Becoming and “Unbecoming” Refugees

Abstract

This article discusses how Syrian men in Egypt rearranged their lives around the newly imposed label “refugee” and negotiated notions of masculinity during their forced displacement. Drawing upon data collected during fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo from 2014 to 2015, this article shows that in Syrian men’s daily reality, their “refugeeness” was present through several encounters and experiences, such as worries about identity documents or contact with the state authorities. Having articulated men’s various experiences with the refugee category, this article goes on to describe how Syrian men in Cairo distanced themselves from the refugee label and tried to masculinize themselves by erecting boundaries between themselves and other Syrian men in their narratives and engaging in reverse stigmatization of the Egyptian host population.

Keywords

anthropology class emotion ethnography hegemonic masculinity Middle East

After the outbreak of the uprising in Syria in 2011, a significant population of Syrians fled to Egypt where they had to deal with the externally imposed refugee label in their interactions with the Egyptian host society, state authorities, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and other aid organizations. Many Syrian men experienced being a refugee in various ways: when they worried about loss, expiration, or invalidity of their identity documents; when they recognized that they were unprotected (and even threatened) by the Syrian and Egyptian state institutions and authorities; or when they felt discomfort because of being associated with the prototype of a refugee. Yet, these experiences of refugeeness—of “becoming refugees”—are not one-directional, linear, and all-encompassing. Rather, I suggest in this article that becoming refugees is a situational transformation that can be reversed, challenged, actively confronted, and rejected, a process which I trace and call “unbecoming refugees.” In this article, I discuss as part of the process of unbecoming refugees how Syrian men distanced themselves from the refugee label by creating hierarchies and engaging in reverse stigmatization. I suggest that for Syrian men, the process of creating distance from the refugee label simultaneously worked as a strategy of masculinization.

In this article, I take issue with the relative absence of engagement with men’s emotions, discomforts, and fragilities in the study of masculinities and forced displacement. I call for an analysis of men’s experiences taking into consideration “the entire social and sensual realm” as well as “men’s embodiment” (Hopkins and Noble 2009, 816). In my argument, I follow anthropologist Farha Ghannam (2013, 170) who analyzes men’s life trajectories in one of Cairo’s low-income neighborhoods. She stresses that men ought to be addressed “as embodied beings who are both the subjects and the objects of systems of power.” Furthermore, she argues that men’s realities need to be understood and analyzed as defined by vulnerabilities, dependences, “frustrations, achievements, failures, and successes” (Ghannam 2013, 170). I suggest paying more attention to men’s emotions, especially in the fragile, uncertain context of forced displacement. However, this does not mean that men’s emotions constitute a new aspect of “hegemonic masculinity,” as has been suggested in recent sociological approaches to the study of men and emotions (see Cottingham 2017; de Boise and Heam 2017). This work focuses predominantly on privileged, heterosexual men from the global north (Pease 2012, 127) and mainly questions the emergence of new forms of hegemonic masculinity and whether they work toward more gender equality (de Boise and Heam 2017; Cottingham 2017). These scholarly works are of limited value for the conceptualization of emotions and masculinities in the context of Syrian refugee men in Egypt. There, I show that men’s lives were in many ways overrun and overtaken by the events and accompanying emotions of forced displacement. They were forced to deal with many emotionally wrenching challenges but did not capitalize upon their emotions.

In this article, I describe masculinity as subjectively and actively constituted in performance. I suggest that masculinities are often discursively negotiated and perceived/viewed as composites of various acts, attitudes, and relationships available at a given time in a specific context. In this regard, I follow the recent work on “composite masculinities” proposed by Wentzell (2015) and the conceptualizations of Haywood and Mac an Ghaill (2003). Furthermore, I suggest that constructions of masculinities frequently rely on “othering processes” and the creation of masculine hierarchies, as in classical conceptualizations of masculinity by Kimmel (1994) and Connell (1995).

The material presented and analyzed in this article was collected during fieldwork in Egypt between July 2014 and September 2015. The settings of my research were Cairo and the satellite town 6th of October City, which is approximately thirty kilometers away from Egypt’s capital. The aim of my fieldwork was to understand how Syrian men handle challenges during forced displacement and how gender relations, and especially constructions of masculinity, were subject to change in exile. I used ethnographic methods, such as intensive participant observation, daily informal conversations, semistructured interviews, and life stories, to gather men’s perspectives on their experiences. I conducted my research predominantly in Arabic and translated the material afterward. I recorded the majority of the interviews and life stories that lasted between thirty and ninety minutes.

The Syrian men and women I met in Egypt were of various ages, professions, and cities of origins and had predominantly arrived in Egypt between late 2011 and mid-2013. Most Syrian men and women I met identified as Sunni Muslims (the majority branch of Islam) and claimed for themselves and their families belonging to the Syrian middle class (ṭabaqa mutawassiṭa, ḥāla maddiyya mutawassiṭa). ¹ They referenced their middle-class position by pointing to their education, family background, possessions, career, and several characteristics, such as creativity, stamina, diligence, and morality. Almost all Syrians I met in Egypt strongly rejected the label refugee and explained vigorously why they did not fit the prototype of a refugee. Ayoub and Khallaf’s (2014) study, one of the few that deals exclusively with the situation of Syrians in Egypt, describes a similar trend. It shows that in 2013, when the study was conducted, a significant number of Syrians surveyed had not approached the UNHCR for registration. One of the reasons mentioned was hesitance about bearing the refugee title, which was loaded in the eyes of the participants, with negative connotations, such as weakness, desperation, and misery (Ayoub and Khallaf’s 2014, 22).

