Promising Platform for Secularism, ‘Free Arabs’ is Shackled by Stereotypes

[freepalestine]

Promising Platform for Secularism, ‘Free Arabs’ is Shackled by Stereotypes

[FONT=Arial]AILA, or Artificial Intelligence Lightweight Android, presses switches on a panel it recognizes during a demonstration at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH stand on 5 March 2013 in Hanover, Germany. (Photo: AFP - Carsten Koall)

By: Hocine Dimerdji
Published Monday, March 11, 2013

Last week marked the launch of Free Arabs, a new journalistic venture which aims to provide “democracy, secularism & fun” while “advocat[ing] secularism as what it is: institutionalized freedom of choice.”
“Millions of Arabs have internalized the notion that secularism is tantamount to faithlessness, and is all about demonizing Islam and promoting a dissolute way of life,” the editorial guidelines read. “This is certainly not the working definition for Free Arabs.”
While I have a few issues with that particular definition of secularism, as it locates secularism within a statist perspective, while ignoring both the historical contexts in which secularism as a concept was born and the rich history of Arab secularisms, I was intrigued. A space for secular Arabs to gather and provide analysis, satire, and commentary on Arab issues from a secular progressive perspective sounded promising.
However, within hours of the site’s launch, most of the responses I readon Twitter were scathing and seemed to pre-judge what on the surface looked like a welcome endeavor.
An intelligent discussion of secularism in the Arab world that avoids orientalist tropes must begin by a thorough deconstruction of the concept of secularism in order to free it from its Eurocentric history.My first reaction was a mixture of hope and apprehension. While some of the listed contributors have a history of incisive, nuanced, and intelligent commentary, others associated with it do not. The title of the website bothered me as well: it seemed to imply that only secular Arabs were free.Unfortunately, as I explored the website more thoroughly, my apprehensions solidified.
The website does not live up to its promise. In fact, I find much of its content damaging.
Indeed, within hours of the site’s launch, listed contributors like Mona Kareem (who blogs here atAl-Akhbar) had withdrawn. Other contributors, while critical of the content, defended their choice to participate.
The first issue I have is with the choice to publish most of the material in English – without any translation into Arabic. If the website is attempting to reach Arabs in the Arab world then it would be rational to expect that content be presented in the language of the target audience.
By choosing not to publish in Arabic, the website appears more interested in reaching a western or westernized audience, thus alienating the majority of people who it ostensibly ought to reach.
While the editors promise a future Arabic version of the website, the point remains that choosing to publish in English first, rather than launch both at the same time, is troublesome.
The other issues relate to the content. The website promises to open up new spaces for discussing secularism in the Arab world without demonizing Islam and Muslims. Instead, the content on launch was almost exclusively devoted to Muslim bashing and rife with contempt for religious Arabs, mocking them in crude and unimaginative terms that rely on tired orientalist fantasies, as well as flagrant misogyny and body-shaming. The overriding tropes about Muslims and Arabs signal that, unless one is a free Arab (that rare breed of enlightened westernized Arab), one is part of a culture that is inherently impervious to modernity.
The space that the website occupies is not a new space. Arabs are homogenized, their experiences and histories collapsed within a commonly heard orientalist perspective. Thus, we have “The Homosexual” (one of the website’s four contributors dubbed “Satan’s personal envoys to the Ummah”) arguing that the experience of homosexual men is uniform within the Arab world.
There is no depth or nuance to his “argument.” It reproduces the imagery of Arabs as inherently homophobic and does not take into account the important work of LGBTQ rights activists throughout the Arab world.
Another of “Satan’s personal envoys to the Ummah” is “The Jew,” who is an Israeli of Arab Jewish descent. He argues in his first piece that Arab Jews are the freest Arabs because he can write expletives directed at Israeli leaders. Ironically, that piece was published the same week Israel introduced segregated bus lines in the West Bank.
Maybe Arab Jews are the freest in that they are free of sitting on the same buses as Palestinians.
The fact that most of the substantive criticism of the website comes from Arab seculars should tell the editors something about their failure to open a space where we feel comfortable residing.It is also interesting to note that the first piece that Free Arabs published touching on Palestine is from an Israeli perspective and that it reinforces notions of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” ignoring the oppressions of Palestinians, African immigrants, and Ethiopian Jews, to name a few. Palestine is arguably the most politicizing issue in the Arab world, and Arab secularism has a rich and continuing history within Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler colonialism.However, that is completely ignored and instead Israel is represented as an island of tolerance and freedom within a sea of ignorance and bondage.
What Free Arabs promises to do and what it ends up doing are two very different things.
I attribute its failure to provide an intelligent and original perspective on secularism to the website’s editorial line, which is rooted within the ideology of liberalism rather than a progressive secular perspective. It is an ahistorical perspective that ignores the intersections of oppressions and problems faced by Arabs within the different contexts of their lives. It relies on taking the binary of religious/secular as pure and uncomplicated, and it sees this binary to be the central problem within the Arab world today.
An intelligent discussion of secularism in the Arab world that avoids orientalist tropes must begin by a thorough deconstruction of the concept of secularism in order to free it from its Eurocentric history.
Secularism as a concept was born within a particular set of European historical contexts. Arab secularism also has a long and complex history, which has not always been a positive one. Most Arab anti-colonial movements were secular. Islam and Christianity often informed that secularism, and those seculars saw no problem complicating the binary of religious/secular. The work of deconstructing and decolonizing the concept of secularism cannot be ignored.
Unless these serious issues, as well as many more that cannot be explored fully in this article, are addressed and rectified by the editors of Free Arabs, I cannot imagine this website providing anything positive.
The fact that most of the substantive criticism of the website comes from Arab seculars should tell the editors something about their failure to open a space where we feel comfortable residing.



Ali Hocine Dimerdji is an Algerian-Lebanese MA in Philosophy. He is interested in questions of secularism, feminism, and liberation politics, particularly in the Palestinian context.
The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect Al-Akhbar's editorial policy.[/FONT][FONT=Arial]

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content...ed-stereotypes




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[Rafiq]

Coming from a country (germany, no?) that helped solidify Islamism in the middle east, this is pretty pathetic. There WAS a strong form of secularism in the middle east, only it was bourgeois-progessivist and it stood in the way of the interests of Western imperialists.

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