God
Knows I Tried.
An experimental approach to orientalism and the practice of
writing.
Preface
[...]
What is striking is that even in more inspired corners of
contemporary academia, in the wake of a better understanding of
the ways and means through which traditional disciplines construct
themselves and their objects, there's been such a lack of
curiosity as to the actual shapes and forms that a more
self-critical notion of scholarship might imply. The odd neologism
aside, even the more productive and politicized academics flatly
assume the way they structure their writing and thinking to follow
from whatever they're trying to get across. The basic idea has
been to reconstruct the practice of the critic-intellectual while
continuing to accept, pretty much tel quel, the same old
discursive procedures - and it's not so much that they are prim,
bookish, labored and long-winded, but that they remain windows
to the world, i.e. monomaniacal, naïvely commonsensical and
matter-of-fact, and desperate to be taken very, very seriously.
One would assume that from the moment one regards one's objects of
study as irretrievably enmeshed with the discursive practice that
is applied to them, the conventions and basic assumptions
underlying said discursive practice would come under increased
scrutiny, and one or two risks would be taken in an effort to
think a little further. But taking risks implies also the risk of
looking faintly ridiculous from time to time, and it is difficult
to overestimate the profession's reluctance to part with the more
sheltering and auratic aspects of literary scholarship.
When it comes to writing, what is really at stake in having a
"topic", in the usual sense of the term, organizing the
links and textual peripheries surrounding it. Must a text declare
its function and intention, and then politely do all it can to
avoid disappointing anyone, or does it stand to gain from
expectations being hopelessly overheated. Must a text be
structured in a manner that draws attention away from the gaps and
excesses that question its disciplinary premises. Could it attain
a density that escapes the limits and the grip of the author's
secure learning and insight, or must one always entertain the
reader on familiar home ground. Do all links within the text have
to be explicitly justified - and if so, do they all demand
explanations in the same terms. Can a text be generous in the
scope of interdependent themes and references it admits (to), or
must every reader be expected to be directly interested in the
topic to the point of reading on and on no matter what. Must the
distinctions between author, text and context remain crystal-clear
at all times. Is the framework of the x-hundred page book, whether
an oeuvre or a collection-of-essays, still worthy of its
teleological standing. And so on.
[...]
My text addresses the issue of Orientalism, using the example of
Iran, and also briefly traces the history of the University of
Geneva, Switzerland where I received my MA. It insists on manners
of doing, on ceremony and conduct, going from everyday social
routines to the consumption of architecture to academic prose,
hinting at possible links with the current production and
organization of knowledge.
I tried to think of a structure that would actually impose a
manner of writing that is at least in some ways blatantly
inconsistent and anti-programmatic. God knows my text has no model
to suggest, but in terms of the priorities mentioned above, it
does hope to raise questions in an obvious and unguarded way,
marking an impatience to start talking about new ideas with
whomever is interested.
-Tirdad Zolghadr
1 At a conference four years ago in New York, architect
Peter Eisenman built up his talk in the form of what he called
"corsivi". Eisenman was referring to a magazine
from the 1930s called Quadrante, edited by Pier Maria Bardi
and Massimo Bontempelli, which he'd stumbled upon during a
research project with Colin Rowe during the sixties: "What is
interesting about this magazine is that there are no essays, there
are merely corsivi, that is, a series of points, uno, due,
tre, etc." The talk was entitled "Autonomy and
the Avant-Garde: The Necessity of an Architectural Avant-Garde in
America" (it was held during a pluridisciplinary convention
on architecture and design theory1), and was basically
a harsh and sarcastic critique of his onetime mentor, the
illustrious architectural historian Colin Rowe, who had spoken
just before him, and had said something rather annoying.
Rowe's talk was called "The Avant-Garde Revisited", and
offered a mocking account of "the four spirits or Geister
most active" in the domain of architecture, the Genius
Loci, the Volksgeist, the Spirit of the Law, and, most
importantly, in the context of the Avant-garde, the Zeitgeist.