The Situation of Syrian Refugees in Egypt

Syrians had settled in Egypt long before the uprising in 2011. The first wave came to Egypt in the eighteenth century, and a second wave of immigration started in the middle of the nineteenth century and ended with World War I (Philipp 1985). By 1914, about 35,000 Syrians of different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds were living in Egypt, most of whom were Christians (Booth 2011). They automatically received Egyptian citizenship unless they explicitly opted out. However, after World War II, several laws were imposed, and national and religious tendencies became more prominent so that the lives of Syrians and other minorities in Egypt worsened (Abdulhaq 2016, 195). During the period of the United Arab Republic, many professional Syrians and businessmen left Egypt because of Nasser’s socialist political system (Barbir 1986, cited in Ayoub and Khallaf 2014, 20).

Refugees and asylum seekers, who arrived at the end of 2011 or in 2012 in Egypt, due to the rising violence and insecurity in their home country, do not live in camps since Egypt does not have a policy of encampment. Syrians mostly settled in the governorates of Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura, and Damietta (Ayoub and Khallaf 2014, 7). In 2012, the then president Mohammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood allies supported the Syrian uprising, and there was a welcoming attitude within Egyptian society, especially among Egypt’s aging Nasserist generation, young liberal activists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and anti-Alawite Islamists (Ali 2012). Morsi announced Egypt’s full support for the Syrian uprising, emphasized an open-door policy for Syrians entering Egypt, and granted Syrians full access to public services. However, immediately after Morsi was toppled in August 2013, visa restrictions for Syrians were imposed. Furthermore, Syrian refugees became the subject of a government-organized media campaign that labeled them as “terrorists,” allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, and supporters of Morsi. This generated an increase in xenophobia and discrimination against Syrian refugees in the Egyptian population.

Becoming Refugees: Lack of Protection through Documents

Many Syrian men I met in Cairo felt that various aspects of their lives had changed dramatically due to their forced displacement. They realized, for instance, that their documents and papers could not secure and guarantee their identity and position in Egypt. Most Syrian men talked about their loss of trust in identity documents with sadness, hopelessness or despair, and with their body language, tone, and facial expression revealing the severity of the issue.

For example, ʿAbd al-Raḥman was recently married and living with his wife in a small flat, while working for a nongovernmental organization (NGO) supporting the Syrian opposition in Egypt. ʿAbd al-Raḥman got angry and raised his voice whenever he mentioned topics such as documents, protection, and rights. On the evening we talked about expired passports, he was the only man in the room with his wife, his mother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and myself seated around him. After eating, he lit a cigarette, took a sip from the tea that was being served, and began explaining to me the issues Syrians were facing in Egypt. The tone of his voice became increasingly aggressive; he would not listen to any interruptions, and his monologue felt like a lecture. With regard to the expiring passports, he stated:

We are afraid here in Egypt of being stopped at any checkpoint, and if they checked our passports they would find that they are expired. We said that even if the passport was expired that doesn’t mean that my identity is expired, too. The name is written in the passport and the passport has the code. Only the date is expired in the passport, so my identity shouldn’t be expired, too. We demand that even in the case of an expired passport, the holder of the passport should be treated like a human being.

His voice trembling with anger, he continued:

Imagine they told you that you were not Magdalena and that you were a problem. No, I am not a problem! I am not a disaster! I am a human being and a human being has the right to live wherever he wants in the world!

In his statement, ʿAbd al-Raḥman refers to the fact that without the state’s registration, approval, and acceptance, the individual does not legally exist as a social person (Rabo 2011, 230). As suggested by Navaro-Yashin (2007, 81), documents, which she defines as “ideological artefacts” (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 88), exist in specific social relation to the people to whom they belong and have the potential to provoke multiple effects in them, such as fear, insecurity, or nervousness. Documents are especially prone to engender fear and uncertainty when they are absent or useless, that is, when bureaucracies leave people and things undocumented or routinely contest the validity of the existing documents (Hull 2012, 258).

In addition to his comments about documents, ʿAbd al-Raḥman took up another theme: the right to have rights based on his humanity, which he continued to describe in the following way:

We have the right as people and from the principle of humanity to be treated with respect in any country in the world, to be provided with living, a place to live, and to be provided with a good life. An Egyptian official might say: “I can’t provide these things to my people!” This is right, but at least provide me with what you provide your people. You give your people an identity card and a passport. You protect your people, so why don’t you protect me, too?

