History and identity in Jaffa and Salonica

I finally got round to reading Adam LeBor's City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa, and the reviewers are right, it really is one of the best recent books on Israel/Palestine, and probably the one book I'd give to someone who hadn't read anything on the topic. The way LeBor tells the story of the last hundred years through the history of one city, and the stories of particular individuals and families on both 'sides', is magnificent. Like all good historical works, City of Oranges makes you want to find out more: about Ottoman Palestine, the Arabic-speaking Sephardic culture of north Africa and Iraq, and the socialist and modernist ideals that inspired the founders of Tel Aviv. LeBor provides no easy answers, but what he does is enable the reader to enter into the experience of groups and communities with radically different perspectives, a process of imaginative sympathy that must surely be part of any attempt to find a long-term solution to the conflict.

LeBor's book is the best historical work that I've read since Mark Mazower's Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, which also took a single city as a prism through which to explore important issues, in that case Europe's Muslim and Jewish heritage, the transfer of ethnic populations, and the Holocaust. Mazower's book conveys powerfully the brutality of uprooting and annhilating communities and cultures that had existed for hundreds of years. (His book Inside Hitler's Greece is also recommended reading, if you want to understand the everyday cruelties of life under fascism and the achievements and weaknesses of partisan resistance.)

It struck me that both LeBor's and Mazower's books demonstrate, among many other things, the tragic consequences of reducing individuals to singular identities. Although it's possible to romanticise the past, 'old' Jaffa and Salonica both represented the possibility of hybrid identities and cultures, while the historical events that transformed them forced their inhabitants to choose one identity: Jew or Arab, Christian or Muslim. Although LeBor resists any easy optimism, he ends his book with hopeful signs of Jews and Arabs in Tel Aviv/Jaffa at least beginning to listen to each other's stories and with their wish that Israel/Palestine can one day become a 'normal' country, in which ethnic and cultural identities are fluid not fixed, and a cause for celebration and connection, not division.

The Arab world needs a secular not an Islamic renaissance

Adam LeBor catalogues the political, economic and cultural stagnation affecting much of the Arab world:

No fully sovereign Arab state is a democracy with meaningful independent institutions where power passes peacefully by popular vote. Economies are sclerotic, but human-rights abuses are flourishing. The internet and globalisation are not opportunities, but threats.

[...]

Intellectual life is atrophying. More books are translated into Spanish in a year than have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000, states the UN's Arab Human Development Report.

[...]

Should we care? Very much so. Already, poor economic opportunities, endemic corruption, education based on rote learning, state-sponsored Jew hatred, soaring youth populations and unemployment are a recipe for social catastrophe. Add the rise of radical Islam and the growth of Al-Qaeda and the mix becomes something explosive.

LeBor contrasts this sorry state of affairs with the intellectual ferment and cosmopolitan tolerance that seem to have been the hallmarks of Arab and Muslim culture, from Baghdad to Cordoba, in the Middle Ages. He believes this history proves that 'there are no contradictions between Islam and intellectual innovation, the motor of any dynamic society', and cites 'a growing number of Islamic thinkers and scholars' who seek to redefine jihad as 'the spiritual and intellectual struggle for knowledge, for self-enlightenment', demanding 'engagement with, not a retreat from the modern world'. Adam is hopeful that recent cultural developments in the Gulf states might 'trigger a new Islamic intellectual renaissance.' 

While I endorse any initiative to liberalise Islam (or any other religion) and undermine fundamentalism and reaction, I can't help thinking that this isn't nearly ambitious enough. Would we prescribe a new Catholic renaissance as the solution to the problems of (say) Latin America, or a reform of Judaism to breathe new life into the political and economic life of Israel? And would we look back a thousand years for models to guide the next stage in the development of Europe, or China?

A culture of low expectations seems to cloud western hopes for the Arab world. Is it really pie-in-the-sky to hope for a secular renaissance and for a decline in the influence of religion in the Middle East? Aren't the populations of those countries entitled to the same kind of flourishing, secular civil society, and the same kind of separation of religion and the state, that most of the rest of the world takes for granted - rather than the continuing dominance of their intellectual and cultural lives by religion, however 'revived' or watered down?

Other relevant posts:

History and identity in Jaffa and Salonica

Religion, 'truth' and the state

Religion, 'truth' and the state revisited

No such thing as a 'moderate' theocrat

Primary proms and classroom homophobia

From today's Education Guardian:

It is prom night and the young people are dressed to the nines, the girls in elegant dresses, make-up and heels, the boys in tuxedos. As they step out of the stretch limos and Humvees their parents have hired, it is obvious that they are ready to leave school...

But these kids are leaving primary school - and their average age is 11. Apparently, the pre-teen prom is becoming an inescapable rite of passage across the UK. The article goes on: 'Boys in kilts and girls in diamante evening gowns are already dancing to the music of time north of the border, where term ends a month earlier than in England.'

The popularity among pre-teens of US movies, such as the ubiquitous High School Musical, seems to be partly to blame. But I think it's also a symptom of the increasing emotionalisation of everyday life (other signs include roadside shrines, crowds weeping at funerals of dead royals). One Scottish parent quoted in the piece says 'I am not sure where the hysteria starts, but when it does it spreads very easily and it is difficult to stop.' 

I can tell you where the hysteria started at our children's primary school: with the teachers. At the end of every year, they set up the Year 6 leavers' assembly so that it would turn into an inevitable weep-fest. Teachers, themselves often dabbing their eyes, gave emotional speeches about 'the best class I've ever taught', and the event wasn't considered a success if it didn't end with gaggles of girls in floods of tears. To watching parents, it often seemed as though it was the staff's separation anxieties, and not the children's, that were being dramatised, and imposing them on impressionable 11 year olds often felt like a form of mild emotional abuse.

I don't want to turn this post into a bout of teacher-bashing, but there's another good piece in the education supplement about combating homophobia in schools. There are some excellent ideas to help teachers deal with issues of sexuality in the classroom, but the assumption throughout is that prejudice against gays and lesbians is part of 'playground culture'. No reference is made to the fact that teachers might themselves exhibit signs of homophobia towards their pupils, and how this might be dealt with. Again, at my son's secondary school (and here's where blogger anonymity comes in useful), the only reports we've heard of homophobic language have been about a teacher who makes repeated remarks about what he perceives to be the effeminacy of certain boys' appearance and behaviour. This is something that was rife at my boys' grammar school in the '60s and early '70s (when even our left-leaning Liverpudlian politics teacher had a habit of referring to a particular pupil as a 'big girl's blouse'), but I had kind of hoped those days were over.

One more item to recommend in the Education Guardian: an interview with one of my favourite historians, Mark Mazower, which oddly omits to mention his bestselling book Salonica, City of Ghosts, which I wrote about here.