CONTENTS OF Vol. 32, No. 4, 2007

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JOSEP LIUIS MATEO DIESTE: Reformism and Muslim Brotherhoods in Spanish Colonial Morocco: Review of an ambiguous dichotomy.

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this article is to review the use of analytical dichotomies to describe the concurrence between the reformist movements and the Muslim brotherhoods in the Spanish Protectorate in Northern Morocco (1912-56). Colonial data indicates that these movements fought to define the most legitimate version of Islam but they also intermingled and found common interests according to dynamic factional and political divisions. It was these that were the social factors mostly affected by the Spanish policy of dividing Moroccan society. The clientelism with the colonial authorities shaped this complex interaction between reformism and brotherhoods not only in urban areas but also in the countryside.

SANDRA CARTER: Morocco, Youth Bands, Social Networking and the Internet.

ABSTRACT: Are concerns of cultural domination arising from international media and technology diminished by the cultural hybridity that occurs in place of the wholesale cultural imitation or identification feared as the worst outcome? In Morocco, cultural hybridity is the norm. The trend takes on new dimension with the introduction of satellite television, international flow of music and images, and the two-way exchange of ideas proffered by the internet. This paper addresses the phenomenon of a number of new musical groups in Morocco who reflect various trends in responding to transnational cultural flow. Hoba Hoba Spirit and others reaffirm a primary identification with Moroccanity and the need to address a specifically Moroccan audience, while H-Kayne and others take a more imitative heavy rap posture in targeting Moroccan and international youth. All the groups self represent on You Tube, MySpace, Facebook and other international social networking sites. I address “internationalized” music movements and analyze their presence on social networking sites to reach local as well as international audiences. Particularly significant is the musicians’ use new technology of digital video to make “home-made” music videos, editing on computer, and disseminating on internet, all for pratically no money — which characterizes the situation of most Moroccan youth: a lot of time and creativity, no money, and a world focus abetted by new technology.

MOHAMED HAMLI: Les limites pénales à la liberté d’expression dans le droit algérien.

RÉSUMÉ: La liberté d’expression joue un rôle capital dans toute société, la commission européenne des droits de l’homme l’a considéré comme la pièce angulaire des principes de la démocratie et des droits de l’homme protégés par la convention. De son côté, la constitution algérienne de 1989 a garanti pour la première fois (dans son sens liberal) le principe de la liberté d’expression, ce dernier a été confirmé plus tard par la loi 90/07 relative à l’information. Mais en effet, cette liberté n’est pas absolue, car le même législateur algérien a institué ce qui est convenu d’appeler les délits de presse (la diffamation, injure, l’offense au président de la république, l’atteinte à la vie privée). Ces derniers visent la protection de la considération et l’honneur des personnes ainsi que leur vie privée. Mais il parait que le législateur algérien n’a pas pu trouver un compromis entre cette protection et la garantie de la liberté d’expression, car ces délits institués contiennent beaucoup de contraintes sur l’exercice de la liberté d’expression, notamment les dispositions qui ignorant la véracité des faits et la provocation comme des excuses légales en matière de diffamation et d’injure, ainsi les règles de responsabilité pénale de l’auteur de ces délits qui sont vagues, et cela contrairement aux autres droits comparés qui ont adopté des solutions intéressantes.

ISRAEL GERSHONI: Monumental Sculpture and Nationalism: The Construction of the Commemorative Statue of Mustafa Kamil, 1914—1940

ABSTRACT: The paper attempts to reconstruct the processes of the construction of the monumental sculpture commemorating Mustafa Kamil (1874-1908). The statue, officially unveiled in May 1940, still stands in the Mustafa Kamil square in downtown Cairo. The paper will analyze the historical relationships between public commemoration, collective memory, and national identity in the formation of national culture. Kamil’s statue is presented as a case study within the much larger undertaking of erecting monumental national sculptures and other artistic monuments and icons during the interwar era in Cairo and Alexandria. Extensively appropriating insights and methods from recent theoretical discussions of collective memory and public commemoration, this paper examines how different Egyptian communities of memory — the National Party, the state under successive regimes, the young effendiyya particularly as it developed in the 1930s, and other elite and non-elite groups within civil society — remembered and commemorated Mustafa Kamil’s struggle for independence, his national legacy and his appropriate place in Egyptian communal memory. The study will follow the commemorative processes from the production of the statue (created by the famous Parisian sculptor Leopold Savine in the years 1908-1910), to its transfer to Egypt in 1912 and its placement in a peripheral school yard in Cairo in 1914 where it waited for redemption by the state in May 1940 when it was officially unveiled. Three specific contexts will be systematically considered.
A) The processes of public forgetting and remembering Mustafa Kamil during the years 1914-1940. Here special attention will be paid to the politics of commemoration which intensified in the interwar era. The main players in this struggle were the Watanists, the Monarchists and the Wafdists who all competed to establish their own monumental national sculptures. Both favorable and opposing views to the sculpture will be presented.
B) The artistic, intellectual and aesthetic origins of the bronze sculpture will be traced. The paper will analyze the structure of the statue, form and content, in light of its French and Egyptian artistic components. An attempt will be made to decode the covert messages and meanings.
C) The large spectrum of interpretations and representations granted this sculpture by different groups in different contexts until it was finally established will be studied. Attention will also be paid to the contemporary perception of the statue at the time of the unveiling ceremony and in the following weeks. Specifically, the representation of the statue as the “statue of the youth” will be highlighted. This representation portrayed Kamil as the embodiment of “the youth revolution of the 1930s”.
D) An attempt will be made to position the monumental product within the larger artistic cultural project of creating sites of memory and commemoration in the urban Egyptian landscape during the interwar era. The paper will show that Kamil’s monumental statue was intended to help mold the emerging national culture. The formation of national culture will be discussed from the angle of the Egyptian monumental art particularly public commemorative statues. The statue of Mustafa Kamil will be compared to the two statues of Sa‘d Zaghlul erected in Cairo and Alexandria in 1938 and to the statue of the Revival of Egypt (Nahdat Misr), and other monarchial sites of commemoration (such as the new Isma‘il (Qasr al-Nil) Bridge, erected in 1933. In this comparison, artistic, aesthetic, and cultural elements will be examined in the specific socio-political and economic contexts that produced these monumental works.

