I highly recommend Sami Zubaida’s book Beyond Islam from which I have chosen these passages:
Islamism, the cosmopolitan and the transnational
We have seen how the leading Muslim modernist reformers were in many senses ‘cosmopolitan’. They formed part of the elite circles of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians, and focused their efforts mostly within these elites. A subsequent generation of Muslim leaders turned to populism and mass mobilization, deploying a much more puritanical and nativist Islam – notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna, which emerged in 1928; these were the ‘fundamentalists’. Their ideology was one of a return to the purity of early Islam and the first generations – hence ‘Salafi’ (salaf means ‘ancestors’); but their politics were essentially those of modern populist mass mobilization. Their appeal was largely that of national liberation from foreign rule, but also, essentially, from foreign customs and lifestyles; they rejected not only the Europeans, but also those of their compatriots and co-religionists who adopted European ways, and precisely those forms and styles considered ‘cosmopolitan’. In this respect they shared the nationalist quest for authenticity. Indeed, at the present time we see an explicit convergence between forms of Islamism and Arab nationalism (though there is diversity within both) in rejecting ‘the West’, seen as the aggressor against all Muslims and Arabs. An essential part of this perceived Western invasion is the cultural component – al-ghazw al-fikri – of alien ideas and corrupt lifestyles.
This convergence between nationalists and Islamists on the cultural front is illustrated by the example of the trials of homosexuals in Egypt, the Queen Boat episode. This boat was one of the many entertainment venues on the Nile in Cairo suspected of being a gay venue. It was raided by the police and all those present were arrested, some subsequently tried – reportedly after the usual police performance of beatings and maltreatment. This highly publicized episode occasioned public outrage against the victims. The thrust of the press campaign was that homosexuality was a Western corruption, alien to Egypt and Islam. One lawyer beseeched the judge to acquit his client to prove to the world that there was no homosexuality in Egypt. While homoeroticism of various forms has been common and unremarked upon throughout the region (see Introduction), these particular groups become a target because of their style and culture: they are engaged in a lifestyle and forms of sociability associated with modern social libertarians – with ‘gay’ culture – and they are thus seen as alien and threatening; they are, in our parlance, ‘cosmopolitan’.
What of Islamic cosmopolitanism? After all, Islamic ideologies are directed at a world community of Muslims, and at proselytizing universally. Indeed, many Islamists have denounced nationalism as being divisive of the universal Muslim Umma. The prominence of Arab Christians in the leadership and ideology of Arab nationalism, from Ottoman times, has prompted many Islamists to denounce Arab nationalism as a Christian conspiracy with the West aimed at the destruction of the Ottoman caliphate and Muslim unity. In practice, however, Islamic politics had been oriented towards particular countries and regions, not the world community. Even the Sufi orders, which had generated widespread networks in the past, had become nationalized within state boundaries. This has changed in recent decades, first with the internationalization of Islamism through the Afghan wars (courtesy of the Americans and the Saudis), then through the spread in migrant and transnational communities and networks. This is a complex phenomenon demanding extensive treat- ment to do it justice. For the present, let me say that transnationalism is distinct from the thrust and connotation of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Transnational networks and ideologies are often directed at social particularism and exclusiveness. While nation-states in the Middle East and many other parts have engaged throughout the twentieth century in attempts to homogenize their populations through ethnic cleansing and the suppression of minority cultures, the cities of the West have undergone the opposite process – one of increasing diversification, fusion and hybridity [when?*]. Within these spaces develop transnational networks with diverse ideologies and cultures. But one prominent element in this mix is what has been called ‘long- distance nationalism’, including exclusivist religious networks. Muslim groups, communities and associations in the West are diverse, and most are secular. There are also Euro-Muslims – those who want their religion to be recognized alongside the other major religions in European society. But the most vocal and publicized are the Salafi, ‘fundamentalist’ groups who, while content with a trans- national presence, insist on exclusiveness and distance from others.
