August 4, 2002

I DO not know if it is logical to consider the Muslim world an entity. The countries included in this category may seem to have less in common among themselves than with other countries that have suffered colonialism and are now going through the travails of the post-colonial era. However, we can learn a lot from the unique experiences of individual Muslim countries as we can identify with them in more ways than one.

Algeria is one such country the situation of which deserves to be studied very closely. The country has been in turmoil for several decades now. The corruption and highhandedness of the ex-revolutionary rulers of independent Algeria, suppression of popular will and people’s fascination with religious politics has led to a terrible and seemingly unending chronology of violence.

A very significant factor has been the isolation of the intelligentsia which has put the lives of many of the Algerian intellectuals in danger. Indeed there has been a series of killing of writers and journalists at the hands of the parties involved in the civil war. Elie Chalala, an Arab writer living in the West and editing the Al Jadid magazine for the last eight years, has tried to find causes for this aspect of Algerian violence in his long essay called “Many causes underlie assassinations of Algerian journalists and intellectuals: why death of a nation’s conscience has met with cold indifference”.

This is a long version of an article about the plight of Algerian intellectuals, from which several articles were adapted, some of which appeared in various US newspapers and magazines, including a shorter version in Al Jadid, Vol 4, # 24 (Summer 1998). This essay is available in the archives of the journal’s website at www.Aljadid/0424chalala.html.

Chalala begins with the words of Lounes Matoub, the Algerian singer and poet, which he uttered only days before his assassination: “I know that they pursue me and will kill me. It is a matter of time; I will be killed in a month or two or less... but I prefer to die for my ideas than on a bed of illness or aging”. He then goes on to say that “Lounes’ name can be added to a long list of Algerian intellectuals and artists, 70 of them journalists, killed in a ‘swords against the pens’ campaign.”

What has struck many observers in the recent Algerian scenario, says Chalala, is that unlike other regional civil wars, from Lebanon to today’s Sudan, one finds unprecedented targeting of intellectuals and journalists. In his view it is rarely acknowledged that today’s Algerian Islamists are not the first to target intellectuals in that nation’s history. Both the French colonial power and its local supporters, as well as the revered nationalist leadership which fought for independence from the French, hunted down intellectuals; the French committed their crimes during the war for independence, the Algerian leadership during the war and after.

One of the factors Chalala identifies in the Algerian situation is the linguistic alienation of the Algerian intelligentsia. “Those surprised by the lack of backlash against the killing of intellectuals, such as the protests in Lebanon and Egypt over similar assassinations, may be unaware of the unique linguistic duality of Algerian letters; most writers work solely in either French or Arabic. This duality is important from the aspect of intellectual production as well as readership, stranding the intellectual outside the popular consciousness.”

Prior to liberation, there was a concerted effort to limit intellectual discourse to French alone. Following liberation, a largely inferior “crash course” in Arabic language was introduced. This duality in linguistic experience has resulted in a class of writers inferior to their counterparts in either language, and likewise a readership insufficiently prepared in either language. The high degree of illiteracy today among the Algerian population by default leaves a large segment unaware and unconcerned about the plight of the intellectuals; the remaining literate classes have suffered in their linguistic preparation, and are left divided into two distinct groups, those who read Arabic and those who read French.

In Chalala’s view, this linguistic dualism has led many intellectuals to experience an identity crisis, and particularly a sense of guilt from writing in the colonizer’s language. “This guilt, some argue, was fostered by government policy during the formation of the central state, when leaders incited hostility between Francophone and Arabized intellectuals. Both reactionary policies of Arabization and a dissonance stemming from use of the colonial language have stifled the creation of literary works that could have formed a shared cultural identification. Such a shared cultural identification would have been the heart crying out against the violence visited upon more than 70 journalists and other writers.”

