Asia & Middle East Archives

An Apology for Propaganda

Writing in the middle of World War II, Freya Stark, a well-known British explorer and Arabist working for the Ministry of Information in the Middle East, penned an unpublished – and ultimately unfinished – twenty-five page essay, which she entitled Apology for Propaganda. When we think of government propaganda, we typically think of faceless bureaucrats churning out sensationalized banners, radio broadcasts, and reports about victories, the enemies’ lies, and various kinds of disinformation. Stark’s Apology, however, provides a unique glimpse into how propagandists justified and viewed their own work in a critically self-conscious manner. On a larger scale, the manuscript reflects on an intimate level the dynamics of British colonial thought, particularly a steadfast belief in the nobility of Britain’s colonial “civilizing mission.” Stark’s Apology not only reflects an available theory of propaganda discussed within the Ministry of Information, but also the persistent belief that, despite any shortcomings, imperialism was really benevolent for Arab colonial subjects.

Freya Stark (via Alchetron).

By her thirties, Freya Stark (1893-1993), an impulsive British explorer of the Near East, developed a romanticized and idealistic obsession with the Arab world and Persia in the same vein as T.E. Lawrence, whom she much admired. She traveled among the Druze, explored Luristan and the hideout of the fabled Assassins at Alamut, and wrote extensively about her travels in Baghdad, Yemen, Arabia, and other parts of the Middle East. When WWII began, Stark volunteered to serve in the British war effort and she was assigned to the Ministry of Information where her linguistic and literary talents were well-suited.

Stark likely wrote this piece sometime between October 1943 and May 1944, while traveling in America on an official diplomatic tour to clarify the British position on the Zionist question. Ultimately, it seems the decision was made not to publish the Apology because Stark’s boss, Stewart Perowne, thought it was too revealing about British intelligence efforts in Egypt and Iraq in the still ongoing war.

British WWII propaganda after Mussolini’s unsuccessful invasion of Egypt in 1942. The poster depicts captured Italian troops entering Cairo under British guard (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark begins the essay by arguing that propaganda fundamentally deals with the “originating and spreading of ideas.” However, propaganda has two distinct meanings: (1) the propagation of a “gospel” or firmly held set of beliefs, and (2) deceitful information. Both grew out of the Jesuit tradition, with the former being an innocent form of “persuasion,” while the latter took form as people associated the Jesuits with “unscrupulous subtlety.” Persuasion meant simply to truthfully present one’s beliefs in a dialogue (“two-way traffic”) with the target audience, making use of slogans and positive statements. Stark firmly believed the government should wholeheartedly embrace this kind of propaganda, since ideas “are as potent as drugs.” Indeed, there is a “duty” to firmly explain the British and Allied cause when they feel confident of the justice and necessity to prevent others from heading over a “precipice.” For Stark, this was connected to her firm belief that the “British desire to encourage freedom in the Arab world is perfectly sincere.” Justifiable propaganda could only be that which worked for the good of the audience, in this case the Arabs. On the other hand, Stark thought that bribing and trickery were repugnant as well as ineffective means of persuasion, and cooperation with Arabs was necessary, since the most persuasive formulations of secular democratic ideals could only be expressed in Arabic by other Arabs and not through translation.

North Africa and the Middle East in 1940 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark then moved from these ideas to show how she tried to implement them in her Ikhwan al-Hurriya (Brotherhood of Freedom), an anti-fascist group in Egypt and Iraq. Based on the organizational examples set by the Bolsheviks and Muslim Brotherhood, this project consisted of a diffused network of loose cells, where British and Arab members could discuss the democratic principles that they shared. She writes that, despite some initial difficulties, the British-inspired Brotherhood garnered about 40,000 members throughout the Middle East at its peak. The British authorities were highly appreciative of this effort, though despite Stark’s high hopes, the organization was officially outlawed in Egypt in 1952.

A chief reason for this was the contradiction within the Brotherhood about politics. Stark envisioned it as an apolitical group and so had to turn several “good men” away in Iraq because of their interest in politics. However, an organization that was ostensibly meant to promote democratic principles could not help but be political in a colonial environment. Stark was happy that there were young Arab men who were receptive to the British message, but she seemed to think that this could be conducted on British terms without raising political questions about Britain’s decidedly undemocratic role. Stark easily mistakes the friendships she formed and admiration for democratic ideas she found with an overall positive disposition to British colonialism. Furthermore, there is no mention of the popularity of Muslim Brotherhood’s anti-British efforts or how Ambassador Miles Lampson’s use of tanks on February 4, 1942 to compel King Farouk to accept the Egyptian nationalist Wafd Party into the government led to the discrediting of the king, the Wafd, and parliamentary democracy as mere British tools. The enormous popularity of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist and authoritarian government beginning in the 1950s also belies Stark’s overly enthusiastic tone in the manuscript. Unlike T.E. Lawrence, who had seen Britain renege on its promises at Versailles after WWI, Stark believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of the British imperial project and whatever did not fit in with this image she discounted as an aberration or simple mistake.

Nasser and the Free Officers overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, marking the decline of British influence in Egypt (via Wikimedia Commons).

Stark’s unpublished Apology shows us how some British propagandists in the Middle East theater of WWII conceived of their roles as good-natured persuaders. They were not oblivious to accusations of cynical propaganda and Stark’s essay shows a conscious effort to articulate a morally acceptable form of propaganda that could serve British and Arab interests, in that order. Stark reflects a strain of British colonial thought that, while sympathetic to Arabs, still thought that British dominance was a guiding hand that benevolently, yet condescendingly, treated colonial subjects as paternalistic clients.