This was all "convenient equipment to have around", he
conceded, but when "retrospective formulations become
equipped with prospective capacity, [...] when inevitable
Zeitgeist - ever renewing and always comprehensible - becomes a
means of ascertaining the future, when the metaphorical becomes
literal, then the cheerful exercise of engaging fantasy [...]
becomes frightening." Ending his talk with an admonition to
be wary of zeitgeistian etiquettes when it came to emergent
artistic tendencies, Rowe suggested one could stop assuming anyone
suspicious of avantgardism were, "ipso facto, a fascist hyena
pig".
"For some thirty-six years," Eisenman later told the
audience, "Colin has been in one way or another railing
against the Zeitgeist. What I always find strange about this [is]
if, as he says, it doesn't exist, why has he been going on so long
about it?" Architectural historians, he continued, could talk
extensively about "the color and the texture of a place, such
as a city, or even the style of an architecture, in abstract terms,
but they are not able to discern the same abstraction about
time". Eisenman has his mind on a mission; "the return
to the possibility of architecture as a social instrument",
for which architecture must return to "its own historical
language" as a condition for its autonomy from the "hegemony
of western capital", and from the current "social
practice that supposedly defines it (shelter, accommodation,
symbolism, etc.)". An architectural Avant-garde would
continually transgress its own time and place, which mustn't
result in cutting-edge originality, but does indeed require a
running counter to the Zeitgeist, and a constant preoccupation
with just what it presently embodies - and not just a smug,
voguish manner of depreciating or ignoring it.
11 Why write about Iran. Why not write about architecture,
gender theory or the Hebrew bible (all of which is important to
this text) tout court. Why should anyone be interested in Iran,
any more than in Slovakian architecture, Malaysian gender politics
or kabbalism in New Zealand. What if everyone started going on
about their pet countries; the campus would look like an ethnic
food fair.
Well, know your enemy, for one thing, and remember Neville
Chamberlain, for another. Everyone knows the Moslems are building
up. Over 40% of international arms sales go to the Arab nations
alone (Mernissi 1996). As for Iran, at his press conference at the
World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, the Iranian foreign
minister said the equipment they got from the Russians last year
was for building a nuclear power plant, and as for
biological and chemical weapons, well, all their neighbors have'em
already, but they never really thought of getting their own, of
course it came up once or twice in conversation, but everyone's so
busy fighting terrorism and inflation and everything. I mean, come
on. Please. Are we going in for that?
Two million Moslems in Germany alone. We now have the highest
number on European soil since the invaders retreated across the
Straits of Gibraltar five centuries ago (Lewis 1993). In
Switzerland, they were 180,000 back in 1990 - with only 60,000
back in 1980: the figure tripled in ten years. How many by the
year 2000, half a million? Remember that Switzerland has barely as
many Ticinesi, and only 18,000 Jews. So it's only a matter of time
before monsieur le conseiller fédéral Hamid Habibi raises
his bushy head. Chanting in ancient Arabic, and beating his wife
on TV.
26 In August 1953, exactly twenty years (almost to the day)
before Pinochet ousts Allende, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi replaces a
popular anticolonial government under a Dr. Mossadegh, which was
toppled by a loose coalition of CIA, MI5 and the age-old alliance
of local fat cat bazaari and the Shiite clergy. The new regime
implements what is now commonly held, outside Iran, to be a "forced
modernization" of the country - Iranians were just too slow
and unwilling for the "changes" the enlightened,
westernizing dictator was bringing to his corners of the land. Why,
women were given custody rights, they could even be judges, and -
best of all - they didn't have to wear that hedjab no more.2
As it happens, women's custody rights, as well as their right to
be judges, were restored two years ago, but that, though
important, is not my point.
Nothing could have discredited feminism more than its top-down
"support" by the Pahlavi oligarchy, who effectively
reduced it to little more than guaranteed professional privileges
for the urban upper class. As for custody rights, neither marriage
nor divorce procedures differed much from what exists today - for
all the overall secularist rhetoric, family law under the puppet
regime never strayed from clerical guidelines. By and by, with the
monarchy regularly playing "women's emancipation" as a
trump card to affirm its moral legitimacy, feminists came to look
like self-serving imperialists or cultural dupes.