LUCIE RYZOVA: Magazines, Writing, and Being Young in Interwar Egypt

ABSTRACT: My paper will focus on popular magazines published in Egypt in the Interwar years, their urban readership, and related changes in social practices. The period (the 1920s to 1940s) saw the mushrooming of illustrated magazines of varying types. Their forms ranged from lavish general variety magazines to cheap pulp-fiction series; their content encompassed urban entertainment and sports to ‘high’ literature and/or religion. Crucially, such themes would often meet within the scope of a single publication. Many canonical works of Egyptian literature were first serialised through popular magazines; conversely, cultural forms that were previously considered shameful (dance, urban vaudeville) and consumed in discrete locations and specific contexts (such as weddings) became part of the urban mainstream through magazines, either as regular features in variety formats, or as publications specialising in ‘cabaret news’. The magazine field as a whole thus represented a venue in which ideas of lowbrow and highbrow were negotiated with respect to the emerging national culture, resulting in the formation of a ‘national middlebrow’ culture. While scholars have begun to use these magazines as a source for the writing of history, the print market remains largely unexplored in its own terms. My paper aims at discussing the magazines on three levels: (1) as a field, tracing the history of the magazine form, (2) the magazine’s urban readership — its social and cultural identity — and (3) changes in social practices (reading, writing, and social perceptions of age).
    The first part of my paper will trace the development of leading magazine forms through the first three decades since they first appeared in Egypt during the First World War. I will discuss titles that became significant ‘model’ forms in each decade. Each of these stages signals not just changes in journalism, but more importantly, changing expectations of urban consumers with respect to print media. Secondly, I will discuss the urban print market: the modes of production and consumption of the magazines (who writes, who buys, distribution). Popular magazines catered to a wide variety of urban groups, located within a conceptual middle class. An inchoate urban middle class status was often articulated, performed and shaped through eager consumption of cultural goods, among which popular magazines feature prominently. Here, I shall focus on two points: firstly, how the magazines function as a site of articulating nascent urbanity; and secondly, on how the mode of production of the magazine itself was a complex two-way process involving both author/producer and reader/consumer. I will argue that large sections of the urban reading market consisted of young males (efendis) in their capacity of either producers or consumers (sometimes both) of the print market.
    Finally, I will discuss the transformations of reading and writing practices on which the urban reading market was predicated. For the bulk of readers the transition was not simply from illiteracy to literacy. Rather, it was a shift from one culture of producing and consuming texts to another. The shift in approaches to written texts is, I will argue, closely related to shifts in the social perception of age and authority. Older forms of authoring texts were based on respect for a senior moral-religious authority. For most consumers the old approach focused on the memorization of texts deemed to have eternal moral or educational value. It involved authoring new texts only when one enjoyed a consensual authority to do so. The new approach, by contrast, opened a space for authoring texts, which had ‘entertainment value’ often based on personal experience. Such texts were, significantly, predominantly written by young authors. The novel practice of ‘writing young’ started with writing diaries, continued through sending poems and articles to papers, and often ended with founding a magazine. Thus, the act of writing (and of publishing) can be understood as one of creating a space free from paternal or religious authority. Young author/publishers in fact often hid their writing activities from their fathers. In other words, the new practice of “writing young” signalled the creation of a (new) public sphere which is normally associated with much later developments in “new media” (Eickelman/Anderson volume). This new public space was a crucial venue for the social construction of national culture, but it has thus far not received its due in historical writing, which has tended to obscure this crucial form of cultural production through an implicit denigration of “mere entertainment”.

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