Art, Culture & Society

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology, by Steven C. Caton. 316 pages, illustrations, figures, notes, bibliography, index. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. $50.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-520-21082-4

This book is a dialectical criticism of the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) based on the assumption that this blockbuster epic, although something of a box-office bust, left a lasting impression on a generation. It is a contribution to our understanding of the myth of Lawrence of Arabia rather than the life of T. E. Lawrence. Caton’s introduction is an extended statement on critical theory arguing against singular readings of such complex films in favor of a dialectical approach aimed at discovering levels of meaning. For readers not attuned to literary and artistic criticism, the essay is heavy slogging but an effort well spent since Caton has a charming ability to make complexity clear without making it less complex.

Before Caton ventures into his dialectical interpretations, he devotes several chapters to various technical matters which many readers will find the most interesting portions of the book. Chapter one examines the internationalization of film production, its causes, and problems. Of particular interest to students of the Middle East is Caton’s examination of problems of filming a controversial topic in a controversial corner of the world like the Middle East. Chapter two deals with technical matters, particularly problems of adapting cameras, lenses, and characters both to summer filming in the Middle East and to wide screen presentation. The most interesting discussion centers on how the environment, the desert, was developed almost as a character, The Wilderness, but a wilderness the audience expects, pristine and, ironically, subservient to the media seeking its realistic portrayal. The problem of the script’s authorship is examined in chapter three. Confused authorship arose from American politics and has resulted in the audience’s rejection of the filmmakers’ intended meaning.

Caton then presents separate readings of the film in the three succeeding chapters. The film is read as an allegory of the dilemmas of cross-cultural encounters, as a statement on ‘orientalism,’ and as an examination of ambiguity of the war hero’s sexuality and masculinity. These chapters are pure literary criticism, well reasoned but strongly opinionated. Some readers are likely to find themselves at least puzzled by the author’s position, if not in strong disagreement with him. For example, the conversation on cross-cultural encounters centers on alienated western anthropologists’ (and, by implication, like professions’) exploitation of other cultures in an attempt to escape by becoming ‘other.’ Those whose careers with ‘the other’ are collegial pursuits of science or profit will likely find the entire conversation curious. In fact, most readers will have the urge to yell at the author that he is wrong, dead wrong, more than once.

Caton intrudes himself on the reader but the intrusion is seldom rude. His personal experiences, observations, and biography always seem honest, personable, relevant and elucidating. His presence adds to the pleasure of rethinking Lawrence of Arabia. Finishing the book makes us want to pick it up and start again so that we can continue the conversations with the author, an accomplished scholar and superb writer.

Weston Burnett
Clemson University


Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, by D. Fairchild Ruggles. 264 pages, notes, bibliography, index, color/b&w illustrations. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-271-01851-8

Gardens, Landscape, and Vision is a compelling study of seven centuries of Islamic garden and landscape tradition in the Iberian peninsula. By employing a rich array of sources, from recent archeological evidence to agricultural texts, historical narratives, poetic epigraphy and visual representations, Ruggles argues that a new, carefully orchestrated, and symbolically charged landscape vocabulary was introduced at Madinat al-Zahra, in tenth-century Umayyad Cordoba. Spreading subsequently throughout al-Andalus, it reached its culminating point at the Nasrid palace of Alhambra.

Ruggles skillfully demonstrates that the innovations adopted at Madinat al-Zahra reflected the political ambitions and ideology of the palace's founder, the self-proclaimed caliph Abd al-Rahman III, in the context of changing dynamics between Abbasids and Umayyads of Spain. While Madinat al-Zahra grew out of a local tradition of suburban palaces modeled after Syrian Umayyad prototypes, its architectural and landscape aesthetics, most notably its emphasis on the view and the construction of framed views intended for the ruler’s gaze, were profoundly eastern. These elements, employed by the Abbasids as visual devices to evoke symbolically the caliph’s sovereignty, were adopted by Abd al-Rahman III as a challenge to the latter's supreme authority.

