The representation of Muslim-related international conflicts in contemporary Anglo

300 Pages·2015·2.01 MB·English

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The representation of Muslim-related
international conflicts in contemporary Anglo-
American theatre, 1992–2011

by
Alaa Abdelaziz Abdelaziz Mohamed Ali

The Department of Drama and Theatre
Royal Holloway
University of London

A thesis submitted as a partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Ph.D.

January 2015
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Declaration of Authorship

I, Alaa Abdelaziz Abdelaziz Mohamed Ali, hereby declare that this thesis and the work
presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always
clearly stated.

Signed: ____Alaa Ali_____ Date: ___22 January 2015_____
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Abstract

Focusing on plays created over the last two decades, this thesis investigates British
and American playwrights’ depiction of the Anglo-American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
and also their dramatisation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My main hypothesis is that
these plays’ comments on the conflicts challenge the dominant discourses of both the
Anglo-American politicians and the leaders of terrorists. Instead of reducing bloody
confrontations to jingoistic labels such as the War on Terror or the War on Islam, the
dramatic texts analyzed insist on portraying the suffering of innocent victims of these
politically exploited conflicts, including civilians and soldiers.
Concerned with both common and different features of the three places and contexts
of confrontation, the plays are insistently topical, in some instances by suggesting a
comparison between historical and present episodes of the conflicts on the grounds of
repetition and causal relations. As the texts seek to achieve an informative goal, their forms
vary from tribunal theatre to dreamlike plays. Therefore, my theoretical approach to these
plays eclectically utilises a combination of insights drawn from political theatre,
documentary drama and performance studies, supported by explanatory paradigms of social
semiotics.
The thesis is organised thematically so that the first chapter explores the intersecting
roots of current confrontations. The second chapter focuses on the different forms of
representing topical events whether by adopting documentary techniques, creating
imaginary plots, or mixing both. In the third chapter I explore dramatic portraits of the Iraqi
people’s oppression throughout four disasters: the Gulf War in 1991, the economic
sanctions, the unjustified invasion of 2003, and its aftermath. The fourth chapter analyses
dramatic responses to the War in Afghanistan, on which playwrights comment by depicting
three phases of Western occupations since the nineteenth century by Britain, Russia, and
America, respectively. The fifth chapter focuses on the representation of two post-
9/11incidents of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, within which occasional individual
tolerance keeps resisting the inherited hatred.
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Table of Contents

Abstract 3

List of Illustrations 5

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction 7

Chapter One: Contextual Frames of Dispute: Dominating Misapprehensions within
Contradictory Discourses 22

Chapter Two: Forms of Topicality: New Goals of Political Theatre 78

Chapter Three: The Representation of Iraqi Conflict: Two Decades of Military
Confrontations and Economic Sanctions 122

Chapter Four: Afghanistan: Tracing Misconceptions in Three Phases of Conflict 173

Chapter Five: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Controversial plays Comment on a
Complicated Dispute 208

Conclusion 243

Bibliography 250
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List of Illustrations

Figure (1): Hans Hansen’s Metaphorical parallelism 33

Figure (2): The War on Terror in Palestine 34

Figure (3): The rule of exceptions 70

Figure (4): The Cycle of Apolitical and Political Theatre 110

Figure (5): Alleged similarity between the Crusades and the First Gulf War 133

Figure (6): Savages: The re-occurrence of an exceptional crime 165

Figure (7): Between the declared and real responsibility for torture 166

Figure (8): Exceptional tolerance 222
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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor
Professor Helen Gilbert former insightful guidance and continuous encouraging. As an
international student, many difficulties would have hardened both my study and life if I had
not received her kind and careful advice.

My huge gratefulness goes to my advisor Doctor Karen Fricker and Doctor Chris
Megson for their support and advice.

Thanks to my wife, parents, and friends for their precious emotional support. I
really needed it.

To peaceful revolutionists who have sacrificed their lives in order to emancipate
Egypt: Your noble death will always anathematise all the opportunists of Islamists,
Nasserists and fake liberalists who, in their dirty war for power, have allied your killers, the
worshipers of corruption and dictatorship.

