How the Middle East Is Reclaiming Its Own Narrative

Not long ago, the Middle East in the eyes of the West was less a region and more a text written by the West itself. The Middle East was heard through reports from foreign correspondents, seen through Hollywood movies and Orientalist paintings, and read through scholarly research. It was a story produced by the west itself rather than a self-evident narrative. That is what Edward Said referred to in his book Orientalism.

The Orientalists did not depict the east objectively and scientifically; on the contrary, they helped produce the East as the subject of Western knowledge, a stable, enigmatic, sensual, and irrational East, in need of someone who would “understand” or “rule” it. The construction of knowledge was not independent of colonial power; it was one of its means: he who defines the other has the right to intervene in it.

A historical example of that can be is how Egypt was represented in a certain period is the case of how the country was represented in the wake of the Napoleonic campaign against Egypt in 1798.

In addition to military personnel, Napoleon brought to Egypt over 150 scholars, artists, engineers, and linguists whose mission was to study and describe Egypt. This research resulted in the publication of the massive volume entitled Description de l’Égypte,—an encyclopedia that contained descriptions of Egypt’s monuments, inhabitants, customs, flora and fauna, and geography.

At a first glance, this may seem like a purely scientific project. However, according to Edward Said, it was an exercise of power: Egypt was transformed into something Europeans could classify, describe and interpret much better than Egyptians themselves. Thus, Egypt became an object of knowledge, rather than the speaking subject.

The same was true of nineteenth century orientalist painting. Painters like Jean-Leon Gerome filled the European galleries with the images of bustling bazaars, women in harems, snake charmers, slave markets, and mysterious mosques. In fact, many of these painters had been in the Orient for a very brief time, or even never at all. However, their paintings defined how “the Orient” looked.

The West did not invent the East out of thin air, then, but rather constructed around it a comprehensive system of knowledge; a discourse with its own institutions, archives, and concepts, until this discourse gradually became a substitute for the actual East.

Over time, scholars began to study what had been written about the East more than the East itself. Not all of these images were false, but the problem lay not in their veracity, but in their claim to completeness; each narrative was presented as if it were the ultimate truth, while the East itself remained absent from representing itself.

The question now is: who has the right to formulate the narrative, and whose narrative will ultimately prevail? Said himself wrote from within this debate, not from outside it, as a professor at an American university addressing the Western knowledge establishment in its own language.

The past few decades have witnessed a remarkable transformation. The Gulf states, the Maghreb countries, and even Egypt with its Grand Egyptian Museum are no longer mere consumers of art. They are now building their own institutions, from local museums and biennial art fairs funded locally, to film institutes, publishing houses, translation agencies, and even television and film productions that address the region from an internal perspective, rather than an external, foreign one.

For example, the Sharjah Art Foundation has played a consistent, institutional role in addressing the Palestinian cause, enabling the story of this prominent Arab issue to be told by its own people. The Foundation organized the exhibition “In the eyes of our present, we hear Palestine,” which featured more than 60 artworks from its own collection by artists from Palestine and neighboring countries.

This pattern reflects the idea emphasized in this article: who has the right to shape the narrative? When works by Palestinian artists from the foundation’s own collection are exhibited, rather than on loan from a Western museum, and when the publication of a Palestinian archive is funded by Palestinians, this is a real extension of what is considered to be the Middle East becoming the author of the narrative, not its subject.

The change is not just institutional. Arab novelists are being translated to English faster than ever before. After he won the Nobel Prize in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz’s works have been translated into more than 40 languages.Arab directors are now winning prizes on festivals that earlier considered the region as a backdrop rather than a producer of content. Artists are displaying their work in the major museums of the world under their own name, not as anthropological samples. Scholars from the region are now writing about their societies in many languages instead of being objects to be studied.

Beneath all of this lies a philosophical dichotomy that merits some reflection: there is a massive difference between being observed and being the observer. Visibility, being the object of someone else’s gaze, is not identical with authorship.

A paradox deserves to be articulated as well. For many years, the region shipped its oil and accepted its narrative from outside. Now it tries to ship something else, ideas, culture, exhibitions, literature, movies and thus to become the creator of its narrative rather than only a provider of raw materials.

But an honest telling of this story cannot simply be a celebration. Several questions will continue to be raised. Can cultural institutions change how the rest of the world sees the middle east, or do we have to accept that these institutions are no more than a form of pageantry?

Will the production of the narrative locally produce a more authentic version, or simply a more accessible one? Will the use of soft power work if there is no intellectually independent and culturally autonomous base from which to build the cultural tools used for public relations on behalf of the state? The narrative created with no space for internal opposition remains, ultimately, someone else’s story told through local eyes.

In the twenty-first century the greatest struggle will be with imagination and who has the right to create a story about a people first. Once stories have been created they are not simply re-told; rather they are what defines a people for the rest of the world and how a people see themselves.