Freya Stark’s “Apology for Propaganda,” can be found in handwritten and typescript drafts, Container 1.3. Freya Stark Collection 1893-1993 (bulk 1920-1976). Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin.

Additional sources:
William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East (2009)
Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark (1999).
Efraim Karsh and Rory Miller, “Freya Stark in America: Orientalism, Antisemitism and Political Propaganda,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, 3 (July, 2004): 315-332
Temple Wilcox, “Towards a Ministry of Information,” History 69, 227 (1984): 398-414

More by David Rahimi on Not Even Past:
Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)

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Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, by Muhammad Qasim Zaman (2012)

by David Rahimi

Starting with the encounter with European colonialism and modernity in the eighteenth century, Muslims increasingly began to worry that Islam was beset by existential crises as Muslim countries slowly fell under colonial domination. Some thought Islam had stagnated and made Muslims weak; others said true Islam already had the answers to modernity. Consequently, many prominent Muslim intellectuals from the Middle East and South East Asia, like Rashid Rida, Shah Wali Allah, Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Ubayd Allah Sindhi, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, insisted over the course of the next two centuries that Islam must in some way rediscover, renew, or reform itself to address the challenges of a changing world. This, of course, raised a host of questions. What needed to be reformed? How should reform be enacted? Who or what had the authority to decide such matters? Were these crises even real?

Muhammad Iqbal was knighted in 1922, by King George V (via Wikimedia Commons)

Muhammad Qasim Zaman takes these concerns as his starting point to examine Muslim contestations of religious authority and “evolving conceptions of [Sunni] Islam” from the nineteenth century to the present day.” At its core, this is a story of inconclusive debates, ambiguity, and cyclical tension as old wounds reopen and close, as lay and traditional religious scholars (the ‘ulama) contest how Islam should be understood and lived. By tracing the contextualized debates of the modern ‘ulama in a comparative, transnational framework, Zaman shows the multifaceted dimensions of internal debate and how this fosters ongoing fragmentation of religious authority in Islam, despite efforts to the contrary. Disposing with an overall chronology or single narrative, Zaman divides his book into the following key thematic issues: religious consensus, ijtihad (i.e. independent analogical reasoning), the common good, religious education, the place of women in law and society, socioeconomic justice, and violence. The problems surrounding these issues have continuously resurfaced within Muslim intellectual and religious circles since the nineteenth century. What links these hot-button, yet seemingly disparate, topics together are the fundamental issues of religious authority, that “aspiration, effort, and ability to shape people’s belief and practice on recognizably ‘religious’ grounds,” and internal criticism among Muslims. Each chapter topic, then, serves as a vehicle through which to explore the interplay between authority and criticism, and what the consequences and implications are for Islamic thinkers and Muslims more broadly.

Countries with Muslim-majority populations (via Wikimedia Commons).

The real world consequences of this battle over religious authority through internal criticism come across strongly in the chapter on violence. For example, the moderate Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), wrote in his 2008 magnum opus Jurisprudence of Jihad that jihad was only permissible in cases of defense. Zaman shows, however, that this opinion does not align with the majority of classical Islamic jurisprudence, to which Qaradawi claims to faithfully adhere. Furthermore, another prominent moderate, Taqi ‘Uthmani of the Pakistani branch of the Deobandi school, had previously rejected purely defensive jihad in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2009, ‘Uthmani reaffirmed this theory of offensive jihad, adding that it only applied, however, to “formal” Islamic states and not to individuals. This disagreement about jihad conveys Zaman’s central point that is replicated across the other chapters as well. The ‘ulama are active in articulating their views, but who or what holds ultimate authority to resolve these religious problems remains unclear, since even the theory of authoritative scholarly consensus is hotly contested. Ultimately, Zaman argues that greater attention must be given to religious authority as a relational concept, formed by the specificities of the context in which this authority is performed. Abstract authority not only comes into tension with authority as it is practiced in real life, but historical circumstances and individual beliefs shape how Muslims respond to or recognize religious authority. The ECFR, founded in 1997, exemplifies this tension, since on the one hand, it seeks to create a new authoritative consensus around a particular set of ‘ulama, yet on the other hand, it claims not to compete with the authority of the many non-affiliated ‘ulama. The unsettled nature of these debates, Zaman insists, results in an “authority deficit” and persistent fragmentation within Muslim intellectual and religious circles.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi (center) in 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age is a work of tremendous insight and compelling vignettes. The weakest portions are its introduction and conclusion, which both tend to be verbose and slightly disorganized. It is also unclear at moments whether the author intends to offer a strong overarching argument or to merely “open a new window onto the Muslim religious and public sphere” – one that forefronts debates among the ‘ulama. Thankfully, these are minor problems. While not meant for readers looking for an introduction to Islam, those hoping for a meticulously researched study of the internal religious dynamics of Sunni Islamic thought will find their expectations well met.

Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age: Religious Authority and Internal Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552-1610, by R. Po-chia Hsia (2010)

by Shery Chanis

Hsia’s book on Matteo Ricci expands the traditional narratives of the Age of Expansion and transforms our understanding of them. Beyond the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, early modern Europeans, Jesuits among them, also ventured to Asia. Published on the four-hundredth anniversary of Matteo Ricci’s death, Ronnie Hsia’s biography of the Jesuit also marks part of a larger effort to commemorate one of the most important figures in the history of Christianity in China. In addition, this book shows a shift in focus to China by Hsia, who has produced an abundance of works on German social and cultural history during the Reformation era.

