Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century

PREFACE

As we write, the world is overwhelmed by the impact of the novel COVID-19 pandemic. It has resulted in massive disruptions to travel and movement of people and goods, locked-down cities, economic freefall, mass unemployment, and millions sick and nearly 650,000 dead. Seen from a lens with silver linings, the pandemic has resulted in cleaner air, less fossil-fuel consumption, more opportunities for wildlife to flourish, novel forms of global solidarity, to name just a few effects. The virus that first appeared in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, in December 2019, spread to and profoundly altered lives and environments in every region of the globe. Perhaps nothing better than this event illustrates how the world is interconnected, that an impactful event, idea, or object emerging in one corner of the planet may indelibly change lives in far-flung places.

This book is about the global interconnectedness seen from the prism of the Middle East, both global-in and global-out. The volume shows how the region’s economic, political, cultural, intellectual, and artistic formations have come about from a complex set of flows, innovations, effects, interactions, and exchanges. It covers topics that range from God to Rumi, food, film, fashion, and music, sports and science, to the flow of people, goods, and ideas. It discusses social and political movements from human rights, Salafism, and cosmopolitanism to radicalism and revolutions. The book is interdisciplinary by design, incorporating perspectives from history, anthropology, sociology, political science, philosophy, religious studies, literature, film studies, and philosophy. We have been adamant to produce short, clear, and jargon-free chapters with minimal notes accessible to lay readers and students, written by seasoned scholars with established expertise in their areas of inquiry.

A volume of this nature relies on the support, hard work, and collegiality of many people. We would like to thank the contributors who, as one reviewer noted, strike gold in their chapters. They approach their topics with a spirit of rigorous scholarship, artistry, and passion. The editors of the Global Square series at the University of California Press, Matthew Gutmann and Jefferey Lesser, have provided encouragement and direction from the start. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we are grateful to the Center for South Asian and Middle East Studies (CSAMES) for hosting a workshop for authors to present earlier versions of their chapters, the Department of Sociology, the College of Education, and the Center for Global Studies. Thanks to Heba Shama for her help with the photos. Gratitude goes to the Estate of Edward Said for permission to reprint Said’s seminal essay Reflections on Exile, to Verso Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from Timothy Mitchell’s book Carbon Democracy, and to Seyla Benhabib for her interview.

To our many students, colleagues, and friends with whom we have had lively discussion about this book, thanks for providing such a fertile ground for sharing and exploring ideas.

Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera Champaign, Illinois August 2020

PART ONE

Introduction

ONE

Global Middle East

Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system.

I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all.

RUMI (1207 – 1273)

RARELY DO LOCALITIES, COUNTRIES, AND REGIONS develop over centuries and millennia in isolation; rather, they develop in complex interaction with others. The societies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), a region also referred to as North Africa and West Asia (NAWA), are not an exception. Their economic, political, cultural, scientific, intellectual, and artistic formations have come about from a complex set of flows, innovations, interactions, and exchanges with those outside and within the region. Ever since the idea of global or worldliness has been part of people’s consciousness, the region has been immensely influenced by various global forces. It has also profoundly impacted developments in other parts of the world, including what is generally called the West.

Yet the Middle East has long been viewed from an exceptionalist lens in much of the Western press, cinema, television, literature, and scholarship. This exceptionalism depicts peoples and societies as being resilient to change, entrapped by their own history, culture, and religion, and prone to tribalism and nativism. In such a view, culture and religion rarely change, and contemporary conflicts are often attributed to stubborn religious and sectarian rivalries dating back centuries, if not millennia. News media, for instance, are replete with explanations of the Middle East as a region of continuous war, sectarian bloodshed, the cradle of extremism, oppression of women, and religious conflicts, as if these are the result of an innate, inward-looking, and change-resistant culture. Only rarely do analysts take into consideration how the role of geopolitics, multinational entanglements, arms sales (which are among the highest in the world), military interventions, climate change, technological advances, social media networks, high rates of internal and external migrations (the list goes on) influence, transform, and alter societies, from all directions.