ʿAbd al-Raḥman’s words resonate with anthropologist Salih’s (2013, 83) observation that Palestinian refugees she worked with in Lebanon called into question that rights were only accessible for those who were citizens of the country they lived in. Criticizing this restricted access to rights, they expressed a different political imagination in which their humanity, and not their belonging to a nation state, granted them access to full rights and to political life (Salih 2018). Likewise, ʿAbd al-Raḥman’s experience of refugeeness left him furious and critical of the political order, in which, he, as a refugee, did not find a place for himself which offered any dignity and security. ʿAbd al-Raḥman’s account additionally proves that refugeeness holds the potential to shake the core of one’s (legally recognized) being and thus threatens one’s ability to build self-confidence on the fact that one has the right to be in this world, to exist, and to claim political subjectivity. Thus, ʿAbd al-Raḥman’s narrative is an implication of the intimate connection that exists between men and their nation state (see Joseph 2000; Nagel 1998), as well as the desperate effort that is required to reclaim one’s masculine selfhood and identity if this core relationship is disturbed.

Like ʿAbd al-Raḥman, Mustafa, a student who worked to support his family while studying, answered my question about whether the felt like a refugee in a tone and with persuasion that did not leave space for disagreement: “No, I am not a refugee. I am living my life. It’s my country. It’s one earth. God created me on this earth, not in Syria. In the Qur’an, it is written that the earth is for all the people.” Mustafa did not relate his humanity and access to rights to his contact as a citizen with the Syrian nation state. However, while ʿAbd al-Raḥman referred to undeniable rights based on one’s humanity, Mustafa turned to the principles of religion to describe why he had inalienable rights and dignity, no matter if he was classified as a refugee or not.

The Encounter with the Egyptian Authorities

For Abū Walīd, who worked in Egypt as a shop assistant, being a refugee meant not having legal assistance and being excluded from the right to be protected from crime. The father of two boys was regularly picked up at his workplace by a police officer and taken to the nearest police station where he was kept and beaten until he paid a huge bribe. Abū Walīd had come to the attention of the police officer when he had tried to open a sweetshop in the area, and the police regularly came to check whether he had the required licenses. The police officer eventually figured out that Abū Walīd could become victim to his ill will because no one felt responsible to protect Abū Walīd. This led to several visits to Abū Walīd’s current workplace where the officer entered in civilian clothes and took him to the police station. There, the officer applied different strategies, accusing him of being a terrorist or a criminal, and eventually settling on the fact that Abū Walīd had no official work permit. In fact, Abū Walīd only had the student residence for his family because his sons were going to school in Egypt (which did not give him official permission to work). Any attempt to oppose the blackmail was useless since the policeman threatened that if he did not pay the bribe he would be kicked out of Egypt. The visits became more frequent, and Abū Walīd was paranoid that one day he would not be able to pay the requested bribe and the police officer would then take him to the Syrian embassy where he would be sent back to Syria and killed.

When Abū Walīd asked a lawyer at the UNHCR to help him, the lawyer only requested the number of Abū Walīd’s file at the police station. Obviously, there was no file because the blackmail happened on an individual, arbitrary basis. When Abū Walīd tried to request international protection through the United Nations (UN) by calling the agency’s hotline, he could not reach anyone in the relevant office. Then, Abū Walīd got in touch with a lawyer working for a Syrian NGO who told him to call him the next time he was taken by the police officer. However, when this happened, the lawyer did not show up presumably out of fear of getting into trouble with the same police officer. When Abū Walīd tried to involve an international NGO, he was told that his problem with the officer was of a personal nature. The NGO caseworker was worried that if the officer was asked by the NGO law department to stop abusing Abū Walīd, he would seek revenge. Even though the caseworker tried his best to help Abū Walīd, he felt helpless vis-à-vis the comprehensive power of the police officer. The only advice the caseworker could give him was to find a job in another area of Cairo where the police officer could not find him.

The experience of being victim to a police officer’s malevolence and the lack of legal support are surely not exclusive to Syrians in Egypt. Indeed, Egyptians themselves have been regularly and in huge numbers subjected to police violence, arbitrary arrests, and forced disappearances (see Abdelrahman 2015; Hamzawy 2017; Ismail 2006). However, I argue that Abū Walīd’s specific vulnerability lies in his paranoia of being sent to the Syrian embassy or back to Syria—an outcome of his status as a refugee, in addition to the financial and personal pressure applied by the police officer.

Experiencing Refugeeness through the Body

Several times when I met Syrian men in Egypt, I got the impression that displacement was also experienced through the body. Qutayba came to Egypt as a student together with his family. But soon after his arrival, he managed to find work in an international cultural institute as an IT specialist. Qutayba told me during our first meeting how offended and embarrassed he was when a foreign female friend wanted to pay for their drinks because “he was a refugee.” Even when he recalled the situation, I sensed his physical unease about being considered poor because of the association of his nationality with refugeeness and of refugeeness with poverty. Likewise, when I met Urwa for tea and argīle (water pipe) right after he had tried to renew his visa in the crowded Mugamm’a, a massive government administration building overlooking Cairo’s Tahrir Square, he told me that he felt that his chest was about to explode. He hugged himself tightly, saying that he felt pain and immense pressure inside, because of the problems that the Egyptian authorities and their bureaucracies caused him. And Khālid, a student in his early twenties, once told to me that he thought of being a refugee as an “injury inside” that he recognized in himself and in people around him. Despite the presence of this injury in all the Syrians, he said: “No one speaks about it, not even with close contacts.”

