resssiduuuue atlas

In one of his regular columns for the literary magazine Salmagundi, the cultural historian Martin Jay once counted Hannah Arendt among a select few thinkers whose elusive intellectual aura is frequently invoked to legitimize and delegitimize political or philosophical positions in European public discourse.Triumphant cold war hawks have hailed Arendt as a defender of the Western canon from Plato to NATO and as an intellectual phalanx in the battle against Soviet totalitarianism. The New Left and post-colonial thinkers, by contrast, validated their critique of bullish liberalism drawing on her search for subterranean formations of political freedom, on her early elaborations of anti-imperialism, her theorizing of the spontaneous revolutionary uprising in Hungary, and on her anarchist formulation of the intellectual pariah as a strategic location of power. Arendt was also very much an outcast who was often belittled by the male liberal establishment. For example, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin scoffed at her in an interview with shortly before his death: “the lady … produces no arguments, no evidence, of serious philosophical or historical thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical free association.”

The point of this essay is not to defend her against these and other blatant misogynist attacks. Rather, what interests me here is when, and how, which of Arendt’s work has been invoked in the Middle East; why some intellectual circles celebrated her and while others ignored or vilified her. I argue that mobilizing Hannah Arendt – often for conflicting causes – says a great deal about wider intellectual developments in the Middle East over the past half century.

Between the disenchantment with radical Arab politics and the rise of militant Islamism in the 1970s to the suicide attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, many leftist Arab intellectuals made peace with American hegemony. In the words of the Arab intellectual who most self-identifies with her, there occurred a wide-spread political conversion to Arendt when “the old tools of thinking about politics were no longer working.”Israelis, Palestinians and Jews with a different sense of conceptual impasse have also recently returned to Arendt’s early writings on binationalism. Though marginal at the time, these texts from the 1940s now serve as a potent validation for imagining an alternative to the flawed two-state solution.

Jens Hanssen is my favorite prof. hassibah disagrees. but that’s okay.

by Hussein Ahmad

When I arrived in the Gulf fourteen years ago, my perception of this region was the same as that of millions of other migrants, that this is a place where we can easily earn enough to achieve financial freedom. But over the years, a different gulf has been haunting my thoughts: that between expectations and reality. In other words, the fact that many who come looking for gold are having to satisfy themselves with coal.

There are around twenty million migrant workers in the Gulf and many millions had walked its sand-swept streets since the oil boom in the 1970s. A vast majority of them are single workers—Asians, Africans, Arabs—and despite the gaping diversities in the cultures they come from, they share one thing: their woes (…) The distressing truth is that migrant single workers in the Gulf have fallen by the wayside while the economies they toiled for galloped. Their salaries have not kept pace with inflation and laws meant to protect their rights are inadequate. Living conditions have worsened due to an increase in population and spiralling of expenses back home. The result: imbalanced minds and disease-wracked bodies. When they go back home after years or decades, they are residues of their former selves, leaving the chasm between expectations and reality as wide as ever.

(…) These experiences and struggles are true of most migrants—Asians, Arabs, and Africans. A large majority of them hail from societies that cling to a patriarchal order where the male is the breadwinner. This injects an aura of sublimity into their sacrifice—a feeling that they are destined to suffer to feed their children, making them sacrificial lambs walking willingly to the slaughter house.

(…) What about the future?  It does not look very rosy for migrant workers, for two reasons. First, the 2011 Arab uprisings have made unemployment among the local population more of a demon for dynastic rulers—a demon that must be exorcised expeditiously if they do not want their own people to march to their palaces. One way to create employment for the locals is to gradually expel expatriates. In Saudi Arabia, thousands of foreigners are in fear of losing their jobs as the regime acts fiercely to create jobs for the restive youth. This has also made expatriates wary of the Arab uprisings. In Bahrain, at the height of the anti-regime protests last year, expatriates took to the streets in support of the Bahraini ruling family! Secondly, the Arab uprisings have made Gulf regimes focus on local populations, relegating to the backburner the welfare of expatriates, especially the need for sponsorship reforms.

(emphasis my own) A portrait poignant because of its scarcity. While we slowly are being exposed to statistics and class analysis, the personal and psychological experiences of migrant workers in the Gulf rarely ever surface. The above are excerpts I’ve just picked out, but do read the whole thing, especially if you — like me — grew up in a country that was built on the backs of migrant workers. I found the final point about the effect of the Arab Uprisings on migrant workers most striking: how often have we thought about this when talking about revolution?