For a short period during the Arab Uprisings of late 2010 through 2013, a break to the mainstream narrative occurred. Media from much of North America and Europe celebrated the protestors as global models of pro-democracy, nonviolent warriors from progressive youth movements.¹ However, the so-called Arab Spring soon turned into what countless analysts prosaically dubbed the Arab Winter, and a return to the old paradigms of regional stagnation and sectarianism ensued. This resorting to stereotypes to understand the region while sidelining crucial developments in geopolitics, markets, technology, social policies, climate change, grassroots movements, and other dynamics is partially rooted in what Edward Said famously termed Orientalism. This refers to a systematic body of knowledge production that constructs a totalizing image of the Middle East as an object of prejudice. It considers Muslim-majority populations as static, while neglecting differentiation and change brought about by exchanges among various societies and peoples in the region.

Today a powerful neo-Orientalist approach depicts the region as largely homogenous, closed, parochial, and resistant to change. Imagined in this fashion, the Middle East has little of value to offer to the world and is responsible for its own troubles. This binary of the (Middle) East versus the West has come to occupy a central place in the well-known clash of civilizations theory advanced by political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1993. Huntington viewed an essential opposition between the Western and Islamic civilizations. The idea of this clash has considerably shaped perceptions in the United States about Islam and the Muslim-majority Middle East, in the media and foreign policy circles as well as among different publics.² Even the very term the Middle East is a colonial construct coined in the 1850s by the British India Office, popularized in the late 1930s in the British outpost in Egypt (Egypt was the middle point between Britain and India, the East). The term traveled to the United States in 1946 with the establishment of the Middle East Institute in the nation’s capital. The Middle East thus became a specific object of policy and research.

Few would deny that in past decades countries in the region have suffered from debilitating wars, stifling political repression, new forms of patriarchy, growing inequality, and more entrenched religious extremism and radicalism. But are these features rooted in local culture and an outgrowth of longheld traditions? Take, for instance, Islamic radicalism, jihadi terrorism, or the phenomenon of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). If these were inherent landscapes of local cultures and traditions, why did they emerge largely after the 1970s and seldom appeared before that time? How do we explain the fact that only very few radicals have a past of long-standing piety, and most of them are religiously illiterate, as Olivier Roy suggests (chapter 21) in this book?

The truth is that jihadi terrorism did not naturally arise from certain values intrinsic to local culture. Rather, it was imported and spread by thousands of youths from diverse national, class, and educational backgrounds who joined the Mujahedin in Afghanistan during the Cold War. The Mujahedin, with the support of the United States, worked to expel the Soviet invaders. At the time, al-Qaeda was under the leadership of Osama Bin Laden, the son of a construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family, who advanced the cause of global terrorism in the name of Islam. He turned on his former US ally and is widely reputed to have masterminded the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As Roy argues, violent radicalism of militant Islamists or jihadi terrorists has little in essence to do with the idea of jihad as understood in the legal Islamic tradition. As such, Roy writes, Jihad was traditionally defined as a collective duty to defend a part of the Muslim territory under attack. No individual could call for jihad or bestow on himself the quality of being a jihadi. Instead, militant Islamists deployed the language of jihad to Islamize an emerging radicalism that was embedded in youth nihilism and fascination with death—a narrative in which successive movements embodied in ISIS and other global jihadi groups found a perfect fit.