ʿAbd al-Raḥman, whose anger I recounted above, voiced several emotions, such as humiliation, despair, and hopelessness in relation to displacement. He said:

If the contract of my flat is expired and I have given 2,000 or 3,000 LE as a deposit and the owner refuses to give it back to me, what shall I do? I have a problem in my homeland so I left. But they [the Egyptians] think that we were humiliated out of our country. The principle of humanity says: this man left his country and he lost his family and he is in a bad psychological condition. This man needs a lot of care more than anyone else. They do the opposite. I am really surprised of the treatment in the neighboring countries and in the countries that have accepted refugees. This kind of treatment forces the Syrians and Palestinians who came from Syria to leave through the sea. Some people say that they have no problem in drowning and dying in the sea as long as they are leaving this country because they can’t live in it anymore. Death has become easier than staying in the country. Some people left Syria to Jordan and from Jordan to Egypt and left Egypt via the sea. Some other people left from Syria to Jordan and then to Algeria and then to Libya. Some people also left to Sudan. What makes a person take such a huge risk? It is a risk of life like suicide. I will jump from this height. Maybe I will die, and maybe I will survive.

Several emotions flow through these Syrian men’s experiences of forced displacement in Egypt. It was experienced as humiliation; worries and insecurity; dependence upon (and threats from) institutions and entities; inability to form one’s future; risk taking; despair and hopelessness; and pain, embarrassment, and loss of the body one used to know. Some Syrian men felt that their identity was in question and that they were subject to others’ ill will. Consequently, in a climate in which men needed to redevelop themselves and adapt to the experiences and encounters of refugeeness, their former masculine identities as competent Syrian men were frequently damaged and required active and conscious effort to be reinvented. The damages Syrian men felt because of their association with the refugee label evoked emotional reactions, such as despair, paranoia, anger, and a feeling of being misunderstood and misrecognized. In the following, I pay attention to men’s coping strategies and attempts to “cure” their masculinity that had been challenged by their experiences of “becoming refugees.”

Unbecoming Refugees: Rejecting the Refugee Label

As discussed in the previous section, there was a remarkable refusal among Syrians in Egypt to be associated with the refugee label. During several conversations with Syrian NGO caseworkers, I was told that Syrians needed time to adapt to and accept their new situation in which they had to bear the refugee title. Khalīl, for instance, who worked with an Egyptian NGO offering psychosocial support to refugees, described the Syrian people as “proud and rich.” Before the Syrian uprising, it was unthinkable for a Syrian to ask for help, he explained. Consequently, Syrians in exile needed time to accept their new status that was defined externally by need and poverty. Qutayba assumed that it was due to the sudden change in their life that Syrians were reluctant to apply for refugee status. Most Syrians who came to Egypt had a good life before the outbreak of the civil war and had to come to terms with the abrupt transformation of their lifestyle, he said. Nūr, a Syrian woman working in an Egyptian company, referred to the Syrians’ pride and dignity to explain to me what prevented Syrians from approaching the UNHCR. She told me that Syrians did not want to be treated like people who had to ask for money to survive. Nūr described reluctance to publicly admit one’s need and poverty, a theme that echoes anthropologist Julie Peteet’s (2005, 127) observations that “displacement meant learning anew how to carry oneself and present oneself to others” and thus enforced the transformation of identities. Likewise, anthropologist Liisa Malkki (1996, 381) stresses that refugeeness had to be interiorized as an aspect of people’s identities.

Another reason for rejecting the association with refugeeness was put forward by Abū Muhannad who had successfully opened a cosmetic shop in 6th of October City and could pay the fees at a private university for his two eldest sons. He opposed the stigmatizing refugee label because he perceived it as incompatible with Syria’s wealth and history. He explained, “Refugee is a difficult word for me. It doesn’t fit the Syrian people. We are from a rich country and we had everything. We have never been refugees before.” He assured me emphatically that he would not accept being called a refugee:

I would kill the Egyptian who says to me that I am a refugee. We have developed 6th of October City to what it is today. There was nothing here before. It is only through the Syrians that 6th of October City became such a good place.

Abū Muhannad referred to the recent visible transformations in 6th of October City, such as the rising presence of Syrian shops, cafés, and restaurants, which has caused national and international media to call 6th of October City “little Syria.” According to Peteet (2005, 210), self-characterizations as refugees in the context of Palestinians in Lebanon became a barometer indexing the individual’s power, dependency, and vulnerability. Following her argument, Abū Muhannad could refuse to characterize himself as a refugee because of his secure economic situation and relative independence. Furthermore, he made use of Syrians’ reputation to be hardworking and creative to justify his refusal of the ill-fitting refugee category.