.
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Introduction

The last twenty five years have witnessed an unprecedented inclusion of the
dramatic characters of Muslims within Western playwrights’ works. This dramatic
phenomenon was the matter that initiated this project six years ago. The main question of
my research was about the way in which Muslim characters are portrayed by these
playwrights. Back then, I was aware of the causal relationship between the so-called War
on Terror and the increasing representation of Muslim characters. However, I considered
neither the specific circumstances of each event of the multi-phased military
confrontations, nor the geopolitical roots of the conflict before 9/11. In addition, I did not
consider the social, cultural and political aspects that might define Western societies, some
of which were targets of operations planned and executed by violent Islamist groups since
the 1990s. Instead, from a standpoint of an Egyptian researcher, I simplistically relied on a
vague mixture of geographical, linguistic and ethnic features of the notion ‘Western’ to
describe non-Arabic, European and American playwrights. I consider this old topic the first
phase of my thesis because some of this early topic’s aspects intersect with those my
current topic investigates. Moreover, some early answers to the main question raised by the
old project helped me in shaping both the topic and the hypotheses of my thesis.
By taking a historical approach, I found that examples of portraying Muslim
characters in European theatre can be traced back to the sixteenth century. For instance,
Shakespeare’s characters use the word ‘Turk’ in a negative sense, which can be read on the
grounds of Jonathan Burton’s claim that ‘the term Turk was coextensive with Islam in early
modern European rhetoric’ (Burton 2000, 126). In the first scene of the second act of
Othello, Iago says ‘it is true, or else I am a Turk’ (Shakespeare 1997, 169).1 However, the
most offensive words against Muslims come from Othello, the most famous, or infamous,
Moorish character. As a Moor, Othello is supposed to be Muslim. However he fights for
Venice against the Turks. Moreover, in his last speech before stabbing himself he harshly
declares:

Where a malignant and turbaned Turk

1 Because of the discrepancy of line numbers between different editions of Shakespeare’s plays, his works are
cited here by page number to avoid confusion. At the same time, play divisions are mentioned through in-text
citations.
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Beat a Venetian, and traduced the state,
I took by th’throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus! (Shakespeare 1997, 331)

Whether Othello, a Moorish refugee who converted to Christianity, hides his Islam for
military glory, or even believes in no religion at all, it seems that Shakespeare’s character
reflects the Elizabethans’ foregrounding of the Moors’ ethnicity rather than religion.2
Anthony Barthelemy explains:

The word Turk itself carries many of the same connotations that
Moor does, but Turk almost always means Muslim and hence an
enemy of Christianity. The single greatest difference between Turk
and Moor seems to be the recognition of the ethnic difference and
the Eurasian origin of the former group. […] The Turk may be an
enemy of Christianity, but he is neither African nor black.
(Barthelemy 184)

In this respect, while Iago’s description of Othello as a ‘black ram’ who dared to marry a
‘white ewe’ (Shakespeare 1997, 121–2) is an ethnic and non-religious discrimination, the
Moorish character’s condemnation of Turks distinguishes them, as Muslims, from
Christians.3
However, I realised that my reading of the word ‘Turk’ in the Elizabethan plays
simplistically limited its connotation to the religious identity, because I neglected the
historical and political contexts of these dramatic texts. The Ottoman Empire was a great
power, which reached one of its peaks in the sixteenth century and had confrontations with
European/Christian states. At the beginning of The Jew of Malta, the Turkish officials
threaten the Christian governor of Malta by asking for unpaid tribute, which might reflect
on the historical event of the Turks’ siege of Malta in 1565. Likewise, the Ottoman-
Venetian Wars were factual events that shaped the background to the dramatic action of
Othello.
Although the references to the historical incidents within The Jew of Malta and
Othello are marginal, the critique of the Turks, including their image as enemies of