The present regime may have achieved precious little itself, but
it didn't take much to outdo its predecessor which, during its
twenty-five years in power, modernized little more than its
methods of surveillance and coercion, which were indeed among the
most sophisticated in the world. Within six years under the "fundamentalists",
the percentage of arranged marriages - a majority under the
decades of enlightening Shahism - had sunk to 38%3, and
the sparse percentage of women among university teaching staff
rose to one fifth, overtaking Germany's (17%4). This is
not to say the new regime was egalitarian, but to point out that,
far from resorting to hallowed rites of silence and seclusion, the
islamists, thanks to their policy of centrally planified
segregation, could push women into entering the workforce in
droves while keeping the more lucrative professions as thoroughly
masculinized as before.
53 Like other texts, laws, when challenged by exceptions to
the rule, or by renegade interpretations, can only respond by
producing more and more text to assert themselves. For its recent
antinudity legislation, the state of Florida needed a long-winded
legal definition of the human buttocks to finally identify what
falls under the category of indecent public exposure: "The
area at the rear of the human body which lies between two
imaginary lines running parallel to the ground when a person is
standing - the first or top of such line drawn at the top of the
cleavage of the nates (i.e. the prominence formed by the muscles
running from the back of the hip to the back of the leg) and the
second or bottom line drawn at the lowest visible point of this
cleavage or the lowest point of the curvature of the fleshy
protruberance, whichever is lower, and - between two imaginary
lines on each side of the body, which run perpendicular to the
ground and to the horizontal lines described above, and which
perpendicular lines are drawn through the point at which each nate
meets the outer side of each leg [etc.]"5
As theorist/visual artist Elizabeth Diller puts it, the body is
continually reinscribed by a "complex weave of discourses
including health, beauty, economy, and geography": in land
law, property lines protect private space from transgressions from
the public, whereas "the property lines that define the
socially decent body defend public space from transgressions of
the private(s)". "The play between property and propriety
or the proper", she continues - i.e. between ownership,
decency, and the inherently personal or distinctive - "is
particularly intricate in considering the body as a legal
site."
56 The local religion during the jahilya offered three
paramount goddesses and a variety of marriage practices, and
examples such as Khadija, Mohammed's prosperous and powerful first
wife, indicate a rather high standard of women's economic
independence; all of which changed at some point either during or
shortly after the seventh century. The introduction of policies
such as stoning female adulterers, or banning woman imams, can be
pinpointed, according to Mernissi's Le harem politique (Bruxelles:
Editions Complexe, 1992), to shortly after Mohammed's death, and
are attributed to the notoriously belligerent ‘Umar, the second
caliph. Nevertheless, the change cannot be rationalized by a
simple shift from the sheer unbending will of the prophet to his
macho successors, as much as by an adaptation to a cultural
context defined by Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
The more the Sunni empire expanded, the bigger was the smorgasbord
of enticing phallocratic delicacies for the Abbasid elite to
choose from. As Leila Ahmed points out, cities in Sasanian Iran
had a reputation for slavery, polygamy and wife-loaning, while
those under Roman law encouraged female infanticide by requiring
only one daughter to be spared (to be sure, none of these
practices were matters of demography or brute survival, they were
practiced mainly by aristocrats). Female veiling was widespread,
though it was often practised selectively, i.e. as a mark of class
distinction; under the Assyrian empire, for instance, common
prostitutes and slaves caught wearing the veil were flogged and
had their ears cut off. By and by, female infanticide was banned
by the Abbasids, but polygamy, slavery, and the seclusion of women
of a certain social standing were deemed morally acceptable by the
new regime.6
96 "To complete the gloominess of the picture, the
women, who are the flowers of our crowds, are in Persia black,
shapeless phantoms stealing silently along in the shadow of the
walls [...]. In the crowd were a number of the black phantoms;
they were true daughters of Eve, some of them, for they lifted the
white veils, which hung over their faces a little, to watch. But
no torturing of my imagination could poetise creatures as void of
form as the earth on the day of its creation."