Another example can be found in the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and successive Israeli governments. Although some analysts try to shape the narrative by claiming Israel’s biblical right to the land of Palestine, or reduce the conflict to age-old hostilities between Islam and Judaism, the conflict is in fact rooted in far more recent history, particularly since World War I. This history includes British support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, European anti-Semitism that culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, the development of strong strategic alliances between the United States and Israel, and the capitulation of certain authoritarian Arab states to the status quo. More recently, Evangelical Christians in the United States have been pointing to end-time prophecies in their support of the modern state of Israel. As conflicts escalate in Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip around Palestinian rights, security, and sovereignty, Evangelical Christians have been propounding Israel’s biblical right to Palestine.³

According to a 2013 Pew Research Center poll, American Evangelicals are even stronger supporters of Israel than are American Jews. If jihadi radicals are in effect Islamizing terrorism by deploying the language of jihad, Zionist radicals are Christianizing the occupation of Palestinian lands by deploying a language of biblical rights. Ilana Feldman’s chapter in this book (chapter 22) offers a much needed context to understand the transnational connections and solidarity networks involved in this conflict, with a myriad of players and interests.

Each chapter in this edited volume is a testimony to the global interlinkages of the Middle East in the political, economic, cultural, intellectual, and artistic domains. The authors narrate how these domains have been shaped by interconnections to transnational forces, peoples, and geographies. But this globality has been complex, taking different expressions and involving different layers, scales, and directions. Sometimes it is expressed in how certain events or interests from outside affect a particular society; other times it is manifested in how persons, products, or cultural registers circulate, travel through national boundaries to be taken on and shared by others. Interlinkages are displayed in the way societies trade, give, take, and exchange cultural and material goods—a process that tends to advance those goods; in other instances, they are revealed in the way persons, ideas, or emotions express belonging to not one but many geographies, taking the world as home.

GEOPOLITICAL EFFECTS

Although we do not hold the Orientalist view of cultural exceptionalism, there does exist a kind of geopolitical exceptionalism in the region, forged by the trilogy of geography, oil, and Israel—elements that have historically heightened imperial dominance and intraregional rivalry. In the aftermath of World War I, Ottoman provinces were carved into zones of British and French influence in the infamous Sykes-Picot/Asia Minor Agreement of 1916. These artificial borders divided peoples and historic communities, splitting contiguous groups like the Kurds and Druze. In the postcolonial period of the 1950s through the 1970s, the forced creation of distinct nation-states planted the seeds of territorial claims and conflicts, instigating wars between neighboring countries.

Thirst for raw materials and control over trade routes brought the lives of the colonized people into global circuits of trade and transportation, production and profit. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, 80 percent to 90 percent of Egyptian exports, mainly cotton, went to British and European textile mills, not only because the American Civil War (1861–65) cut down the US cotton production in the world market, but especially because British colonists wanted Egypt to export its raw material rather than produce its own textiles. Today, even though it is theoretically free from colonial control, Egyptian cotton is entangled in a global network that connects a cotton grower in the Nile Delta to a seaport in Alexandria, a cotton exchange in Liverpool, a factory in Lancashire, a retailer in America, and courtrooms in various major capitals of the world.

To add salt to the wound, the highly desirable commodity of Egyptian cotton used to make sheets and shirts may not even originate in Egypt because, as Ahmed Shokr discusses (chapter 15), the label Egyptian cotton in legal and commercial parlance is not a national marker but a quality brand. Beyond the global circuits of politics, trade, and markets, the fortune of Egyptian cotton also depends on a critical and strategic natural resource—water. With 80 percent spent on agriculture, water remains vulnerable to climate change, energy crisis, local politics and management, as well as regional geopolitics. A number of countries in the MENA region— Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, and Syria to name but a few—already suffer from inadequate water and energy, and in some areas the situation is dire. As Jeannie Sowers relates (chapter 13), key human factors contributing to drought and other forms of environmental degradation include wars, civil strife, occupation, and mismanagement. Egypt shares the river Nile with Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda, and conflict between these countries can very quickly trigger crisis in the supply of water, energy, and agricultural products—elements that are so deeply interconnected.

The discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula transformed geopolitics and transnational trade, triggering massive transregional migration flows as well as economic and social developments. Since the 1970s, Iran and the Gulf Arab countries gained immense revenues from oil and in turn experienced remarkable economic growth, the rise of a middle class, infrastructural development, social changes, and quests for democracy.⁴ At the same time, oil enabled autocratic and authoritarian governments to rule as rentier states. They dispensed welfare to their citizens and attempted to appease and essentially buy off dissenting groups. More significantly, as oil became an energy source driving global economic growth, foreign powers and their corporations (initially from Britain, the United States, France, and the Netherlands, with Russia and China later gaining dominance in this lucrative market) established influence in the region and supported autocratic regimes in exchange for direct access to oil and economic and political favors.

As Timothy Mitchell shows (chapter 14), the largest oil-importing countries encouraged massive arms sales to recycle the money they would pay for importing oil. For instance, in 1953, after the popular prime minister of Iran, Mohamed Mossadegh, nationalized Iranian oil, the United States and Britain organized a coup to topple his secular democratic government in favor of the pro-US monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who became the biggest buyer of US arms in the region. The Shah was later overthrown by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The support of repressive rulers of oil-rich countries is an old story and continues to present times. In 2019, for example, even after the US Senate passed a resolution in March to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen (only to be vetoed by President Donald Trump in April of the same year), after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concluded in a November 2018 report that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Ben Salman (MBS), had ordered the killing and dismemberment of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi, and despite numerous reports of staggering repression of dissent and violation of human rights of women, young activists, artists, and other members of the royal family, Trump continued to wholeheartedly support and defend MBS and continue unabated with trade and arms deals to the country.

In other words, the absence of democratic rule in the region is not simply an outcome of religion or age-old traditions or cultural practices. After all, the Arab uprisings meant to bring more accountable and democratic governance in the Arab world. Rather, this absence is largely linked to the region’s political economy and powerful enablers of repression and autocracy. People in the region have responded to these challenges partly by deploying the language of human rights adopted from United Nations (UN) charters, conventions, and international NGOs. The 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a document born out of the devastation of World War II, was an attempt to lay out a set of international principles for the protection of all peoples. Prominent rights advocates from the region, including Charles Malik (Lebanese) and Bedia Afnan (Iraqi), were influential members of the UN Human Rights Commission. Yet as Lori Allen illustrates (chapter 23), human rights have been torn between the imperial desire to use them as a tool of geopolitical dominance (e.g., invading foreign countries in the name of bringing democracy, enforcing human rights, and protecting women and children) and the indigenous urge to invoke rights as an empowering language for social struggle. Although the process of imperializing human rights has rendered some people in the region to suspect the concept, others have sought to define the meaning and substance of rights in ways that make sense to them, and in which they try to defend them on their own terms. In sum, geopolitics, while a critical force in the region, is not destiny. People and movements transcend regional particularities to act as players in refiguring the global order.

CIRCULATING BELIEFS, ARTS, AND FOODS

If global forces and processes—such as colonialism, oil markets, or arms sales—have deeply influenced the politics and economies of individual countries in the Middle East, ideas and cultural products from the region have equally shaped the social and cultural landscapes outside the region. The remarkable global circulation of belief systems, technologies, music, and foods that originated in the Middle East profoundly transformed the course of human history. The very idea of monotheism as a state religion likely originated in ancient Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten (1353–1336 BCE). The idea of a single universal deity has been the cornerstone of the three main Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all of which were born in what we now refer to as the Middle East. It is remarkable to note that in the twenty-first century, more than half the world’s population adheres to an Abrahamic religion, a topic pondered by Ebrahim Moosa (chapter 2). Moosa shows how the idea of prophecy in these monotheistic religions underlined the impulse to create a worldly political order in which God occupied a central place, beginning with the notion of heavenly king and continuing with today’s religious fundamentalisms. The monotheistic God has had enormous global staying power and remains as strong a phenomenon as ever despite relentless challenges from science and secular sensibilities.