Proving Syrians’ incompatibility with the stigmatizing refugee label was also the aim of Abū Muhannad’s son. As the founder of an NGO for Syrian students, Muhannad repeatedly mentioned that he perceived it as his mission to transform the picture of the needy, poor, victimized Syrian refugee in the Egyptian society. This was the reason why he and his NGO colleagues attended every event they organized or were invited to in white button-down shirts and jackets. Muhannad did not only aim to prove this externally in front of the Egyptian host population but also explained that he wanted to instill self-confidence and self-esteem in young Syrians who had to cope with their new, externally imposed status as refugees.

Majd, a student of economics in his early twenties who worked while studying and had high ambitions for the future, stressed his initial reluctance to go to the UNHCR office and formally accept the refugee label. He explained that he and his mother did not want to get refugee status because of their remarkable family background. Since our first meeting, I knew that his great-grandfather used to hold a key role in the political stage before Hafiz al-Assad’s rule. Due to being from a family of “influential politicians and investors,” as he called it, in whose footsteps he wanted to follow, he did not find it easy to reconcile his lineage with claiming asylum. What changed his mind eventually was the increasing insecurity of living in Egypt without a proper residence permit. By being enrolled in a university and being granted a student residency, Majd and his mother could eventually stay in Egypt. However, for a while, it was uncertain whether he could be enrolled into one of the Egyptian universities; and thus, Majd decided that it was safer to go to the UNHCR and apply for refugee status. In order to justify his decision, he said, “I don’t like the idea of asylum, however, this card [the yellow card]² is like a guarantee for the future, so if in the future, I need to seek asylum, I should have this card with me in order to get a visa.” Like Majd, Ghassān, a student in his final year in high school, justified his family’s eventual registration with the UNHCR and use of the “yellow card” in the following way:

Yes, I went to the UNHCR and I have the yellow card. At the beginning, we didn’t want it, however, for four months we have it now. At the end, this yellow card can be useful if the father or mother dies and the children become orphans. Maybe then the UN can help them. If you have a legal problem the UN lawyer can defend you, especially if they arrest you and they want to send you back to Syria. In this situation, it is useful.

According to Ayoub and Khallaf (2014, 22), most of their Syrian respondents in Egypt eventually did register with the UNHCR because of the changing political situation in the summer of 2013 and the consequent heightened need for protection and assistance. This rejection of the refugee marker for various reasons, and simultaneous acceptance of the refugee status to guarantee one’s security in Egypt, echoes Peteet’s (2005, 209, 210) argument that the meaning of legal refugee status among Palestinians in Lebanon was not constant over time but shifted in accordance with the power and persistence of the Palestinian resistance movement. At times when they were empowered by the resistance movement, the Palestinians in Lebanon rejected any self-reference as refugees. However, belonging to the category eventually became a necessity in order to receive services from United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Similarly, Ludwig (2013, 13) observed changing uses of the refugee status over time: Liberians in New York defined refugeeness as a transient and momentary situation related to their immediate forced displacement from their home countries. Acknowledging that they were refugees at some point, they expressed success and created hierarchies based on the person’s ability to leave refugee status behind and transfer into a new category, for example permanent residency. Likewise, Malkki (1995, 158, 159) observed that refugeeness was linked to a temporally bounded period. The early years in the host country were connected to social hardship and poverty and were defined as the experience of refugeeness. The improvement of one’s economic situation over time was then often linked to the successful escape from the refugee label (Malkki 1995, 161).

While these scholars found that refugeeness was primarily linked to early years in the host country, most Syrian men in Egypt strictly refused any identification with refugeeness when they first arrived, and only recognized and reluctantly accepted its usefulness and necessity at a later stage of their stay in exile. I argue that the initial reluctance followed by an eventual acceptation of the refugee status relates to the specificity of the Syrian case in terms of its recentness and uncertain outcome. When I conducted fieldwork, Syrians in Egypt had been displaced for not more than two years, and the civil war in Syria was still ongoing. Their mind-set, thinking, and planning still had one foot in Syria; thus, they were in a position of absolute liminality, not knowing whether they would return to Syria, would stay in Egypt, or would continue their journey in exile. With more and more time spent in Egypt, Syrians gradually realized that they had to rethink and eventually restructure their lives, identities, and approaches to living, including their perceptions and understandings of their masculinities.

Regaining Masculinity through Hierarchizing

I now turn to the strategies that Syrian men applied to actively distance themselves discursively from the refugee label. A major strategy of distancing that Syrian men made use of was to highlight their many capabilities: to provide financial support to others in need, to exist independently without government support, to articulate their purpose and many aims in life, and to emphasize their usefulness to the host country.³ These arguments were put forward by Syrian men to show that they had nothing in common with the prototype of a refugee. Syrian men in Egypt defined the “typical refugee” as those Syrians who sought refuge in Europe. This was especially prominent among Syrian men who were relatively well-off in Egypt. They used their economic self-sufficiency as a way to prove that they could not be conflated with the “real refugee” in Europe.