Eustache de Lorey and Douglas Sladen, Queer Things About
Persia, 1907, pp. 2,3.7
"[And] lastly, fair Mauresques, enveloped in snowy attire,
who, were it not for the beautiful eyes whose sparkle cannot be
veiled, might be mistaken for ghosts passing to and fro silently
and mysteriously among the human crowd, but taking no part in its
affairs."
Reverend E.W.L. Davies, Algiers in 1857, 1858, p. 78.
[S]hrouded Moorish women, who seemed already half buried from life
and clothed in the garments of the grave - where, even if the
spirit lingered by the mouldering form, they could scarcely feel
less lonely than they at least appear to the eyes of the English
stranger"
George Macdonald, An Invalid's Winter in Algeria, 1864,
p. 794.
"Moorish women like ghosts, veiled with a handkerchief and
quite lost in huge calicoe trousers, shrouded in the floating,
white haik which their invisible hands hold to their chest; like
dominos at a masked ball they pass in silence, and glide along the
walls like phantoms, white against white."
Marius Bernard, D'Alger à Tanger, pp. 37-38.
"In the narrow, winding streets the Arabs watch us pass from
the shade of the street stalls, and when we meet a woman, a black
specter between the walls, which the downpour of rain has turned
yellow, she looks like death out for a walk."
La vie errante, 1890, p. 204.
101 [...] As Le Corbusier put it, if he knew exactly
what to expect without ever leaving Neuchâtel, it was thanks to
reproductions of lifestyles, women and cities, in paintings but
also in travel literature and - perhaps most importantly - in
picture postcards. During the postcard boom culminating in the
1920s, hundreds of thousands of cards portraying the backward,
oppressive, gloomy and yet eerily sensuous existence of Algerian
women were sold throughout Europe, making use of all possible
settings and motifs; some were trapped behind bars, some dressed
in rags holding sickly children, with others lounging around the harem
wearing pseudofolkloric dress, jewelry, and other jumbled,
orientalist paraphernalia. Malek Alloula's Le Harem colonial
traces the history of this particular genre, presenting it as what
he calls "photographed discourse", with the content of
an already elaborate orientalist imagery preceding the pictures
themselves.9
102 Those postcards with women in traditional veils mostly
show large groups, rather than individual portraits, as if a
larger number of those shrouded, anonymous figures - walking
talking camera obscura - observing the photographer while
he himself saw just about nothing at all - could at least
partially make up for the photographer's frustration at being
stripped of his own gaze. Travel literature, for its part, equally
attests to western visitors' acute discomfort when deprived of the
self-evident and inalienable right to stare and scrutinize; they
often faced a Muslim habitus that flatly excluded them, with the
natives observing the would-be observers from within. In Judy
Mabro's Veiled Half-Truths, a collection of sources drawn
from travel journals and letters, the narrators bitterly complain
about finding themselves reduced to exotic spectacles for (panoptical)
galleries full of veiled women: "concealed observers"
with "sundry black eyes", peeping through shutters,
lattices, and curtains, or "tittering" and "taunting"
them from terraces and windows. Some, like writer John Reynell
Morell in 1854, took to philosophizing about the relative merits
of European architecture, giving "free admission to the light
of heaven through large and numerous windows", while "the
Moor gropes about in a perpetual twilight, his walls presenting
the appearance of a prison". He concludes that the
"inquisitive and restless citizen of the West required the
broad daylight and a wide horizon to look about him, learn the
news, and see what was going on; but a jealous nation, shut up in
individualism, could not endure to lay bare the privacy of his
seclusion to neighbors and strangers".
103 The unveiling of the Algerian woman was pursued by all
possible means. According to both Zeynep Celik and Malek Alloula,
in discourses on both sides of the colonial conflict the conquest
of the Good Islamic Woman was equated with the unveiling and the
destruction of "the core structure of Algerian society",
and the key to its "total surrender". [...]
