The Great Intellectual Helmi Sharawy Writes: The Image Of The Other and The Inverted Self-Centeredness

Translated by: Alyaa Hossam

Reviewed by: Mariam Essa

Written by Helmi Sharawy

The image of the other was of concern to Africans as much as Europeans exported their negative image of backwardness, primitiveness and ethnicity. It was termed European racism.

While Africans have sought to improve their image within the framework of liberation and independence movements or through organizational approaches to Europeans and their declared racial forms of implicit dominance, Arab concern over their image is linked to a state of inverted self-centeredness. This is carried out in the name of defending past-oriented identity, disregarding all trends of modernity and relying instead on identity research and the affirmation of Salafi dimensions.

The late Samir Amin addressed this in detail in his book “A Theory of Culture” tracing the state of European self-centeredness back to the era when the image of the eternal West was created in parallel with the image of the eternal East (and I personally believe this dates back to the Crusades).

A Spanish writer, José Antonio from the University of Granada, considered the difference between the Arab and European perceptions to be a difference between Europeans’ recently adopted perspective of multiculturalism and Arabs' historical and national interpretation.

I believe he did not link the severe negative Arab regression since the distortion of their image as a result of fear generated by terrorism and its products of negative effects and images. Consequently, he believed that Arabs had moved past the European perspective, whereas they are in fact in a state of withdrawal, disconnected from the “historical and national”, while some among them are increasingly adopting exclusionary approaches previously well-known in past racist and fascist eras.

This is due to the impact of the national liberation and enlightenment movement, which disseminated modern thinking and lacked the democratic element that develops political and social thought and attitude as well.

Arab and African studies, in all its rich diversity that is by no means unknown, have not overlooked the identity crisis and the powerful impact of media globalization represented in the age of the image, visual culture and heritage on our modern intellectuals.

However, I believe that the atmosphere of Western media, linked to the management of terrorism operations and the influence of its image and consequences on all manifestations of history and the national period, has rendered Arab thought incapable of undertaking crucial reviews of works like Edward Said’s Orientalism or Hassan Hanafi’s Occidentalism since the 1970s and 1980s. While some have also ignored the effects of “Africanism”, experts on Africa (Africanists) are just as American Middle East experts are toward Arabs and Muslims.

I cannot ignore here the Arab studies that have relatively multiplied after Edward Said and Hassan Hanafi, crystallized in the works of Shaker Abdel Hamid and others in the Arab Mashriq, among numerous scholars. However, I was surprised by a recent presentation of the proceedings of an important symposium titled “The Image of the Other… Intersecting Views” held in Bahrain in November 2016.

More than fifty Arab and Western intellectuals showcased the dilemma of intersecting perspectives and the dimensions of overlap in mutual views. Most of these contributions addressed exchange with European images for the Arab other, while completely ignoring any mention of images involving non-Arabs, especially African cultures, something that could have been compensated through engagement with other rising cultures emerging in an age of hope aligned with our future renaissance.

This question was raised by a single writer, Nader Kazem, or through a critical glance by a few others.

This means that there is a self-centeredness even among modern intellectuals!

A previous symposium titled "The Image of the Other" was held in Tunisia in 1995—I was fortunate to participate with a paper on "The Image of the African in the Arab Intellectual's Mind," which was closer to the realities of the Arab world at a time of less turmoil.

The recent symposium added a contemporary treatment of the topic in books written for Arab children by Fadia Hattit and the influences that reach them through imagery. Ahmad Badawi also addressed the religious and sectarian in Egypt, as well as analyzing the influences of Zionist media regarding Palestine.

The "Arab Spring" received diverse analyses, beginning with Mustafa El-Tair's examination of the Libyan case and how mutual positive and negative influences led to an Arab rejection of the other. Mohsen Bouazizi interpreted this by questioning whether Arabs truly know their enemy?

In my search for a deeper analysis concerning the image of the African, following what Ezekiel Mphahlele wrote in 1962, I encountered a Malawian economist friend, "Zeleza", who is known for his valuable publication, editing an encyclopedia of African studies included in the Oxford Bibliographies. There, I discovered an important article on self-centeredness; Curtis Keim guides us to the European critical methodology regarding their stance toward the other as a case of racist self-centeredness, tracing this development to the post-World War II atmosphere, etc.

Therefore, we need diverse studies on mutual images across the world in order to confront what globalization imposes on our identity under circumstances of rising demands for independence and the activation of identities, not negative self-centeredness.