Hsia departs from other Ricci biographies with a more down-to-earth and rounded portrayal of the Jesuit missionary. Rather than claiming Ricci to be a saint or a pioneer cultural accommodationist who allowed Chinese converts to continue certain Chinese rituals, Hsia examines the context in which Ricci operated in two new ways. First, Hsia includes many other Jesuits in his book, illustrating that Ricci was part of a greater effort of the China Mission. Hsia discusses many Chinese figures along Ricci’s path, some of whom helped the Jesuit mission, some debated with the Jesuit, some were converted, and some collaborated with Ricci on various works. Second, Hsia discusses Ricci’s emotions at various stages of his mission. Although Ricci was highly successful in China, Hsia shows that he also experienced melancholy and sadness in his tenure in China.

After a creative prologue about Ricci’s death and burial, Hsia outlines Ricci’s life, from his birth in Macerata, Italy to his burial in Beijing, China. Hsia traces Ricci’s education and training in Europe and his journey to Asia before settling in China. Hsia devotes a chapter to each Chinese city where Ricci lived – Macao, Zhaoqing, Shaozhou, Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing –to illustrate Ricci’s northward movement within the Chinese empire moving towards the capital, his ultimate goal. Hsia follows this with a discussion of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, which he argues is Ricci’s most important work. Hsia concludes his book with an Epilogue, witha brief historiography of works on Ricci in the four centuries since his death, from Nicholas Trigault to Jonathan Spence to Chinese scholars including Lin Jinshui and Sun Shangyang.

Detail from the China section of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map, the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Hsia’s innovative approach continues with his attention to Michele Ruggieri, Ricci’s fellow Italian Jesuit and partner at the beginning of the Jesuit mission in China. Not only does Hsia devote an entire chapter to Ruggieri, he also includes a legal case against Ruggieri in his appendix. Hsia’s inclusion of Ruggieri, who is usually seen only in Ricci’s shadow, helps expand our knowledge of the Jesuit mission in China.

Hsia’s increasing focus on China in his scholarship is also reflected in his incorporation of many Chinese sources in his book. In addition to Ricci’s extant letters and published works, Hsia includes such Chinese materials as local gazetteers, tax records, poems, and letters. This offering of a more balanced perspective between Europe and China makes his focus and methodology less Eurocentric, which is also a strength of this book. Hsia’s inclusion of photographs he has taken in some of the cities Ricci had lived also serves as a great addition to the book.

ILLUSTRATION DEPICTS JESUIT FATHER MATTEO RICCI

Matteo Ricci in the traditional garb of a Chinese literatus (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hsia’s micro-historical approach of focusing on one Jesuit does not provide a full account of the Jesuit mission in China which can be viewed as a weakness of the book. In addition, the book title might be somewhat misleading, since Hsia is interested in not only Ricci in Beijing, the Forbidden City, but also in other places. Nonetheless, Hsia has provided an intriguing account of an important figure in the Jesuit China mission who was also part of the larger narrative of the Age of Expansion.

The Israeli Republic, by Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2014)

by Lior Sternfeld

In 1963 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, accompanied by his wife, the renowned Iranian novelist, Simin Daneshvar, traveled to Israel as an official guest of the country. He later wrote a travelogue about the journey, published in Iran under the title, Safr beh vilayet esrail (Journey to the Land of Israel). Two years earlier the author had gained his leftist internationalist credentials when he published one of the most important Third World manifestos, known as “Gharbzadegi” (Plague from the West). Al-e Ahmad is perceived to have laid the intellectual and ideological foundations of the 1979 revolution in Iran; both the leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Iran’s current Supreme Leader considered Al-e Ahmad to be an influence and role model. This article reviews the most recent translation of Al-e Ahmad’s travelogue, and will be useful to anyone wants to know more about modern Iran.

Translator Samuel Thrope’s introduction allows the reader to understand the profound complexity that characterized Al-e Ahmad throughout his career. Thrope provides excellent biographical and historical contextualization of the text. He also confronts one of the profound dilemmas confronting Al-e Ahmad’s reader. The use of Vilayet in the title can be translated in two different ways. One is charged with religious meaning as “Guardianship of Israel,” while the second carries the more prosaic meaning of Territory. As the travelogue itself makes clear, Al-e Ahmad himself was divided about Israel’s role in that land.

Like a large section of the Iranian left, Al-e Ahmad viewed Israel as part of the Third World. Al-e Ahmad juxtaposes East versus West and draws the borders of the East from “Tel Aviv to Tokyo,” acknowledging Israel’s ability to create an indigenous culture (unlike in Iran, as he analyzed in Gharbzadegi), that did not blindly mimic other cultures but was based on the ancient Hebraic Jewish culture. Al-e Ahmad was especially impressed with the revival of the Hebrew language. His admiration for almost everything he saw in Israel, did not prevent him from arguing that the Palestinians, and by extension the East in general and the Arabs and Muslims in particular, paid the price for the sins committed by Europeans in the Holocaust.

Al-e Ahmad and Daneshvar spent some time in the north Israel kibbutz “Ayelet Ha’Shahar,” which allowed the couple to get a first hand experience of kibbutz life. They saw a play, hung out with kibbutz members, and immersed themselves in conversations about China, the USSR, and Cuba over glasses of beer. Just before leaving, Al-e Ahmad wrote in the kibbutz guest book: “not only were they hospitable, but I met people here that I never expected to meet. Learned people, understanding and open-minded. In a sense, they are implementing Plato. Honestly speaking, I always identified Israel with the Kibbutz, and now I understand why.” Simin Daneshvar added: “as I see it the Kibbutz is the answer to the problem of all the countries, including our own.

