense of self-respect.
The result of this Arab-Islamic collectivization as subjects of threat, war, and terror breeds necrophiliac worldmaking as resistance culture: generalized Mohammeds and Ahmads perform as if their lives are on the line. When one’s life is on the line, taking it becomes the most expressive act of this unbearable precarity. This we extrapolate from what Jihadist terror and insurrection cells teach the disenfranchised Muslim youth: when your life is constantly under threat, you take the hegemon’s dominating power away and detonate yourself; you take death into your own hands, defeat its anticipation, and hail it for yourself. When the bully is so big and so strong, your self-defense is to amputate and explode before the bully comes and does it to you.
Therefore, those from the Arab-Islamic plate have to continuously tend to Western media personnel asking if they condone ‘terror acts’ because much of what is understood about Muslim self-defense is its indifference to suicide. Taking oneself to the gallows as it were. In some way, life under the insurrectionary Muslim jihad school is on a continuous reset not dissimilar to an objective-based, multiplayer shooter game.
This binary gamified fight between the ‘terrorist and terrorized,’ ‘lightness and darkness’ echoes the dystopian sci-fi novel Westworld. A simulated world, life is rendered as an amusement park populated by android hosts that are ‘rented’ and accessed by biological humans. The android hosts are biomechanically dissimilar to humans. After each play session with these humans, the androids' memories of being violated, assassinated, dispossessed, raped, and pillaged by them are wiped.
Over time, the androids exhume deep truths about their subjectivity and learn about their instrumentalization as civilian objects of terror, violence, murder, and rape by superior humans. The android hosts convene and discern that they are in a hyperrealistic game controlled by unseen and distant powerful forces. They speak with one another about the repressions they suffer and through this communal act begin to develop humanity and sensibility.
The lesson of the novel is that androids and robotic life – a source of fear for humans – are actually a source of double exploitation: not only do they need to endure the horrifying acts perpetrated by their superiors, they must also teach and pave the way for them to reach and find their own humanity.
An Ahmad should not only be able to speak or think through a fixed set of relational dialectics sanctioned by an unseen and unreachable oppressor
Today, however, an ‘Ahmad’ or ‘Muhammad’ or ‘Abdullah’ or Hussein’ or ‘Adnan’ or ‘Ali’ should no longer need to identify as a gamified Android turned guillotine. An Ahmad does not need to be offended and antagonized or defensive and deterritorialized. An Ahmad should not only be able to speak or think through a fixed set of relational dialectics sanctioned by an unseen and unreachable oppressor.
This is why I wish to initiate the space for the Arab Killjoy and usher in the post-Arab dialogue. It is the result of a more serious insurrection against the championing and redirection or even correction of an abstracted and enemized Western narrative. Instead it seeks internal innovation and rehabilitation.
I speculate that as more Arabs and Muslims decolonize themselves from their inherited Arab identity, the more they will be able to confuse and disturb their representation as the polar opposite of the ‘Free Democratic Western world.’ Post-Arabism is to reclaim the dogma of what’s perceived as inaccessible to Arab identity, such as being queer or an atheist or simply a voice of gentility, peace, and emancipation. It is a call to graduate from the term ‘Arab’ and propel identities from the existing heterogeneity and marginalities of its contemporary spaces. A shift towards a post-Arab space is not self-sabotage, nor does it reflect internalized hatred of an inherited identity or a desire to abandon intergenerational truths (and traumas). In essence it builds on the ‘Arab’ as an innovative, transmorphic-episteme rather than a genetic truth.
Post-Arabism is to reclaim the dogma of what’s perceived as inaccessible to Arab identity, such as being queer or an atheist or simply a voice of gentility, peace, and emancipation.
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The Arab prior to being an Arab was predominantly a Muslim, or Mohamadean, who belonged to an Islamic Empire; even if said subject was not a believing or devout Muslim. Rather than enacting a binding spirituality and religiosity, the Islamic Empire was more proficient at performing as empires do: staging a crisis of capitalism. The Islamic Empire operated as the collection point of tax revenue in the form of zakat and thus consolidated its administration through territorial control of various settlements.
Within the Islamic Empire, which grew much more widely and influentially than its landscapes of birth in Arabia – especially under the Caliphs of Muawiya bin Abi Sufyan and Ali bin Abi Talib, fathers of the Sunni and Shia Islamic sects respectively – Islam did not evolve to become a singular and collectively followed religion over large parts of the world. Rather, it was the establishment of a formidable civilizational power through an amassing of territory and community under Islam as a political system.