Chalala’s analysis is worth reading. So are many other articles that appear in the quarterly Al Jadid published in English from Los Angeles, and focusing on a wide variety of subjects related to the Middle East. Its Internet edition, containing the list of contents along with a long list of articles published in the past issues, contains many useful and enlightening texts. In a recent media review article published in the Nation magazine, novelist and former New Yorker correspondent Amy Wilentz wrote, “I was led reluctantly to the magazine, but when I looked into its back issues, I discovered that it contains a wealth of opinion and information that no one else is publishing in English.”

A tabloid-sized publication with an average of 28 to 32 pages in each issue, Al Jadid is published in English, and features original articles along with many translations of essays and interviews by Arab writers, journalists, scholars, and poets as well as original illustrations by featured artists. Many leading Arab writers, from both the United States and from the Arab world, contribute to Al Jadid. Much of what you get to read in Al Jadid challenges conventional approaches to Arab culture and arts. It has covered scores of Arab intellectuals and artists under fire from the state or extremists; most recently, Al Jadid offered extensive coverage of the cases of Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Kuwaiti author Laila al-Othman, Syrian novelist Haidar Haidar, Moroccan author Mohammad Shukri, Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife, and the community of Algerian intellectuals and journalists, to mention just a few.

Al Jadid regularly publishes scores of reviews of the latest books on the Arab world and Arab America, across all scholastic disciplines. Al Jadid’s book news and reviews extend also to books published in Arabic, as well as offering the latest overview in English of Arabic books, a section that made the magazine a valuable source to librarians and scholars.

The editor of Al Jadid, Elie Chalala, is an adjunct professor of political science at Santa Monica College, where he teaches politics and history of the Middle East. He has published articles on Middle East issues in books, professional journals, and in US and international publications. Covering the rich field of Arab arts and culture, Chalala says, has been challenging on two fronts: “In the US we’ve had the demonizing and marginalizing of Arabs; in the Arab world, we have censorship issues, wars, civil strife, the vestiges of the colonial mentality, and the endless peace process. All of these factors impact and shape culture, and often find their most poignant, elegant expression in the arts.”

“Arab media have often been dismissed for not delivering credibility,” he says. “If we are to be taken seriously, we must remedy this.” Despite the obstacles, he is optimistic: “Our challenge is to increase the awareness that Arab arts and culture continue to flourish, despite the many obstacles in the United States, the Arab world and elsewhere. In the Arab world, literature is flourishing, despite the various restrictions on freedom of expression, from both governments and reactionary elements in Arab societies.

Al Jadid is committed to bringing state-of-the-art coverage of all these dimensions of the Arab cultural scene, and has distinguished itself with lively debates between secular and religious, traditional and modernist voices.” First published in November 1995 as a monthly, Al Jadid switched to a quarterly format in 1997.

To give you an idea of the variety of subjects dealt with in Al Jadid, here are the titles of a few articles published in the current, Winter 2002, issue of the magazine: “Architectural reflections on the United Arab Emirates”, by Samir Mattar; “Torture, imprisonment and political assassination”, by Sabry Hafez; Fouad al-Khoury on “Photography in the Arab world”, interviewed by Brigitte Caland; Reichmuth on “Sufism: inexplicable states and political links”, interviewed by Sabah Zwein and a film review on “War photographer,” by Judith Gabriel.

Apart from these. the current issue contains reviews of as many as thirteen books and a special issue of the WLT Journal on Contemporary Arab Literature. The books reviewed include Dictionary of painting in Lebanon, by Michel Fani; Lebanon, 1880-1914: the photographic studio of Ghazir by Michel Fani; The living Cairo, stones of Cairo by Jaroslav Dobrowolski; Iraq since 1958: from revolution to dictatorship by Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett; Repression and power: satirical novel recounting 1970s’ Egypt by Sun’allah Ibrahim; Afghanistan: assassinated memory, edited by Olivier Weber; Beyond colonialism and nationalism in the Maghreb edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, and Coming of age in Syria: turbulence of cultural change by Ammar Abdulhamid.

Writer’s email: ak@citypress.cc

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