As notions of prophecy and worship traveled with merchant ships, pilgrim caravans, and migrants, so too did food and recipes. Today we take for granted certain food or drinks but have little knowledge of their origins. Sami Zubaida (chapter 9) lays out the historical circulation and art of food. As empires spread, so too did their quest for culinary distinction. During the Muslim expansions, food items brought mostly from India and China—such as rice, hard wheat, sugarcane, citrus fruit, spinach, and aubergine—traveled to Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and Sicily. Today, European names for rice come from the Arabic arruz, sugar from sukkar, aubergine from Arabic and Persian badinjan, alcohol from the Arabic al-kuhl (antimony eyeliner), lime or lemon from limu, and orange from narinji. The diffusion of small dishes or appetizers known collectively as mezze (originally a Persian word) into global diets has transformed the traditional European meal pattern from full course meal into largely shared small plates. Nowadays, in what Zubaida calls a global foodie milieu in the Western foodscape, such Middle Eastern foods as kebab, hummus, falafel, baklava, or mezze have entered common food vocabularies.

Like food, music holds an extraordinary capacity to spread and merge cultures. With an intangible nature, semantic ambiguity, and no impassible social boundaries, music remains a most globalizable expressive substance, as Michael Frishkopf recounts (chapter 11). Musical instruments and sounds of the region traversed Europe, the United States, and Latin America through such channels as West African Islam, the slave trade, colonial encounters, and immigration. Even though certain genres from traditional music and dance became tropes in fanciful Orientalist stereotypes (like a sonic background to belly dancing mixed with exotic femininity), musical repertoires and movements from the Middle East circulated widely. They have been adapted and incorporated into local musical genres, from hip-hop to Hollywood soundtracks. Without a doubt, the impact of the Middle East over nearly eight centuries in music, poetry, dance, sounds has been enduring.

Hollywood and Bollywood may dominate global commercial cinema, but Middle East cinema has carved an important niche. Egyptian films and especially television serials have enjoyed large audiences throughout the Arab world, as have Turkish shows popular among Arabs and West Africans. The avant-guard and highly acclaimed Iranian cinema has gained worldwide audiences. While US and UK film cultures have informed broad frames of cinema in the Middle East, resistant cinema from the socialist USSR inspired parallels in places as far-flung as Algeria, Angola, Latin America, Palestine, South Africa, and Vietnam. Kamran Rastegar (chapter 10) takes three examples—from Egypt (Yousef Shahin), Iran (Mohsen Kiarostami), and Lebanon (Nadine Labaki)—to trace changes and influences in Middle Eastern cinema. He grapples with questions of art and power and asks, Can global be reimagined as a more revolutionary possibility, a world of new connections and opportunities that surpass the limits of nationalism and regionalism? Cinema exemplifies a globality of multidirectional flows that strives to modify the prevailing pattern of center-periphery flows.

EXCHANGE AND TRANSMUTATIONS

From the period of modern colonialism the diffusion of knowledge often appeared to be a one-way street, typically flowing from the rich to the poor nations or from the center to periphery. Things looked different before. During the Umayyad (661–750) and Abbasid dynasties (750–1258), with seats of power in Damascus and Baghdad respectively, new knowledge and staggering scientific discoveries occurred within a multilingual and transregional scientific culture that continued through the nineteenth-century encounter with modern science, as Robert Morrison points out (chapter 3). Since the history of science begins before the advent of modernity, scholars never use the term Middle Eastern science; rather, they speak of science in Islamic (or Islamicate) societies. Morrison cautions that because Islam was the religion of the powerful in these societies, Islamic science is a concise shorthand so long as one understands that the relationship between the sciences and Islam was nuanced, variable, and historically contingent.

