Abstract
Once past some turgid opening lines – a dense quote from Heidegger’s (1962) Being and Time – you will be engaged with a fascinating phenomenological, ethnographic, and sometimes personal, account of ‘modernness’ and how it is communicated to and expressed by young Arabs through different forms of communication. Sabry’s book aims to bridge contemporary Arab philosophical discourse on modernity with a new field of enquiry – namely Arab cultural studies – so that the two are mutually informing. He distinguishes modernness from modernity, modernization and modernism, defining modernness as ‘about thinking through and reflecting on the very kind of being, that thing we call “modern” … it describes a state of mind and being in the world’ (p. 16). Through an empirical approach, Sabry aims to unravel the underlying mechanisms of modernity and what being modern means to the anthropological subject (as an ontological phenomenon). Sabry’s launch pad is Giddens’ concept of the modern as something that is ‘post-traditional’. Rightly problematizing the prefix ‘post-’ as presupposing a radical break from traditionalism, Sabry points out that clearly this presupposition is not borne out by the empirical and ontological reality of the Arab world, where the traditional and modern coexist. Specifically, the book articulates meanings of modernness in the Arab context through three analytical structures: thought, everyday life and self-referentiality.
It is here that the book’s limitations become apparent, as its core empirical focus is limited to Egypt, Morocco and the wider Maghreb. Can this metonymically represent the entirety of the Arab world – or are the experiences in, say, war-torn Afghanistan and impoverished Yemen much more culturally specific? Nonetheless, Sabry’s call to go and find out is an important one, given that dominant paradigms in both Arab and western intellectual thought largely ignore Arab popular culture. For example, as Sabry notes, in terms of two of the prominent debates within contemporary Arab thought that articulate the question of modernity and its relationship to heritage, rationalist/structuralists attack popular culture as unconscious and ahistorical; and cultural salafists (a school of thought that privileges Arab-Islamic heritage over the present, believing that an authentic past can both be recovered and provide answers to the Arab-Islamic world’s present problems) condemn popular culture as an extension of western capitalist discourses. Sabry posits that it is only the more marginal, anti-essentialist debate that surpasses the duality problem between modernity and heritage, due to its assertion that no discourse is above critique. In terms of western intellectual thought, Sabry suggests that even the de-westernizing/internationalizing strand of media theory merely extends debates on tradition/modernity, reflecting its duality problematic. As such, he argues for a ‘de-de-Westernising’ (p. 28) perspective – or to put it more elegantly, for an interruption of the discourses that de-centre western media and cultural theory, allowing for less totalizing articulations of Arab culture and identity to emerge, and hopefully leading to the creation of new, different discourses of becoming.
After problematizing concepts such as ‘popular’ and ‘subculture’ in the Arab context, in Chapter 4 Sabry offers ethnographies of two everyday spaces of encountering: the Qassr Nile bridge in Egypt and various western embassy queues in Morocco formed by Moroccans waiting for a visa. His aims here are twofold: to see what study of taken-for-granted popular cultural spaces in the Arab world can teach us about the structures of feeling of those observed and about stratification in those societies; and how ‘being modern’ reveals itself as an everyday occurrence. Of these ethnographies, the queue offers particularly convincing insights into hope (feeling mobile in a world of social, cultural and economic immobility), as Sabry relays and interprets the phenomenon of ‘burning’ (illegal migration). Perhaps due to the inherent limitations of using covert participation to explain lovers’ public behaviour, the Qassr Nile Bridge ethnography is not as convincing in the evidence that it offers for Sabry’s interpretation – that the bridge is a working-class popular cultural space for acting out romance, as observed in Egyptian soap operas. In a more grounded manner, Chapter 5 explores modernness as a multiple narrative category by using fieldwork conducted in Morocco from 2001 to 2007 to investigate how long-term consumption of western media helps produce different self-reflexive narratives of modernness, ranging from ‘incoherent acceptance’ to ‘coherent rejection’ (p. 99). Beyond producing an empirically interesting account of the cultural consequences of globalization, perhaps of most relevance to the West and its preoccupation with Islamist terrorism since 9/11 is Sabry’s account of the sophisticated, nuanced and diverse understanding of western modernness by Moroccan Islamists (pp. 110–111 and 134–141).
Sabry ends by arguing for the necessity of a new interdisciplinary epistemic space where studies of contemporary Arab cultures can be empirically studied systematically. While Sabry’s work is important in introducing to western scholars a range of Arab intellectual epistemes as well as insightful ethnography, this call is perhaps not as urgent as he puts it. Across the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of increasingly specific journals dedicated to such issues, such as Global Media and Communication, and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, the latter co-edited by Sabry. Cultural Encounters in the Arab World was published in a moment before the 2011 Arab Spring, which initiated numerous calls to study the intersections of the Arab Street (itself a term derided by Sabry for its homogenizing effect) and globalizing new media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter. Yet, while it is now fashionable for academia to be highly interested in Middle Eastern popular and political cultures and identities, as decades of repression and autocracy are challenged in successive Arab countries in what is perhaps a seminal expression of modernness, Sabry’s book undoubtedly will help to anchor and frame future intellectual enquiry into this fascinating area.