Despite the fall of the Umayyad caliphate by the turn of the eleventh century, the elements and devices introduced at Madinat al-Zahra as visual expressions of caliphal ideology survived. Harking back to past Cordovan glories, they became part of the Andalusian palatine and garden vocabulary. Ruggles traces the enduring legacy of Madinat al-Zahra at the later Umayyad palaces of Cordoba, in the Taifa kingdom of Seville and last, at the Nasrid palace of Alhambra in Granada. At Alhambra, she explains, an elaborate program of poetic epigraphy, explicating and emphasizing the view and its symbolic associations, brought ideas introduced five hundred years ago to their highest form of refinement.

Though the book is primarily a history of gardens and palaces, it also deals with lesser known aspects of the landscape, agricultural, and hydraulic histories of Muslim Spain. In this respect, chapter two, which focuses on landscape practice and aspects of botany in the early period, like the acquisition of exotic plants, the development of experimental gardens, and the production of agricultural and botanical treatises, is one of the book’s most stimulating chapters.

While Ruggles’s interpretation effectively challenges the traditional notion of Islamic gardens as representations of paradise, the reader might find her critique of the scholarship on Islamic gardens in the concluding chapter rather trying and outdated, as it tends to overlook a number of recent studies in which new interpretations on various garden traditions of the Islamic world have been advanced. The book also suffers in parts (especially chapters four, six, and seven) from overemphasis on buildings at the expense of gardens, and from some unfortunate editorial mishaps (for example, paragraph repeated pp. 111 and 129). Despite these flaws, however, Ruggles’s refreshing and well illustrated study is a welcome contribution to the understudied history of landscape in the Islamic world, and should be of interest for scholars of Islamic Spain as well as architectural and landscape historians.

Shirine Hamadeh
NEH/ARIT Research Fellow, Istanbul


Cities from the Arabian Desert: The Building of Jubail and Yanbu in Saudi Arabia, by Andrea Pampanini. 209 pages, appendices, maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. $55.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-275-95594-X

Cities from the Arabian Desert chronicles the relationships and processes that converged in the planning and building of the industrial cities of Yanbu and Jubail in Saudi Arabia. Yanbu and Jubail, built to house facilities of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum and gas industries, are upheld as emblems of the Kingdom's technological accomplishments and economic success in the latter half of the twentieth century. Pampanini argues that such success would not have been possible without the courage, alacrity, and determination of the Saudi administrators. Through interview material with the principal strategists and planners of these projects, Saudi as well as their foreign counterparts and consultants, Pampanini weaves the tale of how Jubail and Yanbu were planned, financed, built, and put into operation. The tale is interesting in its complex transnational nature, but is hindered by the heavy handed laudatory nature of the narrative. The author's desire to give the Saudi administration the recognition and praise it deserves for its role in these impressive public works could actually have been furthered by a more critical discussion of the processes involved that moved beyond the linear metanarratives of development and modernity.

The book’s primary value is as a case study of urban planning, management, and consulting (with the most detailed data located in four extensive appendices) and as an introduction to bureaucratic and business relations in the Kingdom. Readers interested in interrogating the complex transnational relations that structure metropolitan projects such as these will find suggestive material embedded, but not analyzed, in the most unexpected sections of this work.

Sharon Nagy
DePaul University


Splendours of an Islamic World: Mamluk Art in Cairo, 1250-1517, by Henri and Anne Stierlin. 219 pages, bibliography, illustrations. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. $59.50 (Cloth) ISBN 1-86064-219-5

Having already published several books on Islamic architecture aimed at the general public, Henri and Anne Stierlin’s latest work deals with Cairo’s Mamluk architecture (the first author is responsible for the text, and the second for the beautiful photographs). Originally published in French under the title L’Egypte des milles et une nuits, this English translation has an equally misleading title. Mamluk Art in Cairo is only a description of some of Cairo’s well known Mamluk monuments. The book begins with a linear description of the general aspects of the Mamluks’ tumultuous history; attempts are made at identifying the major local and foreign influences that shaped it. The center of Mamluk power and pageantry, Cairo was the showcase of an intense building activity which lasted throughout that turbulent period. Between 648/1250 and 923/1517, the Mamluks dotted the city with numerous architectural complexes (which to this day give it its distinctive skyline) spending enormous sums for their construction and endowment. More than five hundred monuments altogether have survived, many of which have been well studied. Stierlin chose to present twenty nine of them, describing the best known such as the mausoleum-madrasa of Sultan Qala’un, the Citadel mosque of Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, the madrasa of Sultan Hasan, the madrasa-khanqah of Sultan Barquq, the khanqah-mausoleum of Sultan Faraj, the mosque of Sultan al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh, the mausoleum of Sultan Qa’itbay, and finally the Bishtak palace. A chronological table of major political and cultural events in the Islamic World and Europe is included at the end of the book.