This text opens a window to the mindset of the Iranian left. Al-e Ahmad’s praise of Israel articulates his (and other Iranians’) dispute with the Arabs, his harsh criticism of Arab governments, and refutes Arab ideas about Iran’s inferiority.

800px-PikiWiki_Israel_3290_Picking_Cotton

Cotton fields of a kibbutz in Shamir, Israel, circa 1958 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The last chapter of the travelogue shifts tone and criticizes Israel for abandoning its Third World position and becoming a colonial power in its own right. The origin of the chapter is the subject of some controversy. Some believe that it was written in 1968 after the 1967 war and just before Al-e Ahmad’s death (in 1969), and reflects his own and the Iranian left’s disillusion with Israel. During the 1967 war, when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights and then imposed military control over the entire population of non-citizen Palestinians., it became impossible for observers like Al-e Ahmad to view it as a nation that had taken part in a postcolonial struggle. The other explanation is that after his death, this chapter was written by his brother, Shams Al-e Ahmad, in order to get it approved in the radical revolutionary circles, for publication in Iran in 1984. Thrope adds some useful comments about this controversy as well. Thrope’s suggests that it was Jalal Al-e Ahmad himself who wrote this chapter, and that the voice expressed there is one of a literary character (a friend who wrote a letter to Al-e Ahmad). By presenting this fictional dialogue, Al-e Ahmad contemplates his ambiguous stand towards Israel and Zionism, or as Thrope writes: “Could Zionism really serve as a model for the remedy that Iran required? Just as importantly, as a Muslim, an Easterner, and an intellectual opposed to the Shah’s policies, which included close relationship with Israel, how should he relate to the Jewish State’s existence in the heart of the Muslim Middle East?” In this chapter, Al-e Ahmad not only criticized Israel as a colonial power, he harshly criticized the European intellectual left and singled it out for what he sees as double standards. While they vehemently fought against the colonization of Algiers and were outspoken in their criticism of the colonial project as a whole, they could live peacefully with the colonization of the territories gained by Israel in 1967. Al-e Ahmad blames Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lanzmann for leading this dreadful trend. He also blames the military regimes of the Arab countries for their incompetence in facing the changing reality of Israeli policy, and the “Petrodollar Empires” of the Persian Gulf for myopic political and economic goals in only caring about the oil industry.

Jalal Al-e Ahmad (r) with his wife, writer and intellectual Simin Daneshvar (l), in an undated photograph (probably from the early 1960s).

This book recounts a fascinating journey undertaken by an Iranian intellectual to an Israel that existed primarily in the author’s mind. The kind of utopia Al-e Ahmad saw would strike many Israelis as odd. Yet, I am sure that every reader would find this book (and its excellent translation) to be a window on the prerevolutionary Iranian left at a time when it was possible for an Iranian intellectual to embrace certain aspects of Israeli society; to get a glimpse of the history of the Israel-Iran relations and the greater Middle East too.

Listen to an interview with translator Samuel Thrope on 15 Minute History

Image of kibbutz guest book reproduced with the kind assistance of archivist Noa Herman at the archive of Kibbutz Ayelet Ha’Shahar.

Domesticating Ethnic Foods and Becoming American

by Madeline Hsu

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was the earliest popular, English-language guide to Chinese cooking. First published in 1945 and reprinted several times, it remains in wide use today. The author, Dr. Buwei Yang Chao, wrote the cookbook at the urging of fellow faculty wives in New Haven, in particular Agnes Hocking, wife if the idealist philosopher William Hocking. Trained as a physician, Dr. Chao reassured American housewives that she could teach them the complex and exotic art of Chinese cooking because she had learned as an adult herself while a student in Japan.

In addition to providing straightforward and simple directions together with suggestions for obtaining ingredients and alternatives, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese presents its guidance with wit and whimsy provided by Dr. Chao’s husband and translator, the famous linguist Dr. Yuen Ren Chao, who created terms now in common usage such as “stir fry” and “potsticker.” Footnotes add humorous asides that explain family disputes over translations and descriptions for Chinese cultural practices. For example, in the introduction, the language specialist Yuen Ren Chao cannot resist adding a footnote to the otherwise commonplace, “Really, you should not have put yourself to so much trouble!” to explain that this translation is inaccurate because Chinese lacks the “subjunctive perfect.”

Dr. Buwei Yang Chao’s cookbook was so successful that the well-known author, Pearl Buck, who wrote one of its prefaces from the point of view of an American housewife, urged Chao to pen the story of her life. Autobiography of a Chinese Woman appeared in 1947. With great charm, Chao made a persuasive case for the educated, cosmopolitan Chinese family to be accepted as American. The success of Dr. Buwei Chao’s publications bridging Chinese and American peoples underscores the intrinsic relationship between popularizing ethnic food and the assimilation of ethnic and racial minority groups. As Donna Gabaccia wrote in We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, after World War II, ethnic foods such as Chinese and Italian, would win broader appreciation as part of a more general expansion of the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society.