The term Arabic science is often used in replace of Islamic science since Arabic was the lingua franca of science, so to speak. But even this term lacks accuracy, Morrison explains, as more and more scientific literature in Islamic languages other than Arabic comes to light. Thus medicine, philosophy, and mysticism conversed and converged with various linguistic, regional, and ethnic communities of learning and worship. The translation movement (from Greek to Arabic and Arabic to other languages) was for centuries a key factor in advances in science, medicine, alchemy, navigation, and astronomy, among other fields. The life of the itinerant astronomer and physician Abdel Rhaman al-Sufi (d. 986) represents the richness of encounters and cultures of learning. This onetime personal physician of the Abbasid caliph traveled to India to study medicine, as Indians journeyed to Baghdad to learn astronomy. In the thirteenth century the famous Maraghah Observatory, located in modern-day Northwest Iran, hosted scholars from Islamic societies from as far as China. Khawrazmi’s algebra (from the Arabic al-jabr, the reunion of broken parts) drew on some Indian, Hebrew, and Greek contributions to build a discipline that later traveled to the Latin world to undergo further advancement during the Renaissance. As much as they are elevated in world histories of science, Morrison writes, the scientific cultures of Islamic societies and Renaissance Europe owe much to other parts of the world.

Whether it is effect, exchange, or simply circulation, globalizing cultural registers often get modified, transfigured, indigenized, and take new meanings. Thus, as culinary cultures traveled in and out of the societies of the Middle East, both their vocabularies and their textures changed. If the celebrated dish ceviche is a derivative from the old Persian sikbaj, it was substantially modified and found life of its own in Peru and the Latin world. Many cultural registers may lose their original identities when they travel and are indigenized. Just as this has been the case with food, science, and music, so too with cultural artifacts. One such intriguing artifact, which has assumed cultural-political features, is the Palestinian kufiya. As Ted Swedenburg traces (chapter 12), this form of headwear originated with peasant-guerrillas fighting the British occupation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the kufiya became the key symbol of resistance of the Palestinian peoples against the Israeli occupation. It was soon taken up by people around the world to exhibit solidarity with Palestinians. But the kufiya, once imbued with specific symbolic meaning, has taken different turns, sometimes hardly related to its original purpose. The kufiya entered the world of youth chic and high street/shopping mall fashion. The trendy chain Urban Outfitters offered it for sale in various playful colors and marketed it as an antiwar scarf, and Israeli designers appropriated it as a fashion rather than political object. The kufiya has also served as a general sign of resistance worn by protesters in political causes ranging from a right-wing militias in the United States to protesters of the Saudi–United Arab Emirates (UAE)–led war against Yemen. But, as Swedenburg concludes, in whatever context and whatever form, as it continues its transnational migrations and transfigurations, the kufiya in some manner or the other usually refers back to Palestine, and its struggles.

WORLD AS HOME?

The story of the kufiya is at once a story of travel and origin, of going off in the world yet knowing its home. What can we say about a form of globality where the home is the world—the kind of world that one might capture in John Lennon’s lasting Imagine lyrics inspired by Yoko Ono? Here is a perception of home, world, and belonging that is not anchored to a specific place or even region but carries within it a multiplicity of cultures, echoes of a common humanity. The life, cultural habitat, and intellectual sensibilities of the thirteenth-century poet Jalal al-Din Rumi embodies such a vision of world as home—a vision that the Persian word jahan-vatani perfectly captures.

Rumi’s life and poetry represent the quintessential timeless figure who traversed multiple lands, life worlds, and cultures. Born in Vakhsh in present-day Afghanistan, Rumi lived in Iran, Syria, and then Turkey, and died in the multilingual and multireligious city of Konya in 1273. Most of his poetry is in Persian, but he also left verses in Arabic and Turkish. As highlighted by Fatemeh Keshavarz (chapter 4), his goal was simple—to speak through a language that transcended barriers such as class, ethnicity, culture, and religion, that would reach Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists alike. Rumi lived a cosmopolitan life and reflected on its merits in his poetry. No wonder such a timeless and cultureful poetry would find appeal almost everywhere and across the centuries. Literary creations traveled and connected cultures in societies where knowledge of different languages was central to this historic literary circulation.

