It seems that there’s nothing Americans and Europeans like more than traveling back in time to see the rest of the world. Whether it’s a pilgrimage to Jerusalem or following the road to Damascus, Western publications have a knack for romanticized travel articles that portray normal trips to the Middle East–involving such contemporary innovations as 747 airplanes, sun screen, tour guides, security checkpoints, hotels, and taxis–as trips backwards in time, complete with camels, bazaars, and ancient kings. Travelogues like those published in the New York Times by Nancy M. Better or in The Toronto Star by Muhammad Lila give the dangerous impression that there’s nothing to the Middle East but the past, while ignoring the present context of the travelers’ tales.

Surely, there’s nothing wrong with appreciating the history of some place or people when you visit. But it’s myopic to see only its history, and only a selective one at that. I suppose it’s only by such blindness that one can explain Better’s unforgivable sin of erasing Palestinians from history in her travelogue about “history with a whiff of adventure” in Israel. Describing even absurdities like “Genesis Land,” Better fails to ever mention the contemporary context of most of the sites she visits. The Golan Heights, for example? “Captured” not occupied. Israel’s occupation and persistent violence against its Arab neighbors? Dismissed because “Israel is a young country that has been dogged by regional conflict.” Apparently, the only sign of this conflict to Better is “some discussion…. [that] inevitably crops up” to distract you from your immersion in the past. Nevermind the apartheid wall, painfully arbitrary and racist airport ‘security,’ and militarized and armed Israeli youth all over the place.

I suppose it only speaks to the extensiveness and pervasiveness of segregation in Israel that Better’s tour guides warn her against entering the so-called “Arab market.” But then again, insofar as giving historical sites a modern meaning is concerned, Lila’s cliché “road to Damascus” article is not much better. Lila features Damascus’ famous Souq al-Hamadiya to talk about his exotic travels. Apparently, all of Damascus (and all of Syria) can be explained by a really old market cum bazaar–Lila goes so far as to call it a “perfect, real-life metaphor for Syria!” It’s kind of crazy that the old cliche of Arab country as nothing but a bazaar still gets repeated these days at the same time that Western-imposed sanctions on Syria are not mentioned a single time in this article. But why should they be? Damascus is a fantasy-land blast to the past, not a modern place very much involved in international politics, and very much affected by present-day Western policies in the region.

Of course, as a consequence of these fantasies about the past, neither of these travel articles has anything to talk about but so-called historical sites (and to what extent can you really relegate the Hamidiyeh market to the past, even when it functions today, for Syrians, much more importantly as a vibrant and modern market-place?). There is no Syrian, Palestinian, or Israeli people to speak of in these articles. Ali Baba gets more show time in them than any living Arab. There is no today and no sense of tomorrow. The dilemma brings to mind the wise words of Christie Bahna from the now-defunct a-Rab magazine,

“…the more I thought about it, the more I grew to realize that my identity as an Egyptian-American is somewhat problematic: I have the comical misfortune of belonging to a culture that is either permanently located in the past—ancient, primitive, mystical, obsolete—or situated in the future as part of the larger, looming threat that “Arab-ness” poses to countries that aren’t so sinfully undemocratic, ill-intentioned, and Islamic.”

Christie pretty aptly identifies the problem. The present is deliberately ignored and imagined as the past to such a great extent that it becomes a misnomer to talk about “historical sites” and “historical parks” when the whole damn country, region, or people is transformed into a historical relic. Her insight about the other possible Middle East, that threatening one looming over the horizon in the future, complicates the picture–but you usually find that Middle East in the News section. The one from the past is in Travel, Features, or Activities. I suppose this strange dualism reflects one of the great paradoxes about the way some parts of the West see the Middle East, as having simultaneously a harmless history and a menacing future. Perhaps the past is romanticized precisely to ignore the cultivation of that region’s own, independent sense of self, an independence that is represented as a looming and mysterious threat. They don’t like what they see, so they see what they like. A fine operation, unless you are actually interested in things like real diplomacy, cooperation, and coexistence–which all happen in the present, not in the past or the future.

Related posts:

1. Helena Cobban Reports Back from Middle East Trip
2. America’s Senseless Middle East Policy
3. Friends and Enemies in the Middle East
4. American College Opens Up Satellite School In the Middle East
5. A DisHonest Broker: US Pressure Rendered UN Middle East Role Impotent