User-friendly ethnic cookbooks such as How to Cook and Eat in Chinese brought once alien cultures and foodways directly into the kitchens and homes of Euro Americans. According to Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads by Sylvia Lovegren, family meal preparation was not only a commonplace form of domestic labor, but one that provides keen insights into broader historical trends. During the Cold War and the Civil Rights era, these shifts emerged in part through the growing popularity of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Dr. Buwei Chao was an early forerunner of the trends that by the late 1960s and early 1970s mobilized leading figures in the food publishing business, such as Judith Jones, Julia Childs’ editor at Knopfand Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food critic, to recruit cooks with ethnic food expertise, personality, and writing ability to introduce general audiences to their cultures.

Jones’ discoveries, sometimes promoted in conjunction with Claiborne, included southern chef, Edna Lewis of Café Nicholson who authored The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972) and The Taste of Country Cooking (1976); scholar Claudia Roden and A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968); the late Marcella Hazan and The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973); and restaurant owner Irene Kuo with The Key to Chinese Cooking (1977). Claiborne’s entry into the Chinese cookbook field was The Chinese Cookbook (1972) which he co-authored with Virginia Lee. Both Hazan and Lee attracted Jones and Claiborne’s attention when they began offering cooking lessons out of their homes.

America’s immigrant population and the broad acceptance of ethnic cultures and communities have boomed along with the popularity of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, cooking shows, and personalities. For an understanding of the early roots of this business and cultural phenomenon, revisit Buwei Yang Chao’s How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

by Christopher Rose

In The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Giancarlo Casale contests the prevailing narrative that characterizes the Ottoman Empire as a passive bystander in the sixteenth-century struggle for dominance of global trade. Using documents from archives in Istanbul and Portugal, Casale shifts our attention east and demonstrates that the Ottomans were actively engaged as rivals to the Portuguese for control of the lucrative spice trade and sea lanes of the Indian Ocean.

Casale’s study is a reaction against two historiographical trends: the first is a Eurocentric version of history in which the so-called Age of Exploration is posited as a purely European phenomenon, conditioned by the intellectual tradition of the European Renaissance and focused on New World colonization. This perspective focuses on the opening of direct trade between Europe and Asia as the catapult that launched Europe forward and started the Ottoman Empire’s slow road toward decline and eventual demise as the “sick man of Europe.” The second is the new trend toward a non-Eurocentric view of world history, that seeks to write the history of the global community that is independent of Europe. The Ottoman Empire tends to get short shrift in the early modern period in both of these narratives because it did not focus on Atlantic exploration or colonization. Indeed, a cursory review of nearly every map published in world history textbooks that depicts trade routes in the 16th and 17th centuries will show a swirl of arrows around, but never through, Ottoman and Safavid lands in the eastern Mediterranean.

Casale proposes instead that Ottoman participation in the Age of Exploration focused on maintaining, expanding, and defending Indian Ocean trade against the Portuguese expansion there. For the Ottomans, the Indian Ocean seemed likely to be far more lucrative than the colonization of a new continent whose economic viability was anything but assured. The income was substantial and the Ottoman and Portuguese navies were well-matched, challenging the Eurocentric narrative that suggests that European exploration was boosted by superior technology and weaponry.

While the phenomenon of Indian Ocean trade in the pre-colonial era has been well documented by Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Frank and others, Casale provides the Ottoman perspective for the first time through new discoveries in the Ottoman archives. We are introduced to previously unknown heroes and villains, giving familiar events new interpretations. The Ottomans were introduced to this new milieu in 1517 following their conquest of Egypt, a province that had grown rich from its geographic position at the head of the Nile, the head of the Red Sea, and from the their monopoly on trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world. The Portuguese sought to challenge Egyptian dominance of Indian Ocean trade by circumnavigating Africa and establishing their own trading ports in South Asia. The Ottomans, Casale proposes, were motivated in part by Egypt’s riches, which they needed to support, among other things, their never-ending military rivalry with Safavid Iran. Once in Egypt, however, the Ottomans discovered that the Portuguese had established a blockade of the Red Sea to disrupt Egyptian trade with India and a military outpost at Hormuz to control access to the Persian Gulf. In order to restore trade and income, the Ottomans had to deal with the Portuguese menace and increase the flow of goods and their resulting tax revenue. Over the course of the sixteenth century, this led to the annexation of Yemen and Eritrea in order to enforce a Muslims-only shipping policy in the Red Sea and to prevent the Portuguese from striking at the symbolic heart of the empire, Mecca and Medina, or the imperial shipyards at Suez. Similarly, Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf was incorporated into the empire outright, and Casale documents several negotiated attempts at alliances or outright annexation of territories across the Indian Ocean basin as the Ottoman sphere of influenced waxed and waned over the course of the century.

The Ottomans employed a combination of military might, intelligence and espionage, diplomacy, propaganda, science, technology, and cartography in order to counter the Portuguese as they made a serious bid to expand what Casale refers to as a “soft” empire, where trade, rather than political and military power, connected disparate territories across the Indian Ocean, stretching from Yemen and Hormuz to Gujarat, Calicut, and as far as the sultanate of Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. Casale suggests that by 1580, the name of the Ottoman Sultan was read out during Friday khutbas from Central Africa to China, their reward for a propaganda campaign against the Portuguese. In telling this story, Casale’s brings us not only the voices of players in Istanbul, Cairo, and Lisbon but also the voices of the Indian and African rulers for the first time as they played these two powers—Ottoman and Portuguese—off of one another in an attempt to secure their dominions.

