Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Anxieties of Fundamentalism and the Dynamics of Modernist Resistance: Youssef Chahine's Al Maseer (the Destiny)

2006; Issue: 69 Linguagem: Inglês

2562-2528

Malek Khouri,

Turkey's Politics and Society

Introduction In this article I provide an assessment of Youssef Chahine's 1997 film Al Maseer (The Destiny). (1) The film was awarded the 50th Palme D'or Anniversary Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in the same year, and eventually became one of Chahine's better-known and probably most popular films outside of the Arab world. Al Maseer tackles various issues relating to religious dogmatism, and sketches out underlying elements in this phenomenon's rise in the Arab world since the mid 1980s. The film loosely interprets events that took place in 12th century Arab Andalusia, and as such it functions as a piece of history in the sense that it depicts a historical setting where an Arab cosmopolitan culture spanning across cities such as Baghdad, Fez, Damascus and the Spanish cities of Cordoba and Grenada made them centers of economic expansion, scientific progress and philosophical and cultural innovation. The film is also a piece of history in that it uses a moment in Arab and Muslim history (and inadvertently European history) to weigh on current political and ideological developments and issues. As it tackles contemporary anxieties associated with the rise of religious fundamentalism, Al Maseer provides a 'modernist' strategy that presumes an active experiencing subject/audience in and through whom it (the film) becomes memory and history. The film presents a story of struggle against religious fundamentalism through the subject-consciousness of a famed Arab philosopher. The historical Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was an astronomer, medical scientist, religious interpreter (Fakih) and above all a philosopher who lived between 1123 and 1198 AD and later became one of the main sources of atheist thinking during the European Renaissance. As a materialist thinker, Ibn Rushd translated Aristotle and contributed to the emergence of an evolutionary interpretation of the notion of creation. In his treatise titled Incoherence of the Incoherence, a polemic against a book by al-Ghazali, a theologian and defender of religious dogma, titled Incoherence of the Philosophers, Ibn Rushd professed the eternity of the world, implying the existence of uncreated matter, and affirmed the primacy of reason over faith. The philosopher was later exiled to the North African desert and his books were burned. His followers were condemned and persecuted in Europe during the Inquisition. (2) For an audience that is unfamiliar with Arab culture and history the film brings to light references that have been long absented by 'Orientalist' discourse on Arabs and the Arab world. As such Chahine's film counteracts perceptions that allege a long-standing historical clash between, on the one hand, a Western civilization that is beacon of secular and rational discourse and, on the other, an Arab/Muslim culture that is inherently irrational, fanatical, violent and anti-progress. This essay describes the film's estimation of the fight against religious dogmatism in the Arab world as integral to an anti-colonial struggle for liberation, national self-determination and modernization; it also highlights the film's modernist structural and formal strategies. On the one hand, the essay's utilization of the term 'modernity' integrates an outlook toward lived experience that encompasses various political, ideological, and cultural paradigms. My use of the term 'modernization', on the other hand, refers more specifically to the processes of change that result from the introduction of certain technologies, such as the technology of cinema itself, into the various spheres of private and social life. My employment of both terms, however, also considers the specificity of their use in the context of Arab history, philosophy and culture. By offering an 'Other's', a post-colonial--and in this case a specifically Arab post-colonial--perspective on 'modernity', my approach naturally poses a challenge to the 'universal' (read, colonial) use of the notion of 'modernity'. …