In contemporary times, characterized by unprecedented levels of human flows, we witness a different kind of worlding experienced by the exiled, banished from home, out of place with an endless melancholy and longing for the homeland. Exiles, refugees, and displaced people wander between the world and home. The condition of uprootedness and striving for a sense of home has been common to Jews who have fled inquisitions, pogroms, and the Holocaust; Palestinians expelled from their lands by wars and policies of the Israeli state; Armenians who fled genocides; and now millions of Iraqis, Syrians, and Yemenis escaping the calamities of war. Around the globe, these peoples strive to rebuild a home through their language, networks, food, music, and memory. The exile’s new world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction, writes Edward Said in his seminal essay, Reflections on Exile.⁵ Yet precisely because of this fictional character, the experience of exile can lend itself to immense intellectual empowerment and resilience—think of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, or Said himself. His essay is a reflection on his own exiled and global life. Displaced from his home in Jerusalem, now occupied by the International Christian Embassy, a right-wing Christian fundamentalist organization, Said lived and studied in Palestine then Egypt, Lebanon, and the United States, where he rose to fame as an exemplary intellectual of the late twentieth century. He identified emotionally and intellectually with at once his lost home and the world—the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and South Asia.

The kind of life experienced by Rumi, Marx, or Said is often described in terms of cosmopolitanism, which refers to both social conditions and an ethical project. In one sense, it signifies certain social processes, such as migration and exile, that compel people of diverse communal, national, or racial affiliations to associate, work, and live together—for good and for bad. These processes may potentially lead to diminishing cultural homogeneity in favor of diversity, variety, and plurality of cultures, religions, and lifestyles. Cosmopolitanism also has ethical and normative dimensions; it is a project, something to be cherished. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is deployed to challenge the language of separation and antagonism, to confront cultural superiority and ethnocentrism. It further stands opposed to communalism and narrow identitarian politics, where the inward-looking and closed-knit ethnic or religious collectives espouse narrow, exclusive, and selfish interests. Cosmopolitanism of this sort overrides the multiculturalist paradigm. Because although multiculturalism calls for equal coexistence of different cultures within a national society, it is still preoccupied with cultural boundaries—an outlook that departs from cosmopolitan life-world where intense interaction, mixing, and sharing tend to blur communal boundaries, generating hybrid and impure cultural practices.⁶

The social environment, fascinating life trajectory, and influential body of work of the philosopher Seyla Benhabib represent an aspect of such cosmopolitanism. In an interview with Benhabib (chapter 24), Linda Herrera seeks to tease out connections between biography, political philosophy linked to cosmopolitanism, and global Middle East. Benhabib recounts her memory of the incredibly cosmopolitan Istanbul where her Sephardi Jewish family lived next to Greeks, Italians, Kurds, and Turks in the 1970s. She traces her own political awakenings, life trajectories, and studies that enabled her to make contributions in the areas of German philosophy, feminism, and the rights of stateless people and migrants. Benhabib’s ideas in political philosophy resonate with the plight of migrants and refugees throughout the world, including those from across the region.

Sadly, that type of cosmopolitanism that Istanbul enjoyed began to fade following the Arab-Israeli War and the rise of religious politics in Turkey since the 1980s. However, a new kind of cultural diversity has emerged in the Persian Gulf with the heavy presence of foreign residents and migrant laborers. As a result, places like Dubai have come to represent a cosmopolitan city-state in the Persian Gulf in that it juxtaposes individuals and families of diverse national, cultural, and racial belongings, who live and work next to one another within a small geographical space. But can we call this cosmopolitanism? Indeed, what Dubai represents is not unique in the region. As Ahmed Kanna demonstrates (chapter 18), the massive presence of foreign workers in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates has virtually turned the area into a non-Arab region where 90 percent of the population in UAE and Qatar—and 50 percent in the region as a whole—are currently immigrants. Indeed, migration has essentially altered the meaning of nation in this part of the region and the world.

