The "Motherland": An Archetypal and Postcolonial Reading of Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad

Working at the intersection of postcolonial and archetypal criticism, this article investigates the role of women in resistance literature by looking at a piece of postcolonial Arabic fiction, Ghassan Kanafani's Umm Saad (1969). Rooted in Arab politics concerning land rights and anti-Zionist struggle, the text offers a related archetypal approach to the depiction of women in politicized literature. Umm Saad allegorizes the struggles of Palestinians to reclaim their land. A poor peasant woman, the titular heroine embodies the intimate connection between Palestinians and their land, acting as a helper to combative men and a primal symbol for attachment to the enduring land. Umm Saad is a personal mother and a trope for a feminized colonized territory, metaphorically representing the Palestinian nation and assuming mythological features enabling her to identify with the Earth Mother to send a message against dispossession. Since she embodies positive mother archetype symbolism (the personal mother and the Earth Mother), she acts as a source of fertility and protection. Expressing a political statement via the mother archetype, Kanafani appeals to a basic human need, i.e. the need to settle down in one’s land, which makes woman an indispensible part of the collective unconscious of any nation. Keywords: Archetypal Criticism; Kanafani; Mother(land); Postcolonial Arabic Fiction; Umm Saad.

On Secular and Religious Politics of Belonging

This chapter focuses on the search for meaning and belonging of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel by discussing how belonging is framed in Arab politics in Israel. More specifically, the chapter maps and analyzes three narratives in the Arab politics of belonging: the romantic, the practical, and the visionary. The first advocates belonging to what the authors term a “lost paradise” of Palestine and Islam. This nostalgic type of belonging yearns for idealized places, times, and characters in the history of Palestine and Islam. The second narrative, the practical, defines belonging first and foremost as a developmental act, practiced at the community level through voluntary and charity programs. The third, the visionary, promotes belonging as an ideological position to be articulated and educated for at the national level. These three concepts are circulated and mobilized by both secular Arab political and Muslim religious actors but in different versions and to different extents.

Parliaments in the MENA Region: Between Timid Reform and Regression. A Comparative Survey

Part of a special issue devoted to the role of parliaments in contemporary Arab politics, this article gives an oversight of the evolution of the constitutional rules governing the status and powers of Arab parliamentary assemblies following the “Arab spring” and during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Parliaments have traditionally played a marginal role in Arab constitutional theory and practice. Although the strengthening of the role and powers of parliaments and a rebalancing of the executive-legislative relations in favour of the latter featured prominently in the reform agendas emerging from the protest movements of the “Arab spring,” these movements proved unable to produce lasting change. The reforms have either been rolled back by oppressive governments or given way to a political pactice of renewed presidential dominance which diverges considerably from the initial aspirations of the reformers. The highly unfavourable conditions existing in most Arab countries – with internally divided democratic reform movements, entrenched military, and political elites determined to resist genuine democratic change with all means available and powerful external actors supporting the domestic status quo – are likely to ensure that parliaments will remain confined to a largely ornamental role in Arab politics in the foreseeable future.

A Dimension Reduction Method Application to a Political Science Question: Using Exploratory Factor Analysis to Generate the Dimensionality of Political Ideology in the Arab World

This paper utilises data dimension reduction to settle a heavily debated question concerning the dimensionality of political ideology in the Arab World. It relies on recent data available through the World Values Survey to generate a stable solution for the number of important and exciting dimensions defining ordinary citizens’ political attitude structures. The findings of the analysis suggest that in four Arab states, political ideology is multi-dimensional on the mass level. This negates the widespread assumption made about Arab politics where Islam and secularism constitute the only dimension organising voters’ attitudes and behaviours. This is important because many analyses of Middle Eastern politics start with this assumption without questioning its validity. Further, models of political ideology are to be modified when transferred to studying Middle Eastern political attitudes. The single-dimension hypothesis applicable in some Western settings is not attainable in the Arab World.

Salafism in the Maghreb

This volume explores the growth and transformation of a particular variant of Islamism—Salafism—in the Maghreb region. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and from previous scholarship on Salafi typologies—specifically, quietist, political, and jihadist variants—it seeks to understand the socioeconomic and political drivers between the growth or diminishing of each trend. The volume pays particular attention to exploring how state-sponsored Salafists compete with more informal, nonstate, and transnational variants, particularly jihadists. It analyses how local political contexts determine the calculations and trajectories of Salafist factions that appear to share a certain doctrinal uniformity but whose actual practice on the ground, in the sphere of Arab politics, varies significantly. Specifically, it assesses state capacities and policies toward Salafis as a crucial variable that has shaped the transformation of Salafism across the Maghreb’s different countries. A key feature of the book is its attention to the blurring of the boundaries between Salafi quietism, political activism, and the imperative, in some countries, for Salafis to modulate aspects of their doctrine to gain public support. It concludes with the observation that Salafism’s growth is the product of a growing and youthful disenchantment with the existing order and especially authoritarianism, corruption, and dislocation. At a time of heightened polarization in the region and unfortunate American misapprehensions of Islamism—at both public and official levels—the book’s granular insights provide correctives for understanding a diverse religious current that has too often been synonymous with extremism.