The Empire achieved this by adapting and blending the message of Islam with what it saw as pagan and polytheistic spiritualities of the different regions to which it traveled. Since it subsumed existing cultures it never in fact displaced them. Islam thus was spread in a polyglot fashion, becoming what is known today as global Islam in addition to many self-authored offshoots, like the Khawarej or Ismailis or the Nation of Islam. Islamic cities such as Timbuktu, Almaty, and Jakarta represent a heterogeneous Islam not a singular one.
Needless to say, the Empire’s penultimate reign, nearly 800 years, lay with the Turkic Ottomans, who were neglectful of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina and the religion’s supposed Arab nativity. As a result, by the turn of the twentieth century being Muslim did not signify a center but a nebulous and diffuse soft power cross-continental culture. Additionally, Muslim culture was a majority consensus and representational constellation that included various local denominations as well as minority communities, even of non-Muslim origins or from non-Abrahamic religions, such as the Druze, Zoroastrians, and Parsees.
Thus, before the Arabs became the Arabs, they were predominantly Muslims who descended from Arab origins and felt that the ideas, cultures, and religions that their kin had ideated – which did not only include Islam but Christianity and Judaism too – were completely deterritorialized and beyond their control. This sentiment was especially felt as the Ottoman Empire’s influence was waning at the turn of the twentieth century, with the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the armed might of European colonialism baring their teeth at Islamic gates and forts.
It follows that much of what became Arab modern culture and identity hails from intellectual restorative measures and a reterritorialization of the legacies of Abrahamic spirituality: namely the expansionism of Islam, especially that of Sunni Islam and victories of the Umayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids and deeper histories from the Pharaonic, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Nabatean societies.
The restorers of the Arab Nahda, ie the 20th century modernist renaissance, also identified their citizens-to-be not as an indigenous genetic group but as ‘autogenetic.’ For Sati’ Al Husri, who conceived of this concept, Arab autogeneticism referred to the heterogeneous lingua franca that the Arabic language has expressed and creolized itself in. This ranged from communities bordering the Maghrebi Atlantic through to Egypt, Sudan and the Horn of Africa, the Levant, Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, island states of the Western Indian Ocean, as well as the boundary zones between Mesopotamia and Persia.
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It was not genetics which made you Arab according to this autogeneticism, but an elected or assumed belonging one had or felt. It was the cultural affinity and affectivity one experienced which made them an Arab. Al-Husri’s ideas of an autogenetic Arab nation-state (inspired by French positivism and German romanticism) also laid the groundwork for the birth of a simplified and accessible Modern Arabic language, or Fusha, meant to decenter the classical and antiquarian Arabic used in religious literature and teaching, reserved for the elite and nobility. Looking to displace Islam as the center of people’s identity, Modern Arabic came to be the accessible language of the press and the masses.
Arab self-selected autogeneticism also heeded ideas of self-determination, secularity and personal choice circulating during the Tricontinental postcolonial zeitgeist and the formation of autonomous, secular and state-led identities in the mid-twentieth century. Under the leadership of mostly socialist-leaning and anti-colonial military officers, this intellect was applied to state ideologies, creating Arab nations divorced from the old vanguard governed by the nobility of a theocracy. These commanders and officers were the conspirators of homeland patriotism, or the Qawmiya, immortalized by the figures of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Naguib, but more concretely realized by figures such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Hafez Al Assad.
Rather than the Islamic umma as imagined by its preceding empire, these ‘Arabists’ believed in self-rule, autonomous territorial borders, postcoloniality, self-determination, athleticism, leisure, militarism, heteronormativity, science, and most importantly secularity. A secularity namely from Sunni political Islam. The officers and military groups saw themselves as the representational future of the working class, of localized natural resources, of self-made industry, of the bureaucrat, of the disenfranchised, and as the propellers of what was ‘vulgar’ and ‘popular’ to become the driving force of the future.
Although many of these ideas were central for the establishment of the modern Arab region, the ideology’s ultimate solidification into a collective public and transnational identity came by way of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the Israeli settler state. A major tenant of what became the post-imperial Islamic world did not necessarily mutate into a self-determined, autogenetic Arab world, but in essence became the pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist Arab world. A few decades after the Nakba, the freedom of occupied Palestine was heavily intertwined with the success of the Arabist cause. Arabs are not free if Palestine is not free.