Casale might exaggerate the originality of his findings and the vision of some of his historical figures but he makes an interesting, readable, and meticulously detailed case for the Ottoman Empire as an active participant in the first century of the Age of Exploration, along with a well-justified explanation for its decision not to pursue expansion at the century’s end. European and World historians alike will find compelling evidence for a new narrative outlining a perilous balance of power in the Indian Ocean during this era in which Europe’s eventual ascendency was not a foregone conclusion. His readers will gain a new appreciation for all of the players involved—not just European and Ottoman, but also the Indian and African rulers who are finally given voice through Casale’s archival work.

Photo Credits:

Fragment of a 1513 Ottoman map depicting the coasts of Western Europe, Northern Africa and Brazil (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A 1606 map of the Ottoman Empire (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Musui’s Story, The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai by Katsu Kokichi (1991)

Musui’s Story is an exceptional account of one man’s hell-raising, rule-breaking, and living beyond his means. The autobiography documents the life of Katsu Kokichi, a samurai in Japan’s late Tokugawa period who adopted the name Musui in his retirement. Katsu is something of a black sheep within his family, being largely uneducated and deemed unfit for the bureaucratic offices samurai of his standing were expected to hold. As such, he typifies in many ways the lower ronin, or masterless samurai, many of whom famously led roaming, directionless lives and wreaked havoc among the urban poor and merchant classes.

The book is quick and simple to read, with barely literate Katsu’s prose skillfully translated by Teruko Craig. The autobiography follows Katsu’s whirlwind of adventures, which involved a great deal of fighting, name-calling, and extortion. What Katsu lacks in ambition is more than made up for by his knack for getting into trouble. The supposed premise of the autobiography is to serve as a cautionary tale for his descendants, as Katsu advises from the very beginning, “Take me as a warning.” In actuality, however, the story smacks of a thinly veiled account of braggadocio.

Many of the stories are almost certainly exaggerated, and even if they were not, they would not be exemplary of the samurai class as a whole. Still, the expectations and conflicts Katsu faces are representative of the underlying economic and social tensions of Tokugawa Japan. Musui’s Story offers a money-obsessed voice to the low-ranking samurai class, in light of its struggle to establish its purpose in a society that increasingly saw it as parasitic. Katsu broke with the accepted moral code of his class, exemplifying the societal struggle that marked one of Tokugawa Japan’s most distinctive features. The role of the Tokugawa samurai was increasingly out of touch with the social reality of the period. It was a class plagued by insecurity of both income and identity. Samurai had emerged as the dominant, warrior class during Japan’s feudalistic era. Originally a rural class, many samurai including Katsu came to live in Edo (modern day Tokyo) during the Tokugawa period, where they lived on capped government stipends. Samurai were, in name, at the top of Japan’s four-tiered shi-no-ko-sho system, but many found themselves unemployed, heavily indebted, and directionless.

Musui’s Story epitomizes the growing pressure many samurai must have faced as they were torn between outdated cultural expectations and an impossible financial reality. Katsu gives a charming and hilarious voice to the struggle, and through his story we see that a study of samurai teachings is insufficient to capture the samurai life in its actuality. Katsu all but abandons the bushido code he would have been taught, venturing among the urban poor and abusing the threat of seppuku, or honorable suicide, as a means of extortion to avoid payment and punishment.

These disjointed expectations for displaying wealth regardless of a samurai’s income level offer a simple explanation for Katsu’s decision to run away, twice, in shame. Tokugawa social insecurity might also be in some ways reminiscent of our contemporary society’s complex relationship to debt. Despite their temporal and geographical distance from the events in Katsu’s autobiography, UT students might find a few striking parallels to their own lives, but hopefully not so much that they would be inspired to imitate Musui’s violent antics.

Photo credits:

19th century woodblock print of the famous Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Edgar Walters is a Plan II junior. He is an undergraduate intern at the Harry Ransom Center and associate editor at the Daily Texan. He would like to pursue a graduate degree in the humanities in the future.

Check out Jacob Troublefield’s winning submission for Not Even Past’s Second Annual Undergraduate Essay Contest.

When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Ostuka (2003) & The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Ostuka (2012)

by David A. Conrad

Writers of ethnically-themed novels are often pegged as simply recording their family stories. However, by the time National Book Award finalist Julie Otsuka set out to capture her mother’s stories of “camp,” dementia had already stolen her once-clear memories. For the novel that became When the Emperor was Divine, Otsuka had to research the events that took her, as a 10-year-old along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, from their homes on the west coast designated them as “enemy aliens,” and confined them to internment camps in inland desert areas during World War II. Her research produced the moving and telling details that reveal the profound loss of fought-for home and identity, the crushing helplessness, and resulting mental incapacity, that beset Japanese Americans with the onset of the war. Her novel conveys how they were literally stripped of all but what they could carry, and forced them to wait for the end of the war imprisoned in temporary barracks behind barbed wire removed from the stabilizing routines of work, school, home, community, and greater acceptance. Inspired by Hemingway, Otsuka uses luminous prose to convey the unmooring of one Japanese American family though everyday objects: the family dog that had to be killed because it could not be brought or adopted, a jump rope cut into pieces, stones thrown through train windows, silverware buried in the garden. A painter by training, Otsuka states that When the Emperor was Divine first came to her in images, which she then set down in words (Texas Book Festival, Oct. 27, 2012).

