The title is deceptively simple but behind those words lies a challenging search for the Arab identity. In the very first pages, Tarik Sabry questions the existence of a pure Arab identity. Over the centuries, the Arabs have been influenced by the Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Romans, Indians, Kurds, Turks, Africans, Chinese, European colonialism, capitalism, socialism and much more. The Arab character therefore reflects all these cultural encounters. So the quest for the pure Arab essence confronts us instead with the “transient”, the changes and even the “contradictions” which emanate from these cultural encounters.
The difficulty of grasping the Arab identity, a composite of different cultural layers, reaches a high when the author hides his inability to express his thoughts in a clear fashion behind an exasperating verbiage.
As soon as the author shares with us his concern with the concept of ‘modernness’ and how the young Arabs through different forms of communication express it, we have to endure a hollow pseudo-philosophical analysis on modernity, modernization, modernism and modernness. And finally, we are rewarded with a clear explanation of the concept ‘modern’:
“When we utter the words ‘modern times’, ‘modern psychology’, ‘modern art’, we think we have used terms and expressions that mean something, whereas in fact we have said nothing at all. We have merely pointed out an inextricable confusion between fashion, the here-and-now, the valid, the lasting and the contemporary.”
But the above is not from the author, it is taken from Henri Lefebvre’s “Introduction to Modernity.” This light moment is short lived as Tarik Sabry’s forces his incomprehensible language upon us and at the beginning of the second chapter we are once again dragged into a black tunnel and emerge with relief for a discussion about “Arab Popular Cultures and Everyday Life” and “The Bridge and the Queue as Spaces of Encountering.”
Some interesting points are made such as “many voices that constitute Arab popular culture remain unheard and thus become subordinate to a cultural structure that is mainly led and dominated by an authoritarian polity and its apparatuses” and that the emergence of youth culture shows how the socio-cultural inter-relates with the economic, in fact ‘youth culture’ is seen as a symptom of the rise of consumerist society. Moreover, there are many subcultures in the Arab world, but due to the traditional and still rigid authoritarian structures of Arab societies, subcultures function and operate only in private spaces such as clubs, houses, derbs (streets) and concerts.
It is the everyday that the author is mostly interested in. “The everyday is boring because it happens every day. Whatever happens on the street, in the souk, the queue, the bridge, the work place and the café is common and has a daily structure that makes it appear, at first glance, to be nothing special, not worthy of our curiosity, yet these human settings are the very spaces where much of our existence and everyday politics are played out,” says Tarik Sabry.
Young people without work whether in Algiers, Cairo, Casablanca, Beirut and other Arab cities spend most of their time in the streets and in cafes. “This is where their dailiness is acted out; this is where they chat, joke, fight, smoke, watch and discuss the news. In other words, this is where their dailiness unfolds.”
One of the book’s forte is the depiction of life on one of Cairo’s most famous bridge: The iconic Qasr Nile Bridge with its two majestic bronze lion statues lying at the entrance. Young Egyptian men and women traditionally date on this bridge. It seems they can somehow act in a way that is not seen in other public places. The bridge, according to the author, is a symbolic manifestation of socio-economic and cultural change in Egypt; it is also a working class popular cultural space; a temporary outlet for repressed libido, of desire to be desired, and where romance is acted out.
Follows an eye-opening analysis of Moroccan youth that are part of a growing young Arab population where more than 56 percent of the region’s population is under the age of 20 and 78 percent under the age of 35. “Their construction as a political generation and their role as agents of change, is significant not only for Morocco but also for the rest of the Arab world,” predicts Sabry. The recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt widely led by young people have proved him right.
The Moroccan youth can be divided into the Islamists and the pro-Westerners. Islamists see the Moroccan ruling classes as cooperating with the West. They reproach Western media for annihilating their Islamic traditions and believe that Morocco is already an extension of the West. On the other hand, young middle class Moroccans are westernized; they feel Moroccan by blood but European on the outside. “Western modernity is, for them, not merely a way of life, but a tool; one, which they use to establish their cultural superiority over the ‘ordinariness’ of Moroccan working class cultures” explains Sabry who specifies that “the Islam lived and experienced by the ordinary Moroccan/Muslim/Arab differs from that preached by the theologian, the Islamist and the cultural salafist…”
Tarik Sabry, a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Theory has attempted to answer the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today. Unfortunately, he fails to convince us; his language is hermetic to the general public, the very people he is trying to reach out to.