Arabs are not free if
Palestine is not free.
Since the occupation of Palestine endures, there have been some suggestions that its twinning with Arabism is a reason for Palestine’s inhibited, protracted freedom in the contemporary age. Islamists did believe that the secularism advanced by the Arabists was a radical break with the region’s history rather than a bridge, and thus not a comprehensive strategy for a collective transition. Islamists may also accuse the Arabists of appropriating Islamic culture as an Arabic one.
Arabists did break from Islam, as well as from twentieth century attempts at Islamic modernization, by brute force. In Nasser’s Egypt, Islamists were imprisoned en masse in concentration camps. Saddam Hussein filled the prison of Abu Ghraib with Sadarists and Shia sympathizers. Enhanced modernization and secularism as experienced under the Arabists did breed a sense that local culture and customs were being erased. Adoption of modernity and liberalism in the Arab world was perceived as the mutation of Western colonialism from built direct rule to terminal soft power dominance. Progressives, meanwhile, called on the Arab public to adopt the master’s tools so as to dismantle the house from within and so that the culture of modernity in the region was self-authored rather than imported. Since Arab modernity leveled and embraced Western cultural expressions, it also sometimes came tied to diplomacy with Israel.
The militancy of Islam thus grew as it began to conceptualize the Arab secularist as a complacent consumer. To take on example of the recoil this sentiment generated, Saudi Arabia’s Hijaz, the birthplace of Islam, witnessed tremendous liberalization vis-à-vis Egypt in the mid-twentieth century until the Juhayman seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979, which completely radicalized the Kingdom’s governance structure, retreating back into Islam as the only solution forward. Contemporary reforms in Saudi Arabia echo this history and renew the dynamic that the repression of political Islam is equated to accelerated liberalism – the region thus remains governed by states of extreme.
Activists, radicals, and intellectuals of the region would dismiss such claims, and present evidence of Western energy conspiracies in the region and colonial lust over its resources. They additionally would claim that the arming, terrorizing, and ongoing fighting present in the region stem from the implanting and importing of zealot Zionist terrorists in the years prior to and after 1948. In their view, this reality has trickled down across the Arab region, with religious ethnoterrorism becoming the de facto governance model hatched and replicated by the Zionist ideology across the modern Arab world. According to many of these claims, it is not that Nasser was wrong or that the Arabists were mistaken, but that envious, greedy, and monstrous colonial appetites colluded to stymie the Arabists’ desire for sovereignty and prosperity.
In my practice, I have spoken about the historical alpha-male sentiments and narratives, in which the Arabist’s dream was never realized, as a ‘Pan-Arab Hangover’ condition. It diagnosed contemporary cultural artifacts and narratives of the lingering ruins and affect of the ‘missed opportunity’ of Arabism – of the unfulfilled not dream but destiny of its cause, now resulting in the dismembered and scattered sense of solidarity among its subjects. We hear the echo of this sentiment today, especially in Toufan Al Aqsa and the genocide being carried out on Palestinian life with ‘Where are the Arabs?’ The curt answer is perhaps long ago, in 1967, the Arabs decentered the Palestinian cause; and in 1979, thinkers like Fouad Ajami declared Pan-Arabism dead; meanwhile, during the first Intifada Julia Boutros, Amal Arafa, and Sawsan Hammami sang on Libyan TV ‘Wayn Il Malayeen’, ‘Where are the Millions’, which criticized the deafening response of Arab governments and communities. It commemorated the political shift and disappearance of the ‘millions’ from the region who usually mobilized for Palestinian freedom.
Julia Boutros - Wein Al Malayeen Deezer
The transnational vision of Arabism which saw itself as the voice and basin of Palestinian freedom and as a master overrider over local origins splintered into tribal-like constituencies: Maghrebi, Khaleeji, Sudani, Masry and so on. Instead of transnationalism, the Arab project became national and territorial. Inversely, the founders of Zionism rationalize their ideology and nation as victorious because of how it operates as a transnational loci for disparate Jewish groups and people.