In contrast, Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, for which she won the PEN/Faulkner Award, flowed as a multitude of “chanting” voices. Based upon two years of research into the lives of Japanese picture brides—young Japanese women of Otsuka’s grandmother’s generation, who followed arranged marriages and came to America between 1908 and 1924 only to find that neither their husbands nor their circumstances matched their advertised claims. Otsuka uses a “we” voice with no single protagonist to evoke the range of struggles and adaptions women made when they entered hard, working-class lives alongside their husbands on farms, in stores and restaurants, boarding houses, mining and lumbering towns, raising children and keeping house, sometimes in tents or newly built shacks without electricity or running water. There are few documents recorded in these women’s own voices and Otsuka recreates their world through their eyes. It is not a glorious story of immigrant integration and success, but a richly layered and compelling account of struggle and survival that honors the picture brides’ humanity while underscoring that their ranks did not produce any recognized heroes or literary tropes.

Japanese-Americans boarding a train in Los Angeles bound for an internment camp, April 1942 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Japanese-Americans standing by posters with internment orders (Image courtesy of the United States Department of the Interior)

These two slight novels are well worth the couple of hours that they take to consume. Otsuka uses elegant and compact prose to transport readers to a transient time and set of circumstances that are, thankfully, long over, although the psychic remnants continue to resonate.

You can purchase When the Emperor Was Divine on Amazon here.

You may also like:

David A. Conrad’s reviews of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II and Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village

Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope by Judith M. Brown (1989)

by Dharitri Bhattacharjee

Judith Brown’s Gandhi, Prisoner Of Hope published in 1989 amply reflects the decades of quality research that went into its production. Brown elucidates Gandhi’s transition from being “a man of his time” to “a man for all times and all places” by his unswerving and whole-hearted submission to the idea of satyagraha or truth-force, most significantly reflected in the deep questions that he asked, many of which he himself did not find answers to. Brown’s biography breaks many a myth about Gandhi and encourages readers to evaluate his life and achievements for themselves, as they find access to Gandhi’s own voice, that of his contemporary’s opinions on him and even the attitudes of the Raj’s officials towards Gandhi.

The title renders to the readers two aspects of Gandhi’s life. First, the book describes Gandhi’s career from being a “nonentity” in England to symbolizing Indian identity to the world; from being an unsure leader in South Africa in his early middle age to becoming the central public figure in India in his old age. The book carefully constructs the image of Gandhi, juxtaposing it against the popular image of him as Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” a title by which he began to be called much before any of his ideas were accepted or executed on a large scale. Brown tries to project the man behind the mahatma, with his failings, doubts, mood swings and blood pressure problems. Second, Brown projects the ideological and philosophical mind of Gandhi, tracking carefully the origins of his ideas, be it satyagraha, non-violence, civil-disobedience or his stand against westernization and modernization; their development, their timely execution and their fall out. In this process Brown sets the groundwork on which she is able to explain how time and again, almost ironically, Gandhi falls in his own esteem in trying to execute his ideas, yet tries again, and how in doing so with uncompromising optimism, Gandhi became a “prisoner of hope.”

Brown does not praise Gandhi uncritically nor does she place him on a pedestal, above human beings and closer to the God that Gandhi so relied on. The beauty of her work lies in the way she discovers the mahatma in Gandhi, almost at the end of the book. In the epilogue Brown’s thesis comes to a full circle and she shows how Gandhi’s greatness, his well deserved praise, lay in being a flawed man but being courageous enough to correct those flaws. Gandhi, a frail man by stature, emerges in Brown’s works one of the strongest men in history. “God centered and man oriented,” Gandhi searched for “[H]im in humanity” and there lay his strength.

Photo Credits:

Left: Gandhi spinning, December 1929 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Right: Gandhi at his Johannesburg law firm, 1905 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany (2006)

by Janine Jones

Alaa al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building (2002, Arabic عمارة يعقوبيان‎) tells the story of a group of people loosely bound together by dint of living in the same crumbling building – a real place – in downtown Cairo. The son of a doorman; an older man with an endless fascination for women; the secret second wife of a wealthy and corrupt businessman; and a lonely newspaper editor looking for lasting love, are each connected to the building, either because they rent office space there, or have an apartment there, or visit someone who lives there. A scathing indictment of governmental corruption and a critique of the class-based limitations of contemporary Egyptian society, Yacoubian Building is nevertheless a piquant and entertaining read.

The Yacoubian Building gained notoriety in Egypt for being one of the first novels to break the homosexual taboo by featuring an openly gay character. The half-French, half-Egyptian editor of the fictional (French) newspaper Le Caire, Hatim Rasheed is portrayed sympathetically. Although other characters talk about him disparagingly he has nevertheless managed to gain the respect – or, at least, the quiet tolerance – of most of his neighbors and associates. Rasheed’s least sympathetic moment is not one related to his sexuality, but to his sense of class entitlement. He is deeply in love with a poor married Nubian man, Abduh, whom he has been supporting financially and with whom he has been having an affair. When Abduh’s child dies a sudden death, he is convinced that God is punishing him for engaging in forbidden sexual acts, and breaks off the affair. Rasheed, who wants a long-term committed relationship and has no interest in cruising the gay bars, seeks out Abduh and hopes to lure him back, promising him job security if they can only have one more night together. Abduh, deeply in debt and still racked with guilt, consents to one night in the hope of getting back on his feet. When Abduh gets up to leave, a drunken Rasheed demands that he stay, threatening and raving as though Abduh is nothing more than a servant whom Rasheed is entitled to command: “You’re just a bare-foot, ignorant Sa’idi. I picked you up from the street, I cleaned you up, I made you a human being.” While Rasheed’s ugly rant may be interpreted as the distraught sputtering of a heartbroken, inebriated man, the broader notion of entitlement and the economic and sexual exploitation of the poor by wealthy men is is clear here and throughout al-Aswany’s book.