The great ports of the Persian Gulf have historically drawn people from a mix of Arab, Persian/Iranian, African, and South Asian cultures. Ports are in essence worldly spaces, as Laleh Khalili reveals (chapter 16), not only because of goods transiting through their harbors, but because of the flows of merchants and mariners, capitalists and colonizers, soldiers, sailors and spies, and adventurers and dreamers. Indeed, the great Arab ports on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Gulfs (Arabian/Persian, Aden, and Oman) played such a role in their very long histories that predate the birth of Christianity and Islam. They created the conditions for cosmopolitan environments of sorts in what seemed to be remote and disconnected locations. The port cities around the harbors teemed with languages, sounds, flavors, and smells from all around the Indian Ocean and even further afield. Today the port of Jabal Ali in Dubai embodies a global space par excellence. It is operated by a mix of western Europeans, Lebanese, Syrians, Indians, Punjabi, Filipinos, Pashtun, Nepalese, and South Asians whose assembly reflects Dubai itself, a cosmopolitan if highly unequal global city.

The question to ask is how many elite professional expatriates residing in places like Dubai or Doha share cultural life with the poor, stateless, and deprived migrants of the host society? In truth, the objective possibility to experience mixing, mingling, and sharing is not the same as the genuine desire to do so. At closer examination, cosmopolitan Dubai turns out to be no more than a city-state of relatively gated communities marked by sharp communal and spatial boundaries, with labor camps (of South Asian migrants) and the segregated milieu of parochial jet-setters, or the cosmopolitan ghettoes of the Western elite expatriates who remain bounded within the physical safety and cultural purity of their own reclusive collectives. Ahmed Kanna shows how the extraordinary labor migration to the Gulf has substantially altered the economic and cultural landscapes of these societies. These states have reinforced colonial patterns of segmented labor where the highest paid managerial jobs go to Western elites, while the menial, back-breaking, and domestic labor is assigned largely to South and East Asian men and women. They endure severe exploitation, often long hours, and low pay. Construction workers in Dubai earn as little as fifty to eighty cents per hour in ten-hour-six-day-week routines, trapped mainly in temporary contracts and a system of work sponsorship known as kafala. Laborers live in residential compounds that further entangle them in already hyperexploitative relations of debt, in conditions of particularly exploitative forms of bonded labor. Rather than being regionally specific, this pattern of exploitation is organically linked to the structure of global capital and its logic of profit-making.

If seaports have long been key loci of travel and exchange of people and goods in the region, airports have dramatically increased the volume of travelers, tourists, and pilgrims since World War II. Waleed Hazbun (chapter 17) recounts how from colonial times, the Middle East became a destination for millions of people to visit ancient monuments, religious sites, and the expanding tourist resorts. Beirut famously became the Paris of the Middle East in the 1960s before the civil war and the Arab-Israeli conflict ended its fortunes. But Holy Land tourism and the Muslim Pilgrimage, the Hajj, to Saudi Arabia has continued to attract two million Muslim visitors from around the world every year. Tourism does not necessarily bring about more exchange and human connection, particularly if it remains an enclave industry concentrated in pockets across the region. Tourism can also perpetuate global hierarchies and zones of exclusion.

COUNTERCUR RENTS

Cultural imperialism—a term that conveys how flows of knowledge and paradigms for understanding the world tend to move from the rich countries of the Global North (the center) to the poorer nations of the Global South (the periphery)—is often a reality but not a given. Good ideas and cultural traits that resonate with global humanity can stir countercurrents capable of breaking barriers and shifting the direction of history. The spectacular Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly spread to Egypt and several other Arab countries inspired and informed the imagination of millions of people around the globe who were fighting for social justice. Asef Bayat (chapter 20) discusses how Tahrir Square in Egypt became a global emblem, a model for the global Occupy Movements that emerged in eighty countries and five hundred cities around the world, including Athens, Madrid, New York, and Tel Aviv.

How did the Tahrir repertoire exude such a remarkable global reception, especially when the idea came from a region, the