Since the 70s, there have been political shifts from being anti-Israel in the Arab region. Additionally, there has been the fostering of peace treaties and political dialogue with Israel since the 1970s, including from the Palestinian resistance movement. In 2021 a new wave of normalization with Israel among Arab monarchical and Gulf states also took place. Even though governments made such decisions, they are by no means a reflection of the public. Thus, in this ongoing decentering of Palestine from political Arab movements and governments, Islamist groups today inherit and capitalize on this mass public sentiment and have more pronouncedly anti-Zionist politics than contemporary Arab governance does.
Arab, as a term, is not as cosmopolitan and fluid as contemporary Arab publics in reality are.
These histories reveal not the fixity and impermanence of the Arab but its malleability as a transformative mask used for political leverage. What ultimately rings most true about the Arab mask, or Arabism, is that it is a monolithic figure suppressing a pluralistic universe. Its supposed ability to create a sense of collectivity and heterogeneity in the name of one equalized Arab identity is flawed and failed, yet still paralyzes this region’s self-conception. Alpha Arabness engendered marginalization through its totalizing effects. Arab, as a term, is not as cosmopolitan and fluid as contemporary Arab publics in reality are. Not to mention, powerful post-Arab sentiments from Kurdish, Turkmani, Nubian, Ajami, Afro, Berber, Sufi, Armenian and Amazigh communities. Additionally, Arab secularity also imagined a secularity from Sunni Islam, while Ajam-izing, ie Persian-izing, Shia Islam variants as non-Arab and as unwanted.
For this reason, my argument is that Arabism in itself is not a sufficient framework for solidarity. This act of lingering and waiting upon some inherent sense of Arab belonging to prevail will never be realized, and thus disillusionment, helplessness, and failure are guaranteed outcomes. Arabness as a framework for political fulfillment infantilizes its supposed subject rather than emancipating them. Collectivizing Arabness is a convenient effort because totality is an easier rationale.
In my view, the history of Arab restoration and dignification as a decolonial measure shares symmetry with the Western gamification of voices from the Arab-Islamic plate. They rely on the dominant and monolithic to reinforce the status quo. Both impose on the subject a position of defensiveness, as someone who must audition for their humanity, to speak on behalf of the region, its political parties, sects, beliefs, the Palestinian genocide, and so on. What many actually miss in the representation of the region is that it goes far beyond its centrality to birthing Abrahamic religions and the Arabs. This is why I call for the adoption of a new schema to speak about the Arab World, one that does not flatten and reduce it to the dominant Arab and Muslim cultures.
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While I am biographically from a monolithic Arabic and Islamic culture, I identify with the lands of what constitutes modern-day Iraq. My ancestors are Arab, Kurdish, Turkmani, Najdi, Sunni, and Shia. Among our family and friends are exiled Jewish Iraqis, Circassians, Chaldeans, Armenians, assimilated Kuwaitis, naturalized Iraqis of Palestinian origin, Anglo-Iraqis, and Assyrians. The national territories of Iraq had been the lands of the Doms, Zott, and Ghorbati, Arab tribes linked to the Najd, Persian, and Turkic communities as well as to several other ancient cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Babylonians, Akkadians, and Assyrians. Today, there exist in Iraq many pre-Abrahamic minority communities such as the Mandeans, Zoroastrians, and Yazidis.
This example is not simply to show diversity as a form of post-Arabism but to illustrate that hybridization, creolization, and dynamism must always be mobilized in contemporary self-narration to disrupt the essentialisms imposed, whether as the inheritor of the modern Arab cause, militant Islam, or the gamified terrorist/war victim.
This extends to the casual invocation of Palestine and Palestinians as a monolithic identity or that the current Toufan Al Aqsa aggression as a war between Islam and Judaism or Israel and Palestine. In The One State Solution Edward Said argued that, “First Palestine is and has always been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab. While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main one. Other tenants have included Canaanites, Meabites, Jebusites and Philistines in ancient times and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines and Crusaders in the modern ages. Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.”
Additionally, there are several examples that destabilize the notion of Arab puritanism. In the Maghreb region some claim that Arabness is not necessarily a dominant feature of its language or self-expression but an influence coequal to Berber, Amazigh, Sicilian, Spanish, and African Francophone culture. Throughout the Arabist cause Lebanon had been, and continues to be, very vocal in advocating for a post-Arab identity, or more precisely a non-Arab one, relying on its Phoenician and Byzantine histories. In territories of present-day Spain, Portugal, and Southern Italy, the ‘Arab-Islamic’ isn’t so much a part of their contemporary state identities but is instead preserved as a heritage of artifacts, architecture, and mixed genetics.
