"Reciting Colonial Scripts" (Alkadry)

            In this post I will discuss the article "Reciting Colonial Scripts: Colonialism, Globalization and Democracy in the Decolonized Middle East" by Mohamad Alkadry. Here are a few things that I found particularly interesting:

·         First, the article argues that one of the reasons the Middle East has not fully democratized is the region's history of colonization. In his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai reiterates this same belief. He writes that ethnicity ("ethnoscapes") is often more important than ideology ("ideoscapes") in distinguishing groups of people from one another. This topic that Alkadry addresses is also a common discourse among Westerners: the tendency to blame the lack of democracy in the Middle East on Islam, rather than historical interactions of exploitations. Thus, Alkadry's article challenges this dominant discourse.

·         Second, Alkadry's whole article reminds me of Alev Çinar's book Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time. Çinar addresses 1990s Turkey and talks about the fluctuating power plays between Turkey's original Ottoman-Islamic identity and the secular state. The secular state is an external force that imposed itself on the region. For example, they tried to strictly regulate various aspects of daily life, such as hijab use. This is very much like what colonizers do (which is the topic of Alkadry's article). Alkadry outlines four ways that colonialism has prevented democratization (p. 746). These reasons all involve somehow suppressing the pre-existing structures/movements and redirecting them to be loyal to the colonizer. This is exactly what Çinar talks about. For example, the secular state tried to forbid commemoration of Ottoman-Islamic festivals and instead created new holidays, thus manipulating citizens' conceptualizations of time to more align with the secular state's agenda. So Alkadry addresses many of the same issues that Çinar addresses.

·         Lastly, I found it perhaps ironic that globalization is seen as a threat to democratization in the Middle East. If democracy is a Western construct in the first place, then how would that idea spread to the Middle East? Isn't globalization actually necessary for this spread to take place? I suppose it depends on how you define globalization, and which "scapes" you consider it to encompass (Appadurai).

-GGM