Cosmopolitanism in the new age
Our own time is marked by the most profound technical revolution in global communications, transcending national and cultural boundaries. At the level of the common people, television soaps from Hollywood, Mumbai and South America are beamed into every home and followed with passion. This is accompanied by international patterns of mass consumption, with global brand names that have become iconic (Levi’s jeans, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola being the most prominent). At the technical and institutional levels, the internet is conquering ever more frontiers: even the most repressive and isolationist Middle Eastern states are connected, but always looking for means of control and censorship. Add to that the enormous explosion in tourism, travel, commerce, international media and the translation and publishing industries, and impressive cross-cultural transactions and mixes are achieved.
Side by side with this cultural globalization, we have the most xenophobic and intolerant manifestations of narrow nationalisms and religious revivals, of which political Islam is the most prominent in the Middle East.
Does cultural globalization represent heightened cosmopolitanism? And is the xenophobia of political Islam a reaction? I would argue that manifestations of cultural globalism have transcended the problematic of cosmopolitanism. The context of the cosmopolitanisms of the first half of the twentieth century were networks and milieux of intellectuals, artists, dilettantes and flaneurs in urban centres – deracinated, transcending recently impermeable communal and religious boundaries, daring and experimenting. Or, at least, that was the projected image, one that defined identities and outlooks. These kinds of networks and milieux persist, and are probably more extensive than ever before. In the age of cultural globalism, however, they have been ‘routinized’, and have lost their special identities and charismatic images. At the same time, global means of communication in the form of television, the internet and other media do not necessarily breach communal and particularistic boundaries and spaces. People receive foreign soap operas in their own homes or neighbourhood cafes, dubbed into their own language. They consume them in terms of their own constructions of meanings and life-worlds.
In another global context, international business creates its own uniform milieux, with its executives and personnel travelling the world and residing in diverse centres, but always in the ‘same’ hotel rooms or apartments, served by Filipino maids, and the same networks of sociability of colleagues and associates. Tourism similarly creates its own milieux: at the cheaper levels, resorts, hotels, entertainments and food that strive for standardization, from Benidorm to Bodrum. Upmarket tourists pay for a touch of exoticism and local colour, often constructed within the safe and hygienic confines of their hotels: witness the constructions of popular cafés and souks in the Cairo Nile Hilton – complete with Ramadan nights if you happen to stay during the blessed month.What is intriguing is that these constructions are not just for tourists, but attract the native prosperous classes, who also like to engage in ersatz exoticism without rubbing shoulders with their poor compatriots.
In conclusion, we can say that cosmopolitanism in the Middle East – in the old-fashioned sense of communally deracinated and culturally promiscuous groups and milieux – continues to exist in particular corners of urban space. These, however, are submerged by the two major forces of the metropolis: the urbanized masses and their transformation of the city and its politics; and the forces of international capital of business and tourism, and their towering hotels and offices, their media and the consumption of goods and images that cater to them.
Mass higher education produces a proletarianized, poorly educated intelligentsia, lacking in wealth and resentful, directing its ‘ressentiment’ against the Westernized elites, seen as the agents of cultural invasion. These are the main cadres of nationalist and religious xenophobia, currently so powerful in the region.
While some degree of liberalization has benefited cultural production in Egypt and elsewhere in recent decades, these limited gains have been very insecure, especially now that they are threatened by religious censorship and intimidation, which also extend to the urban spaces, such as cafés and bars, that form the social milieux of intellectuals and artists. It is not surprising, therefore, that the main cultural flourishing of Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism now occurs in London and Paris.
Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam - A New Understanding of the Middle East, I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 150-55
*The comparison has to be qualified. The European twentieth-century saw the biggest genocidal and exclusivist regime in history, the Nazi regime. Stalin also engaged in exclusivism through mass deportations. It was mainly after WWII, the end of the age of direct colonialism, the need for labour, new migrations that Western cities began to be inclusive. It was in the nineteenth century that the homogenisation process in Western Europe took place, .i.e. during the formation of nation states. The level of violence employed during that process varied from one country to another. (My comment, N. M.)
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