One of the least sympathetic characters among these upper–class men is Hagg Azzam, a nouveau riche entrepreneur and budding politician who has accumulated vast drug wealth under the cover of more respectable, legal business dealings. Corpulent, seedy, selfish and malicious, Azzam typifies the corrupt businessman, justifying all manner of morally dubious behaviors under the veneer of Islamic sanction, denying seemingly even to himself the fact that his own pocketbook provides the necessary suasion with the religious leaders he consults for guidance about right conduct. He is allowed to take a second wife under Islam and to stipulate certain provisions about her behavior in the marriage contract, so he deliberately chooses a poor young widow, Souad, setting her up in an apartment in the Yacoubian building and then treating her little better than a call-girl. Azzam forbids her to see her beloved only son in Alexandria and demands that she not have any more children. When she does get pregnant and wants to keep the baby over his strident objections, he uses his wealth and means to forcibly drug and kidnap her, aborting their baby and divorcing her while she is unconscious. After repudiating her, any regrets he feels are related to sex and sex alone:

“He consoled himself with the thought that his marriage to her, while providing him with wonderful times, hadn’t cost him a great deal. He also thought that his experience with her might be replicable. Beautiful poor women were in good supply and wedlock was holy, not something anyone could be reproached for.”

The Yacoubian Building, No. 34 Talaat Harb, Cairo, Egypt

Nevertheless, despite Azzam’s ruthlessness and apparent lack of conscience, even he can be played by men who are more powerful. In one scene he goes to protest being asked to donate 25% of the proceeds of a business scheme to the powers-that-be, only to be required to sit and wait to talk to the “Big Man,” a disembodied voice piped in from the ether. This critique of the construction of modern Egyptian masculinity around power, intrigue, corruption, and manipulation, continues throughout al-Aswany’s novel.

Egyptians on the streets of Cairo in 1920. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Azzam’s complicated approach to Islam, moreover, reflects al-Aswany’s diverse and nuanced characterization of Egyptian men and their religious sentiments. Although nearly all of the characters in The Yacoubian Building are Muslim, each interprets and understands Islam differently. For example, although it would be difficult to read this text as supportive of radical Islam, al-Aswany paints a sympathetic portrait of Taha el Shazli’s journey into radicalization, as a consequence of social and especially governmentally-imposed emasculation. Despite Taha’s considerable intellectual gifts and willingness to work hard, he is thwarted at every turn, unable to land a decent job because of his lack of connections and the stigma of having been born to a working-class father. His relationship with his first love falls apart as she too falls on hard economic times. Because Taha is unable to marry and provide for Busayna and thereby protect her from the leering, sleazy overtures of her employers, she gradually succumbs to a precarious balancing act of giving sexual favors (as long as they don’t compromise her all-important status as – technically – a virgin) in exchange for job security and increased monetary compensation. Selling herself in such a way, however, embitters Busayna. Though she never tells Taha what economic circumstances have forced her into, she grows cool and distant from him, finally breaking up with him in an almost glib manner in the street. In a sad irony, his increasing religiosity parallels her increasing descent into moral compromise, both a result of economic inequality. Having lost his love and any possibility of a real job, Taha finds meaning in Islam, actively protesting the corruption of the government and advocating for change. He finally finds the dignity and self-respect that broader Egyptian society had robbed him of in his Islamic organization:

“Those who knew Taha el Shazli in the past might have difficulty in recognizing him now. He has changed totally, as though he had swapped his former self for another, new one. It isn’t just a matter of Islamic dress that he has adopted in place of his Western clothes, nor of his beard, which he has let grow and which gives him a dignified and impressive appearance greater than his real age….All these are changes in appearance. Inside, however, he has been possessed by a new, powerful, bounding spirit. He has taken to walking, sitting, and speaking to people in the [Yacoubian] building in a new way. Gone forever are the old cringing humility and meekness before the residents. Now he faces them with self-confidence. He no longer cares a hoot for what they think, and he won’t put up with the least reproach or slight from them.”

No longer obsequious and servile, Taha feels confidence in himself as a man. Any ambivalence he may have felt about his Muslim associations is crushed when he is jailed, tortured, interrogated, blindfolded, and raped repeatedly by jeering police. His sense of alienation and emasculation complete, Taha turns wholly to the anti-nationalist teachings of Gama’a Islamiyya. Even marrying a beautiful Muslim widow (who manages to be sensual, sexy, and modest at the same time) doesn’t deter Taha from his goal of revenge through a martyrdom operation on those of the police establishment who violated him. Al-Aswany’s message is clear: lack of economic opportunity and government violence and corruption are leading to the religious radicalization of young Egyptian men.

(Image courtesy of Gigi Ibrahim/Flickr Creative Commons)

(Image courtesy of Hossam el-Hamalawy/Flickr Creative Commons)

This last is all the more interesting, relevant, and timely, given the brutal murder of 28-year-old Egyptian student Khaled Said by Egyptian police in front of his home in 2010, and the subsequent Facebook page and protest campaign, called “We are all Khaled Said” (كلنا خالد سعيد ). The viciousness and injustice of the murder served to galvanize public opinion, and was an important catalyst for the uprising, eventually evolving into the still-unfolding Egyptian Revolution.

You may also like:

Yoav di-Capua’s FEATURE piece on his recent book, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.

Yoav di-Capua’s blog post about political and social conditions in Egypt eight months after Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Lior Sternfeld’s review of Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment.

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