>On Thursday, May 20, 2004, at 08:04 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>The book The Arab Mind is one of the examples that Edward Said used
>>to critique "Orientalism Now." See Said's Orientalism (NY: Vintage,
>>1978): pp. 308-9, 311, 312, 349. If the photographs of sexual
>>torture at Abu Ghraib had been indeed used as a tool of blackmail,
>>based on the orientalist conception of "the Arab Mind" that authors
>>such as Patai expounded, the blackmail evidently failed to work, as
>>Hersh notes. The failure, I submit, is not only evidence of
>>torture's uselessness as an instrument of gathering information
>>from the tortured that Darius Rejali documents but also proof that
>>orientalism says more about phantasmagoric images of the "Western
>>Self" and the "Oriental Other" that orientalists create as
>>statically diametrical opposites than about objective and
>>subjective lives of the Arabs and other so-called orientals which
>>are as variegated as objective and subjective lives of any people
>>anywhere else -- a confirmation of Edward Said's thesis.
>
>That seems a reasonable statement. Perhaps one could explain this
>failure of the blackmail tool to work as follows: these days, the
>impulse to resist and drive out the U.S. occupation is trumping the
>feelings of shame among Iraqis. A few ex-prisoners have been
>interviewed in the NY Times and elsewhere saying that they were
>indeed ashamed by their treatment in the prison, but once it becomes
>clear that many prisoners received this treatment, it simply adds to
>the solidarity of the resistance.
Collective imprisonment in a colonial context does often unwittingly create a new network of solidarity in resistance or expand an existing network by mingling a few experienced resistance fighters with many who have been apolitical until imprisonment. It's not for nothing that Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers features a young man -- Omar Ali, aka Ali La Pointe -- who is a petty thief, gets imprisoned, witnesses the execution of an FLN fighter and other prisoners' moral solidarity with him, and decides to join the FLN. Chapter Four of Joe Sacco's graphic novel Palestine, which depicts Sacco listening to Palestinians who were once imprisoned at Ansar III, says more about self-organizing of prisoners than almost any other work of art does.
>Still, there could very well be differences between the general
>Western and Arab attitudes about sexuality. As others have
>mentioned, the veiling of women seems to indicate this.
The veiling originally was more about the mixture of class and gender than sexuality. "Not confined to Muslims, it [the veil] was an urban phenomenon associated mostly with the upper classes. Christian Coptic women wore long veils until the early 1900s when Western Christian missionaries influenced them against it. Most discussions are in relation to women, while men have also had a variety of head coverings, which are discussed in terms of dress codes and status" (Barbara Aswad, "Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Fadwa El Guindi. New York: Berg, 1999. 242 pp" [Book Review], <http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~elguindi/AARvuVeil.htm>). In short, the veil was a sign of wealth, a way of saying that the person who is wearing it is so wealthy that she does not have to work and that the person who is married to her is so prosperous that his wife does not have to labor. Using an example of Algeria, Franz Fanon theorized, in a chapter titled "Algeria Unveiled" in A Dying Colonialism, that the veil, originally a practice confined to upper classes in urban areas, became more widely adopted and even enforced across classes in part in reaction to colonialists' denigration of all elements -- minor or major -- of what colonialists thought of as the "tradition" of the colonized. Ironically, colonialists "nationalized" the veil, so to speak, without aiming to do so. Fanon goes on to say, however, that the growth of a left-wing national independence movement and women's active political participation in it as protagonists would allow female revolutionaries to reject both colonialists' assumptions about the veil (and all other actual and imagined elements of the colonized people's culture) and male (and sometimes female) anti-colonialists' initial simple inversion of colonialists' assumptions.
>I'm still looking for a reasonably scientific (psychological,
>sociological, etc.) discussion of this topic which isn't completely
>permeated by political preconceptions (orientalism, occidentalism,
>etc.).
Which topic? Torture at Abu Ghraib? Or the social meanings of the veil? About the latter, there is already a ton of feminist scholarship. Look into such feminist journals as Signs, Genders, Feminist Studies, etc. You may also look into the archive of a listserv called H-Gender-Mideast <http://www.h-net.org/~gend-mid/>. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>