The transliteration system, based on the original French text, was not revised and there are a number of errors, such as el-Ashar (p. 29), el-Akhmar (p. 204), Kalhoun (p. 24), Manur (p. 34), to mention a few examples. Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad is interchangeably referred to as el-Naser Mohammed and Mohammed el-Naser. The khanqah is wrongly identified as a “monastery for soldier-monks” (pp. 26 and 33). Some pictures are either misidentified (p. 182, a detail of a metal object is identified as a street facade of a house), or their legends were misplaced (the legend for a photograph of the mosque of Ibn Tulun on p. 188 is identified as the tomb of Sultan Barquq while the correct label is found on p. 193). A few illustrations of Mamluk objects are included, but strangely these have been restricted to those from the Al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait. Many will find this book disappointing in its lack of a discussion of important social, urban, or iconographic aspects of Mamluk architecture. Material concerning waqf documents and epigraphy are also missing. Aside from the excellent photographs, most of which are in color, Splendours of an Islamic World is of limited use as a reliable survey or a reference book, and will therefore simply join the ranks of coffee table books on Islamic architecture.

Noha Sadek
GREMMO-Maison de l’Orient, Lyon



The Internet in the Mideast and North Africa: Free Expression and Censorship (Human Rights Watch). 96 pages, appendices. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 1999. $10.00 (Paper) ISBN 1-56432-235-1

The purpose of this slim volume is “to encourage governments to strengthen protections for freedom of expression at this early stage of the Internet’s development” (p. 2). Informed by Human Rights Watch’s position that the right to seek and send information electronically is an integral part of the broader right to freedom of expression, the volume opens with an articulation of general principles for Internet policy, including an end to government censorship of online content and protection of users’ right to anonymity. The remainder of the book chronicles restrictions on Internet use in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. These restrictions include well-known and widely practiced forms of direct censorship, such as blockage through proxy servers of sites deemed objectionable on political or moral grounds. They also encompass more subtle forms of restriction designed to cast a chilling effect, such as Tunisian laws which hold the directors of Internet service providers legally responsible for the contents of sites accessed through their servers.

One of the many strengths of The Internet in the Mideast and North Africa is that it goes beyond the more readily apparent and explicitly political limitations on Internet usage to address the economic aspects of access. The author calls attention to the role that state telecommunications monopolies play in restricting Internet access by leaving private Internet service providers—where they exist—no choice but to pay high fees to state firms in order to connect to international gateways. The question of cost, however, highlights the book’s main weakness―its inadequate discussion of which Middle Easterners have access to the Internet in the first place. Discussions of the Internet’s effect on Middle Eastern politics often range between optimism about its democratizing potential as a way to circumvent state control of information and a more pessimistic view which holds that the region’s high levels of poverty and illiteracy render questions of Internet freedom almost irrelevant. While the author acknowledges these obstacles, he suggests that “it is arguably in less-developed and more repressive countries that the Internet can have the greatest impact” by increasing access to information and opportunities for coordination among opposition actors (p. 12). This section could have been strengthened by a brief analysis of who actually accesses the Internet in the region. With new studies demonstrating that Internet use in the Gulf is fifteen times higher than that in the rest of the Middle East, it would appear that the author’s formulation may be only half correct―that the Internet may have the greatest potential to open new spaces for political discourse in those countries which are simultaneously not only the most repressive but also the most highly economically developed. For those who can afford Internet access but face government censorship, the volume is replete with interesting and concrete examples―complete with relevant website addresses—of how individual users can circumvent the restrictions, including downloading encryption software, accessing banned sites through anti-censorship proxy servers, and using steganography, in which sensitive material is hidden within seemingly innocuous forms of data such as audio clips. In sum, this is a highly readable book which offers clear prescriptions for activists interested in ensuring Internet freedoms; it also provides important background for ongoing debates about the role of the Internet in creating new political spaces within the region.

Vickie Langohr
College of the Holy Cross