Over the course of my fieldwork, I came to realize that Europe occupied an ambivalent status: some Syrians praised it for its development and humane treatment of refugees, but others despised it for its cultural distance from the Middle East. Most Syrians I met believed that life in Europe for Syrians arriving as refugees was good and certainly better than the treatment Syrians experienced in Egypt and the wider Middle East. ʿAbd al-Raḥman, for instance, said:

They [people who made it to Europe] have a good life there which meets the human standards and they are happy. We are always in touch with our friends who travelled via the sea to Europe or got resettled by the United Nations. They arrived in Germany, France, the Netherlands, or Sweden. They are comfortable there.

Often, I heard idealized assumptions about the treatment refugees would receive in Europe, which was clearly based on rumors and speculation. In the eyes of Abū ‘Alī, for example, refugees in Europe had a comfortable life:

As refugees in Europe, our situation would be much better. Here we don’t get anything as refugees. In Europe, there is money, they give you houses and 300 dollars. The Syrians in Europe are refugees just like we are, but we are underprivileged. No one knows how to deal with us. They don’t care for us. This is not my country.

Abū ‘Alī and his wife lived in one of the poorest areas in Cairo, and he complained that the Egyptian authorities would not provide him with basic services and that he could not expect support from the Egyptian police if he was in trouble. He used to work as a lawyer in Syria but was unemployed when I met him. He had worked in several jobs, such as a cashier or a chauffeur for a couple of months after his arrival in Egypt. But he could not continue because of poor health. In addition to the widespread belief that Europe treated refugees well, Syrians talked frequently about the stable political and economic situation they believed they would find in Europe and about Europe’s considerable development, wealth, and progress.

In contrast to these assumptions, however, I also heard that European countries were perceived as the countries of the kufār (unbelievers) where morals and values were degrading, and people did not care for each other. Europe was associated with sexual relationships before or outside of marriage, promiscuity, sexual laxity, and a lack of morals and codes of ethics. Frequently, I was asked by Syrians, who had relatives in Europe or planned on going to Europe themselves, whether and how the governments in Europe would interfere in the nuclear family’s life: Would the child be taken away by the state authorities if it was beaten once? How much parental authority was acceptable? Does the voice and signature of a woman as wife and mother count as much or more than the husband’s or father’s? Can a woman decide family-related issues on her own without consulting her husband? Can she travel on her own?

Abū Muḥammad, who prepared himself and his family for resettlement in Germany, had several questions and concerns with regard to his prospective life in Europe. He told me:

If you go to Europe you should assimilate and accept new things. You will need to spend at least one year studying the language. You will waste one year only for getting a language certificate. I wasted years of my life just because of this. It’s better to study German in Syria and then go to Germany immediately. It’s better than staying in Germany for two years doing nothing but studying the language. I am really upset that I will go to Germany and lose two years of my life doing nothing but studying the language.

In Abū Muḥammad’s account, living in Europe is clearly associated with a standstill in one’s personal development and with giving up autonomy with regard to one’s personal plans and preferences in exchange for asylum and the obligations that come with it. Likewise, Qays, the founder of an aid organization for Syrians in Cairo, was extremely critical of the idea of leaving the Middle East for Europe. He spoke mainly in fuṣḥa (formal Arabic) to me presumably to make his words sound more sophisticated, educated, and convincing:

If I were in Germany, I would get a salary. There, you could work and your wife could work as well at the minimum. In Germany, there are people who prefer to just take money, so they don’t need to worry about anything. The Egyptian society is close to the Syrian society. It’s better that the Syrian stays in societies that are close to our societies (fa-kān yufaḍḍil baqa al-sūrī fī mujtamaʿāt qarīb min mujtamaʿātnā). The Western society for us is a strange and different society. Europe and the US are strange for us. It’s different from the oriental societies. Many Syrians left and went to Europe. I find it strange. It means that there is a social problem (hadhā dalīl inu fī hunāka azma mujtamaʿiyya). I don’t remember that it was said that the Germans left Germany after the war. I didn’t hear anything like that. Even if the German left the country, he decided to come back to rebuild Germany.

Qays juxtaposes the proximity of Egyptian and Syrian culture against the alienating “other” culture of the West. Even though he was at times extremely critical of the Egyptian host population, in this specific context, he made use of the notion of the uniting, border-crossing Arab culture. This resonates with Peteet’s (2005, 185) observation of the habit of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon oscillating between Arabness and Palestinianism depending on its usefulness, to either express belonging to the Arab culture and history or to highlight the Palestinians’ separateness and distinction. In Qays’ account, belonging to the Arab culture and upholding it rather than trading it, for living in an unfamiliar society in which one received welfare turn into a positive marker proving Syrian men’s sense of honor.

Likewise, Maḥmūd, a tour guide, turned leaving one’s country into a failure and a degrading insult. He shared with me that he once got into trouble with an Egyptian doorman when he wanted to withdraw money from his bank account. The Egyptian doorman, when he had found out that Maḥmūd was from Syria, made a joke about Syrian women working in Egypt as prostitutes. Angrily, Maḥmūd told him:

If a war breaks out in your country, you will hear stories worse than this about your own people. In any place in the world, if there is a war, you will even find men working in prostitution. The war makes people this way. If there was a war in Egypt, you will find more Egyptians than Syrians traveling to Europe!

