THE ORIENT: MYTH AND REALITY
Memmi, Albert
If we try to grasp the Orient, it trickles through our fingers like desert sand. What is the Orient? It is best described as the contrast of opposites: the Orient is what the Occident is not....
...In the literal sense, it is books, religious tradition, the search for the profane, language, the arts, and philosophy...
...But what is it...
...Forgive me, Senghor, if I reply that your distinction is not serious and certainly not definitive...
...But let us not exaggerate its importance...
...But when...
...To combat oppression or keep from drowning, self-assertion is a sound expedient...
...Behold how Mohammedan men mistreat their female consorts...
...Now the Arab-Muslim world is beginning to stir again, to move ahead...
...The Occident's victory lies, of course, in the superiority of its technology and industrialization, its conquered world markets safeguarded by highly sophisticated weaponry and political domination —and the by-product, its triumphant culture...
...The East is like a luminous specter: on the spot its differences are barely perceptible, but viewed from a distance, they loom much larger...
...Nothing but a dream...
...in the larger sense...
...Before Mohammedanism, the Arabs never veiled the women...
...A prime example: the persecution of Galileo...
...How much longer will young Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan women submit to the law of the male...
...Muslims prostrate themselves in prayer five times a day, but is this a specific difference...
...An unvaried world would be as depressing as a country of Eastern Europe...
...try to seize it and it vanishes into thin air...
...A dream that sometimes turns into a nightmare in some small, ruined fortress where a Legionnaire, who has fired his last cartridge, lies dead on the scorched sand...
...Let us, however, discard misleading evidence...
...indeed, they are already doing it...
...But again, is this so strange...
...Now Oriental women, too, have hoisted the banner of 369 revolt...
...Christianity is a tolerant, not a restrictive faith, while theirs commands everything and constrains the people...
...more to the point, let us not presume that our differences are better than anyone else's...
...This is certainly true...
...And accustom ourselves to see at a glance this planet for what it is becoming: one world...
...And rejoice that they exist...
...After the mass exodus of the colonizers, couscous became a national French dish...
...The East is geographical space, of course, but again in terms of the Christian "Occident...
...he asked...
...Let's just say it's all a style of life...
...IS THERE NOTHING MORE to be said on the subject...
...Cultural diversities do indeed exist—in literature, in religion, in language, the arts, and the law, in cuisine and culture, not excluding the siesta...
...like Dalida, who insinuated a rhythm of her native Egypt in her songs...
...The plight of Muslim women is a good example (I was about to say of voluptuous, exquisite, submissive women...
...No doubt, they do...
...We must, of course, respect the disparities, although perhaps not all of them...
...A dialectic on the veil is widely discussed, then forgotten...
...I do not mean to imply that there is nothing apart from technical mastery, but neither is anything spiritual the sole prerogative of the Orientals...
...Surely it is more than that...
...Today it is a common practice...
...And let this clarify your thinking further: which is the better image of the Orient, the siesta in the shade of a whitewashed wall or tea in a bivouac...
...Anyway, what is a culture...
...It is not Islam that prevents the Muslims from progressing but rather the centuries of slumber induced by Islam...
...In some areas they still do...
...Did it really come from that part of the world, papa...
...and then only to climb the social ladder...
...Yet the Orientals must find out exactly that...
...That's where it is backward...
...but where are the differences...
...As for their renowned secrets of the soul, these enigmas are like a phantom...
...All the same, there are differences...
...For the present, communal life dominates the Islamic countries...
...Self-assertion is something that differentiates us, like a flag...
...But look here: Arab civilization reached its zenith in the cities...
...As one who champions this claim, I can say in all fairness that the issue begins to irk as much as it bewilders us...
...Unpublished Notes THE ARABS ARE NOMADS and their true civilization is that of the desert...
...Christianity, too, has had its woes trying to justify its philosophy...
...As for democracy, the invention of the Greeks that became the political Bible of the West, what Oriental revolutionary is fighting for it...
...Translatedfrom the French by WILLIAM A. PACKER 370...
...They invented algebra and the astrolabe...
...The Orient" is primarily the dream of "the Occident"—a dream of colors and odors unknown to the West, of exotic foods, of polygamy and hammam, which means a profusion of bodies, and nudity rediscovered...
...the East has replaced the Italy of the Romantics...
...It represents travel and escape...
...False humanism reduced to a single model...
...National cookery...
...Because among Arabs themselves, there is an "Occidental Orient"—the Maghreb—and a kind of "Orient of the Orient," the Fertile Crescent...
...In the not-so-distant past Barbary pirates—black demons with flashing white teeth— ravaged the coasts of Europe, violated women, and abducted children...
...In the country of my birth [Tunisia], Bedouin women rarely wore it...
...Not exactly, some will retort...
...A dream of glory, too, no longer possible in Europe—like Lyautey's Morocco, like the Spahis garbed in red burnooses, scanning the horizon from a lofty perch astride their camels...
...Hence, the West can take pride in its power, the East in its spiritual gifts...
...It is a world of other people, far off somewhere...
...Travel is a dream life...
...Why not...
...In the North and the West, mystics and Jewish Kabbalists have no less influence than their Mediterranean counterparts...
...I maintain that the essential thing is to fight against injustice and the domination of some over others, whoever the some and the others may be...
...But we find shifts in the realm of religion just as we find them in technology...
...The Orient is that which is not Christian...
...Referring to this dichotomy, L. S. Senghor [the poet and political leader of Senegal] whom I esteem and value as a friend, magnifies it thus: rationality and efficiency on the one hand, the dream and a profound insight into the secrets of the soul on the other...
...What, then, is the East...
...but we must take all that with affectionate irony...
...We shall see...
...And who are these men...
...Here again, let's be clear...
...It is Flaubert's Carthage, Chateaubriand's journey from Paris to Jerusalem, now extended to the Tunisian oases and the souks of Marrakech...
...Of course, they have their own theology, but they don't burden themselves too much with doctrine...
...How a man woos a girl or makes love...
...Not long ago I pointed out that there are no two ways of pouring cement...
...The Iranian issue confuses more than it illuminates us...
...In regard to technological developments, centuries ago the East lapsed into a deep sleep...
...The West denounces the veil and the harem with virtuous indignation...
...But conflict is not inevitable because everything ceaselessly moves and changes institutions as well as culinary recipes...
...We must understand that theirs is not a religion like other religions, certainly not one like ours...
...Yes, indeed...
...They mediated between the West and Greek philosophy, and their artisans ranked among the finest in the world...
...Didn't the Christian and Jewish religions in the past also rule over every aspect of life down to the smallest detail...
...Oppression aside, it becomes folklore...
...Where...
...It was necessary to clarify this question because the men in power denounced it—hypocrites who aspired to proclaim the universality of their culture...
...This Manichaeism conveniently settles everything between the two sides...
...A backward mentality is not endemic to the character of the Muslim people, only to their history...
...All the same, in practice a pious man is a pious man...
...Once again let's cite the differences: technology, religion, individualism, and so on...
...That's what my young son thought it always was...
...In the Orient, Christian Arabs, Copts, and Jews, wretched islets in a Muslim sea, don't count...
...Arabs, Muslims, and Jews haven't always been drowsing...
...At close quarters, such accusations again only confound us...
...It's like Enrico Macias, the singing idol of the crowds...
Vol. 28 • July 1981 • No. 3