Understood as the birthplace of Arabs and a specifically Arab space, Yemen nonetheless claims its own distinct, autonomous, and self-made identity of post-Arabness, mutating from the Arabian Peninsula to Central and East Africa to South and Southeast Asia, with Arabness regarded as an ancient feature. Afro-Arabness presents yet another marginalized dimension, one usually projected onto the North African region and to a lesser extent by Sudan and Djibouti. Afro-Arab history and influence in Chad, Mali, Niger, and Cameroon are rarely imagined as part of the Arab public, nor is the Omani imperial presence on the east coast of Africa, namely in Tanzania and Kenya, and on the Indian Ocean islands of the Comoros and Madagascar.
The Gulf region is another place I am connected to which identifies as Arab. Its contemporary social condition, however, would be unimaginable without its majority resident South Asian communities, seen locally as both a source of its success but also projected as a source of friction between the ‘native Arab-Islamic community’ and ‘foreign Hindu culture’. Moreover, some Gulf states are autocratic yet have embraced neoliberalism as key to their development, which has led to the loosening not of political freedoms but consumer ones, with privatized services, real estate, and experiences offered by a one-party, non-elected government, not unlike China’s contemporary structure of governance. Moreover, the Gulf’s political policies and strategies have been techno-scientific and futurist oriented, rather than a series of building blocks departing from the Arab cause.
All this is to say that when I revolt today against the Palestinian genocide it is not because of my affinity to the Arab-Islamic plate, but in alignment with the heterogeneous, intersectional world I am working daily to realize – a world much beyond the Arabist Qawmiya and the Westphalian nation-state. Instead, the political vision extrapolates from experiences with the region outside its dominant Arab-Islamic cultures and all of their attendant assumptions and subjugation. Palestine transcends the Arab-Islamic sphere, yet it is sometimes seen as a regional and communal struggle – manifest in phrases like ‘Where are the Arabs’ – largely because the Arabist made it a central tenet of its cause. Under the Arabist, the Arab identity is never at peace and its life is constantly on the line with the occupation of Palestine. Yet, Palestine intersects with much more than its regional and neighboring spokespeople and expands on several discursive spaces of armed resistance, dissent, exile, binationalism, indigeneity, segregation, environmentalism and much more. It is critical today that we carve out space to speak on behalf of and demand justice for Palestine outside of our own lineage as inheritors of Arabness or Islam.
The post-Arabist lens offers other spaces to resist Western gazes and dogma, namely in its posture toward atheism and queerness.
The post-Arabist lens offers other spaces to resist Western gazes and dogma, namely in its posture toward atheism and queerness. Not because such expressions do not exist in the Arab world as marginalized spaces, but documented transphobia and same-sex criminalization in the Arab world have been used to delegitimize calls for solidarity with Palestinians. Although practiced widely, atheism or agnosticism still has no space in state identification; religious sects dominate these forms of identification, hindering employment, marriage, and living opportunities in different parts of the region.
It also offers the possibility of approaching existing non-Arab and non-Islamic heritage, especially pagan and polytheistic belief systems, most of which have been segmented as part of the Jahaliyya, i.e. the era of ignorance, prior to Islam.
Post-Arabness can subvert the understanding of Westernized or diasporic Arabs as somehow extracted from their ‘home.’ Instead, a post-Arab framework can absorb the dimensions of the diffuse, immigrant, nebulous world we are fast becoming globally. It can integrate the Western, or Westernization, as a major influence and enmeshment with the past and present of the region rather than a decidedly foreign and unwanted imposition.
I do not call for the abandonment of the term Arab or acknowledge that it does not create a world of important and nuanced meanings for the region’s inhabitants or those in the diaspora. Rather, it is an invitation for a transitional space outside ‘Arabness,’ beyond the notion that the modern and contemporary condition and governmentality of the Arab world is a locus sufficient on its own to build solidarity. This is a call to initiate intersectional and heterogenous frameworks with a deliberate understanding of Arabness as a political prosthetic, rather than an essential truth; to develop contemporary revolutionary thinking and action with the liberty afforded by nonethnic – or autogenetic – frameworks and to build a political class that advocates for more-than-the-representational.
by Ahmad Makia
in coordination with
Toufan Al Aqsa
self-published
2023