The doorman answered that he could not imagine that the Egyptians would ever leave their beloved country. Maḥmūd remembered that he responded: “Yes, you will leave your country! We said the same. We said that we would never leave Syria and now we are spread all over the world!” The underlying theme of this verbal fight is clearly a man’s responsibility vis-à-vis his home country. Furthermore, it is obvious that Syrian men like Maḥmūd and Qays defined “real refugeeness” by using the notion of giving up one’s culture in exchange for protection in Europe. By constructing the trope of the “real refugee,” these men simultaneously create a form of “shameful masculinity” that is related to ignoring one’s home country and origins in times of crisis.

To this end, traveling to Europe was perceived with suspicion and rejection because in the post-2011 era, Syrians were forced to leave their home country and were dealt with as refugees rather than choosing freely to migrate, as suggested by Bashār, a student of dentistry living by himself in 6th of October City:

Is a civil servant working in the ministry able to live on the street for one week without water and a toilet? No! So why do I have to live on the streets? Because I am now a second-class human being (daraja tāniya).

Bashār referred to the news from Germany which went viral in the summer of 2015 when hundreds of new arrivals waited for many hours and even slept in front of LaGeSo (the State Office for Health and Social Affairs) in Berlin in order to submit their asylum applications (see Eddy and Johannsen 2015; Murray 2015). He continued:

Before 2011, no one travelled from Syria via the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. The situation was good back then. Now, I have to be scared that my children and I get killed in my own country. That is the reason why so many Syrians flee to Europe.

Bashār describes Europe as a place where refugees are discriminated against and treated without respect, and as a destination where Syrians flee because they have nowhere else to go and are guided by the human instinct to survive.

With these descriptions of the conditions of refugees in Europe, Syrian men actively erected boundaries and a hierarchy between themselves and refugees who were forced to flee to Europe. This served not only as a form of role distancing but simultaneously as a strategy to masculinize themselves. Based on their self-ascribed moral superiority, their self-perception of being successful because of their hard work, and their loyalty to the Arab world in contrast to other Syrian refugees’ willingness to compromise their autonomy and lifestyle in return for governmental support in Europe, Syrian men in Egypt attempted to regain an acceptable version of masculine selfhood.

Masculinity through Stigmatization

In addition to searching for proof of one’s masculinity in the distinction between Syrians in Egypt and the “real refugees” in Europe, I observed that Syrian men engaged in a process of “reverse stigmatization” after being initially stigmatized by the Egyptians. Again, various emotions flow through these men’s narratives. ‘Abd al-Raḥman, who had come to Egypt to study in 2006, said, for instance:

From 2006 until 2011, I was a bāshā (a respected man) in Egypt. Any Egyptian would call me bāshā and I was loved because there were not many Syrians in Egypt. However, when the incidents started in Syria they [the Egyptians] thought that we were fleeing from the war and that we needed them, but the money that any Syrian paid for the flight ticket for him and his family can provide living for one year for an Egyptian family. The costs of the trip from Syria to Cairo can cover the living for any Egyptian family. We see a lot of people living in 6th of October City in nice houses and they opened very fancy restaurants. We see how the Egyptians left the Egyptian restaurants and came to eat in the Syrian restaurants.

The title bāshā had an important connotation in the pre-1952 monarchy in Egypt. The Palace bestowed this title on individuals (often large landowners), privileging them and giving them access to positions of power (Eid 2002, 194). It referred to influence, wealth, social status, and authority (Eid 2002, 157). Nowadays, bāshā is used in everyday conversations in both an informal and a formal manner. If used in an official environment, for example, at the workplace or with high officials, it establishes and maintains relations of hierarchy (Shehata 2009, 227). In the words of Yūssif, an Egyptian student, bāshā nowadays defines someone with money, property, and influence; someone with high social status and a good life. Losing the status of bāshā, which ‘Abd al-Raḥman recognized, can thus be understood as a feeling of degradation in terms of class, status, respect, and masculinity. ‘Abd al-Raḥman bemoaned that while being Syrian used to be an influential, valued status, the Syrian crisis and civil war diminished Syria’s standing and consequently the position of a Syrian man in Egypt. Simultaneously, however, he clarified the senselessness of Egyptians because they assumed that Syrians coming to Egypt were in need. He thus successfully turned the degradation in his favor, by showing that Egyptians were ignorant in not understanding the situation.

This line of reasoning echoes sociologist Abdi Kusow’s (2004, 179) argument that groups or individuals who experience stigmatization by a society reverse the process and find their own ways to engage in stigmatization of those who dominate them. He found that Somali immigrants in Canada ascribed moral and cultural inferiority to the Canadian society to draw a symbolic boundary, while they experienced stigmatization on the part of the Canadian society because of their skin color. Similarly, Peteet (2005, 184) argues that in times of conflict, moral distinctions between Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese host population were expressed. Palestinians found in the “other” qualities that they considered opposite to their own, even though they could equally find similarities between them.

