The Orient and the Fundamentalist

April 6, 2007

This is the program for the small conference being held here at Lawrence by Glow (Gay, Lesbian, Other, Whatever). If you look at the bottom right you will see.. in small print.. the title of my talk: "The Orient and the Fundamentalist: From Flaubert to Andrew Sullivan". (I thought the title had a sort of "Lexus and the Olive Tree" sound.)

I begin my talk with Andrew Sullivan. He is by no means a fear-monger in the way that so many commentators on the Middle East are, but rather a principled opponent of fundamentalism.. or Islamism. One issue that in particular animates his discussions of the Middle East is the treatment of homosexuals. It was by reading is blog that I first learned about these Iranian executions:

I stand with Andrew in condemning these executions, but I am also interested in the way such images come to symbolize the region. In other words, such stories take on a life of their own and color public perceptions of the region. If we try to locate the associations that come with the phrase "Middle East" we would have to rate high fundamentalism and images like this one.

I think my point becomes clearer when we look to past versions of Islamic countries.. specifically the accounts contained in 19th century travel narratives. Gustave Flaubert describes the following scene:

As dancers, imagine two rascals, quite ugly, but charming in their corruption, in their obscene leerings and the femininity of their movements, dressed as women, their eyes painted with antimony. For costume they had wide trousers… From time to time, during the dance, the impresario, or pimp, who brought them plays around them, kissing them on the belly, the arse, and the small of the back, and making obscene remarks in an effort to put additional spice into a thing that is already quite clear in itself... [84]

The 19th century traveler Richard Burton could be mined to provide plenty more excavations of the sexual world of the East. Orientalism is the word that we use to describe this literary construction of the East as an exotic and alluring place.

As soon as I bring up Orientalism I am in the realm of perception. Most would admit that the "Orient" peddled by writers such as Flaubert or Burton is a souped up and exaggerated version of the actual thing. I would argue that likewise the contemporary fixation on the Middle East as a haven for fundamentalists is likewise a flawed version of the Islamic world. It is a widely held perception which represents an exaggeration of what is actually there.

One could stop right there.. ending up with a sort of relativism of perceptions. The Middle East can be anything one wants! But that does not quite work.. I would hardly recommend to a gay friend that he vacation in Iran. So there is something to those perceptions. Likewise the Orientalist world encountered by 19th century travelers may have been an exaggeration.. but it similarly had a foundation in reality.

Instead of just calling it a case of perceptions that randomly wander, I think it is better to look for concrete changes that have come to the Middle East. Think of Alexandria during World War I.. You could find the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy and the English novelist E.M. Forster hanging around there. Both used Alexandria as a potent setting for their work. At this point Alexandria was a city with a significant Greek and Jewish minority.. a cosmopolitan city.

The Alexandria that could support a Cavafy and a Forster is gone. The cosmopolitan character of the city was lost for various historical and political reasons.. and the city now feels much like any other big Egyptian city. If the earlier Alexandria was a place that could easily support an "Orientalist" version of itself.. allowing for two prominent gay writers to live comfortably.. then the current Alexandria is much more conducent to the fundamentalist version of the Middle East.

The example of Alexandria allows us to see how perceptions work. The social situation in Alexandria 100 years ago is widely divergent from the social situation today.. and the differing perceptions of the city that have held sway in these different times is related to actual changes on the ground. Changes in perception can be linked to concrete social changes. On the other hand, perceptions always outstrip those concrete changes. The Orientalist version of the Middle East exaggerated what was really there.. and the fundamentalist version likewise goes beyond what is actually there. Both are tethered to something real.. but push the perceptions into a realm of caricature.

Caricature is a good word, by the way. As I understand it, what a caricaturist does is look for a person's dominant physical features and then exaggerate them. A person with a large nose becomes a person with a supersize nose.. a person with ears that stick out becomes a person with elephant ears. We know how this works. The perception of places works in a similar way. We locate some characteristic but then the vagaries of media attention inevitably transform the public perception of a place into a caricature with exaggerated features.

A fascinating aspect of the perception of the Middle East is the way homosexuality is a key feature both in the Orientalist version and the Fundamentalist version of the Middle East. It is the nose.. or maybe some other bodily feature.. that constantly gets supersized as people gaze at the Middle East.