2 A claim that a few number of Turks and Moors converted to Christianity in England since the second half of
the sixteenth century can be found in Matar (19-21).
3 For more examples, see Shakespeare (1986, 120-1), where Hamlet uses the phrase ‘turn Turk’ whose
meaning according to Bernard Lott, is to ‘take a turn for the worse’, and/or to ‘change from a Christian to an
infidel’. In Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, not only do the Turkish slave Ithamore and his Jewish master
Barabas kill Christians out of religious hatred, but Ithamore also betrays his master.
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Christianity, possibly references Ottoman military aggression against European territories. I
also realised that while the reasons for the Turks’ wars in Europe were mainly political and
economic, the Ottoman rulers motivated their soldiers by claiming that this war aimed to
spread Islam over the land of the infidels. In turn, the leaders of European states utilised
Christianity as a method of achieving an alliance against the Muslim army.4
The focus on distancing Islam from Christianity as two different systems of ethics
and behaviour continues throughout the seventeenth century as I can find in Christian
Turned Turk, written by Robert Daborne in 1610, Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, or The
Gentleman of Venice (1624), The Island Princess, written by Francis Beaumont and John
Fletcher in 1621, and John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670). However, it is hard
to decide whether these specific aspects of the Turks are totally shaped in the Elizabethan
era or inherited from earlier stances of conflictual and/or cultural encounters between
Europeans and Muslims such as the Crusades.5
Mixing political and religious reasons to negatively depict Muslim characters is
manifest within a number of Spanish plays. These plays seem to respond to the long
encounter with the Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula in the period between the
eighth and fifteenth centuries in what was known as Andalusia. Despite the end of Islamic
rule, a small Muslim population stayed in Spain only to be expelled in 1614. Marchante-
Aragón mentions that, just after three years of the eviction of Muslims, in 1617, the Duke
of Lerma commissioned Mira de Amescua to write The Masque of the Expulsion of the
Moriscos, which was performed in the same year. Apart from the festive nature of the
Masque, which recalls the Duke’s successful effort to expel Muslims, the image of Moorish
characters in the performance is always related to evil and anti-Christianity (Marchante-
Aragón 98–101). The playwright Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s Aben Humeya o La
Rebelión de los Moriscos, 1830, is a history play in which the writer portrays the revolution
of Moors led by Aben Humeya against Philip II in the middle of the sixteenth century. The
play depicts Muslims as barbarians, whose defeat occurs because of their betrayal of Aben
Humeya who is eventually beheaded.

4 For more information about the economic motives of the Ottoman–Venetian Wars, see Inalcik, (262–8). A
detailed eyewitness record of the siege of Malta can be found in Balbi di Correggio. For discussions of the
exploitation of Islam to justify the Ottoman wars in Europe, see Yurdusev (190-9), and Rudolph Jr. (53). For
using Christendom to unite European countries against the Turks as ‘infidels’, see Curtis (2009, 25).
5 For detailed discussions of the Crusades from different points of view, see the studies of Hillenbrand and
Madden.
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Even decades after the Muslim occupation of Andalusia, the negative image of
Muslims can be found in Federico García Lorca’s Play without a Title.6 The character of a
lustful Muslim young man in the play feels happy to be killed only because he will be able
to live together with a large number of women. The Muslim character explains: ‘I’m
hoping to die so I can have a million concubines. The women are expensive here’ (Lorca
122). This speech parodies some verses of the Holy Qur'an, which describe the eternal life
of Muslims in heaven. What distinguishes Play without a Title from The Masque of the
Expulsion of the Moriscos and Aben Humeya is that Lorca’s play, whose dialogues revolve
around the comparison between the bourgeois and working-class audiences, does not
include any reference to the nationalist struggle against the Muslim occupation. The most
striking feature of the Muslim’s speech within Play without a Title is that it suggests that
the playwright acquires information about Islam that enabled his critique of Muslim
characters to extend beyond their physical traits or behaviour to draw a link between such
behaviour and the Qur'an. In their analysis of the suicide operations by the members of
some radical Islamist groups since the 1990s, a large number of European and American
academics and journalists comment on specific verses of the Qur'an, which are recited by
the leaders of these groups in order to justify violence.7
The previous examples of plays do not offer a comprehensive record of the
representation of Muslim characters, or culture, within Western drama in general or English
and Spanish theatres in particular. Nevertheless, my examination of these dramatic texts led
to some observations, which I utilised to define the topic of this dissertation. Firstly, the
inclusion of Muslim characters within these plays seems to be partly pertinent to, and
motivated by, specific sociopolitical contexts of conflict. Secondly, while the polemically
intersecting circumstances of the ongoing War on Terror are remarkably different from
both the Ottoman wars in Europe and the Muslim occupation of Andalusia, the discourse of
Osama Bin Laden since the middle of the 1990s seems, in some respects, to recycle the
historical claim of the Muslim holy war against the Christian infidels. Moreover, some

6 Lorca unfinished play was written in 1936, but not published until 1978.
7 Claims that the Qur'an (Koran) includes many verses that praise brutality and violence can be found, for
example, in McCarthy, B. Gabriel, M. Gabriel, and Winn. More profound approaches to reading the
relationship between the Qur'an and terrorists’ discourse of justifying violence is taken by a large number of
scholars such as Roy 2004, Juergensmeyer, Silverstein, and Kurzman.