A Brief Thought . . . .

The following is an excerpt of a Nagib Mahfouz (Egyptian novelist and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature) from Hisham Sharabi’s Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society . . .


"He leads a contemporary [i.e., “modern”] life. He obeys civil and penal laws of Western origin and is involved in a complex tangle of social and economic transactions and is never certain to what extent these agree with or contradict his Islamic creed. Life carries him along in its current and he forgets his misgivings for a time until one Friday he hears the imam or reads the religious page in one of the papers, and the old misgivings come back with a certain fear. He realizes that in this new society he has been afflicted with a split personality: half of him believes, prays, fasts, and makes the pilgrimage. The other half renders his values void in banks and courts and in the streets, even in the cinemas and theaters, and perhaps even at home among his family before the television set."


While Mahfouz wrote this years ago, it still applies to what I see in Syrian and Arab society. Recently I was out to lunch with an Arab Christian in one of the many dinning establishments in Damascus. And as nearly all of the ‘modernized’ dinning establishments that feature versions upon western themed food, this place had a television and was tuned to one of the 20 or so main Arab Music Video channels. Amidst video after video full teeming with sexuality, I heard the call to prayer echo from one, then another mosque around the neighborhood. After a little bit, one the waiters turned the channel to what I’m sure was a Saudi based-station, for the afternoon prayer. As soon as the prayer was over, he flipped back to Western inspired, Arab-interpreted, music television – brimming with breasts and gyrating hips. I began to laugh and was asked, “What is so funny?” I explained that I found the juxtaposition between half-naked music videos and religiosity (which implicitly upholds “the modest’ and ‘the chaste’ as virtues for women) without even a pause, without even a cursory nod to a glaring contradiction, struck me as hilarious. She found it funny after I explained it, and said: “yah, you get so used to these things that it doesn’t even seem weird . . .“ I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.