104 The harem is the single most important leitmotiv here.
According to Morell, for example, the secluded Moorish lifestyle
depended on "houses uniting the character of castle and
dungeon", on the one hand, and the "slavery of woman"
on the other: the idea of the harem is irresistably fascinating
and alluring in its combination of limitless despotic rule with
the possession of sensuous and submissive females.
As Mabro points out, harems fitting this description would have
seemed at least as weird and exotic to the Algerians themselves -
the word, coming from haram (forbidden), commonly referred
to the rooms for women and kids where only closely related males
were allowed in, or even to the women of the house themselves.
Which didn't keep the 1852 Roget's Thesaurus from defining
it as "impurity" or "brothel". A century later,
the Everyman's Thesaurus still retained the above
definitions, though adding "apartment" to the list, and,
in 1962, further adding "womankind" and "lovenest".
The 1972 Everyday Roget's Thesaurus finally takes local
denotations into consideration, but still employs "impurity"
from the 1852 edition.
Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi has complained that, when
looking for publishers for European editions of her books, she
could barely find one who wouldn't insist on photos of veiled
women on the cover - arguing that in Europe they would sell much
better that way. Europe certainly loves to dress up as the
savior-superhero of the little brown woman from the big brown man,
but the central argument of Alloula's Le harem colonial is
that the harem is precisely colonial, not local - here, the satrap
is us, and the harem ours.
111 In medieval England (and, so I've been told, throughout
the Victorian era), women were universally veiled. Some women went
quite far in making the very most of their headgarments, shaping
them into "horns" by stuffing them with wigs. Along with
the "tails" some women attached to their dresses and
dragged along behind them in the street, the horns drove people
nuts with desire, and the horned women were condemned as "devils'
nets that lure and destroy the souls of men": G.R. Owst's Literature
and Pulpit in Medieval England - which focuses on influences
of religious sermons on medieval poetry and literature - documents
the lyrical ways in which both poets and preachers would unleash
their fury on those lecherous individuals who put the souls of
innocent bystanders in danger with their lurid masks and
adornments ("In the woman wantonly adorned to capture souls,
the garland upon her head is as a single coal or firebrand of Hell
to kindle men with that fire")10. One bishop would
go as far as according special pardons to those who harassed and
humiliated them in public. In this case, it was the adornments
themselves, and not the exposure of flesh, that was seen as most
erotic and threatening to public propriety: " [they] put on
their head hair that is not their own or unnatural color on their
face. For, to put hair on the head or give a new complexion is the
special concern of God", p. 392. When Christ was nailed to
the cross, they insisted, he was perfectly naked. Even Mary,
"which hadde a premynence / Above all women, in Bedlem whan
she lay, / At Crystys birthe no gret dispence, / She wered a
kovercheef, hornes wer cast away".11
Endnotes
1 published as Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an
Avant-Garde in America, New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997.
2 for a perfect, concise example of the discourse in
question, cf. the Paris Match interview with ex-Queen Farah
Pahlavi, February 18th, 1999.
3 Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics
in a Modern Muslim Society, Indiana University Press, 1987.
4 Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy,
Indianapolis: Addison-Wesley, 1992 (admittedly, the respective
role and status of the universities would have to be accounted for
as well).
5 cited in Elizabeth Diller, "Bad Press", in The
Architect Reconstructing her Practice, ed. Francesca Hughes,
MIT, 1998.
6 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical
Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale University Press, 1992.
7 all extracts from Judy Mabro, "Death out for a Walk",
in Veiled half-Truths: Western Traveller's Perceptions of
Middle Eastern Women, London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 1991.
8 quoted in Mabro, op. cit.
9 Malek Alloula, Le harem colonial: images d'un sous-érotisme,
Paris: Editions Slatkine, 1981.
10 Gerald Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval
England, Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1966, p. 395.
11 Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume, ed. F.W.
Fairholt, (???), p. 54.
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