Similar to ‘Abd al-Raḥman above, Abū Walīd described the Egyptians’ treatment and perception of Syrians by engaging in a way of “ascribing back” certain stigmata:

They really don’t deal with us as refugees, but as someone they may take from. If there is advantage and money behind you: “enta ḥabībī wa ‘aynī (you are my love and the light of my eyes)!” If there are no advantages in dealing with you, even if you are an Egyptian, they don’t deal with you.

When describing the bad treatment he experienced at the hands of the Egyptians, Abū Walīd managed to point out the Egyptians’ bad character trait of always trying to exploit others.

Maḥmūd, the tour guide, who had set up his own office in his flat and had created his own material for tours he offered to tourists, remembered a conversation with his Egyptian landlord in which the landlord told him that Egyptians could learn how to be creative from the Syrians. The landlord admired the fact that even though Syrians were facing a war in their home country, they could come up with original, innovative ideas in Egypt to make a living. Then, in another conversation, Maḥmūd spoke at great length about the jealousy he saw in Egyptians, which was, in his eyes, an understandable outcome of their encounter with the more meticulous and diligent Syrians.

And sometimes there is envy on the part of the Egyptians. Why? Because, as I noticed, many Egyptians told me: “you are excellent in everything! You are the best in restaurants, you are the best in clothes. You open a dentist clinic here and you are the best. You open blah…!” I hear it from many people. I feel happy, but at the same time, I feel that the Egyptians who work in the same field are not happy because of the Syrians. And they are right sometimes. I am in my country and someone comes to my country and he starts to make any food and the people go to his place. Some Egyptians ate ḥawāwshī (an Egyptian meat dish) in a Syrian restaurant with me, and they said that it was the best ḥawāwshī they ever had. Bas ḥawāwshī yaʿnī masrī (But ḥawāwshī is Egyptian)! Imagine if another restaurant here that is very famous hears that ḥawāwshī is the best at the Syrians! And the one who said it is Egyptian. They will say: “Fuck Syrians!”

In his narrative, Maḥmūd emphasizes Syrian men’s special qualities. By focusing on the food industry, in which many Syrians in Egypt managed to make a living, Maḥmūd also told me:

So this is the difficulty: if you want to work you might face problems because you may not be good. However, Syrians have a different problem: they are famous for being good. And maybe they are not good. Wallahī, I met someone in Medan Lubnan and I asked him where he used to sell shāwirmā in Syria and I discovered that he was ḥadād (a blacksmith) back in Syria. He wasn’t doing anything with shāwirmā before. But he opened a shāwirmā shop in Egypt and wrote “Syrian Shawerma” on the signboard and all the people trusted him immediately. I found the shāwirmā okay, not very special.

There is a sense of reverse stigmatization, as described by Kusow, in Maḥmūd’s narratives: by praising Syrians’ outstanding skills to set up a business in the Egyptian food market, he manages to devalue the Egyptians with regard to their cuisine, work attitude, and credulity. Furthermore, I suggest that Mahmud’s descriptions include reclamation of Syrian hardworking, innovative middle-class masculinity, which comes into being through the comparison with the Egyptian “others.” Syrian men engaged in stigmatization of the Egyptian host population by creating their own definitions of successful, middle-class masculine identity characterized by creativity, ingenuity, diligence, and productivity. Reverse stereotyping thus became a strategy to masculinize Syrian men, similar to the process in which the “real refugee” in Europe is “othered” and defined as undignified and less of a man.

Conclusion

I began this article by introducing the various ways Syrian men felt about belonging to the refugee category. Syrian men experienced associations with and consequences of being a refugee in emotional ways—through anger, fear, insecurity, and humiliation, suggesting the need to focus on men’s handling of emotions, especially in the context of forced displacement. The emotionality with which Syrian men described and articulated their experiences as refugees in Egypt showed the extent to which they were challenged in the masculine selfhood that they had used to take for granted.

Furthermore, I have discussed the strategy of hierarchizing among Syrian men in Egypt, who downplayed and questioned the dignity, morals, values, and characteristics of the “real refugee,” who sought refuge in Europe. Syrian men I met actively erected boundaries to distance themselves from what they considered less valuable and respectable masculinity, which the “real refugee” in Europe personified. This less respectable masculinity was defined by the distance to the “Middle Eastern culture,” which Syrians in Europe arguably accepted in exchange for protection and by their acceptance of a degraded status, control, and inability to follow their individual life goals. Furthermore, I discussed the process of reverse stigmatization—another strategy Syrian men made use of to reclaim their masculinity and oppose any association with the stereotypical refugee.

All in all, these strategies are evocative of conceptualizations of masculinity as active and conscious endeavors. They show the adaptability of masculinities, the importance of “othering” processes, the construction of hierarchies, and men’s need for “others” to define their own position. In Syrian men’s daily realities in Egypt, their “refugeeness” was present through various encounters and experiences, such as worries about identity documents or contact with the state authorities. However, as seen in this article, Syrian men in Cairo also distanced themselves from the refugee label and tried to masculinize themselves by erecting boundaries between themselves, “other” Syrian men, and Egyptians in an attempt to reverse the stigmatization of being Syrian refugee men.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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