Arab culture on the record: customs, traditions, and the media that retells them

Well, I think the time has come for us to get to know each other a bit better! That’s why I want to share a short story of my everyday life with you. It’s not a very special one, however, it brought a lot of memories and I admit a lot of nostalgia too. Here it is!

While researching for interesting blog ideas I somehow landed on https://slots.info/netent/. As you can see this is a very informative platform filled with detailed reviews of hundreds of online slot variations. Then, I not-at-all-accidentally found this perfect example of how the most exotic collection of Middle Eastern folk tales – ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ or ‘Arabian Nights’ have now lost their mysterious yet profound appeal. Wonder why? Observing the slot review I noticed my mind shifting in a wrong but inevitable direction. The animated moustached Arab on the reels seemed threatening and the dagger next to him did increase the danger even more.

I went back in time remembering the days when I used to listen to stories from ‘Arabian Nights’ on my parent’s gramophone record player. A velvety female voice was reading the stories, there were mystic sound effects and strangely named characters such as Shahrayar and Shahrazad. I realized that I have probably listened to these stories so many times that the exotic names sounded just like the name of a childhood friend of mine, totally normal and totally not scary. But, back to Netent’s video creation! While watching the reels spin, I felt nostalgia to those long-gone childhood days but most of all to the days when ‘Arabian Nights’ was an innocent fairy-tale collection, ‘Shahrayar’ didn’t sound like a terrorist and an animated fez or a dagger on a slot machine wouldn’t seem inappropriate.

Read the whole piece

Most of what a Western reader learns about Arab life arrives pre-framed. It comes through a news package built to a deadline, a film that needed an antagonist, a headline written to be clicked. None of those are lying, exactly. They are simply doing a different job from the one a reader would need done in order to understand anything.

Understanding Arab culture means starting from the other end: with the ordinary material — what people eat, how a household is organised, which languages are spoken where, what a wedding actually involves, what happens during Ramadan and at Christmas — and we keep a parallel record of what happens to that material on its way into English-language media.

Why the ordinary material — customs, food, family — goes missing

The gap this site addresses is not a shortage of information. It is a distribution problem.

A Western reader will encounter an enormous volume of coverage concerning the Arab world across a lifetime, and the overwhelming majority of it will concern conflict, security or crisis. Very little will concern how anyone lives. The result is a reader who is genuinely well informed about one narrow subject and mistakes that for a picture of a culture — which is a harder problem than ignorance, because it does not feel like ignorance.

The correction is not argument. It is availability: understanding Arab culture requires only that the other material exist somewhere and be findable.

What “Arab culture” covers: many countries, many traditions

The phrase is used throughout this site with a caveat attached, and it is worth stating up front.

“Arab” is a linguistic and cultural category covering twenty-two states, from Morocco on the Atlantic to Oman on the Arabian Sea, across two continents. It is not a nationality, a religion or a race. A Casablanca winter and a Doha summer have nothing in common. Lebanese and Yemeni cooking share an alphabet and very little on the plate. Most Arabs are Muslim and most Muslims are not Arab — Arabs are under a fifth of the global Muslim population, and the four largest Muslim-majority countries are all outside the Arab world.

So the variation inside the category is larger than the distance between any part of it and the reader. There is no single Arab cultural identity to summarise, and any account that offers one has compressed something. Where the writing here touches on Arab cultural identity at all, it does so regionally. Where an article describes something as common practice, it says where, and it says where it is not. The questions people most commonly ask are taken at their full length for exactly this reason.

The second half: how Western media retells the material

Running alongside the cultural writing is a second strand on representation, because the two subjects cannot honestly be separated.

A survey of more than nine hundred Hollywood films featuring Arab characters found that the overwhelming majority presented them negatively, and that the number offering an ordinary, unremarkable Arab character ran to a few dozen. That is a century of output arriving at a ratio no population would produce on its own. The pattern is documented in our piece on depictions of Arabs and Muslims in Western media, and its individual components — the desert, the oil billionaire, the uniformly oppressed woman, the fanatic — are checked one at a time in the piece on common and untrue stereotypes.

The effect of that repetition is not belief. Audiences know fiction is fiction. The effect is availability — which association surfaces first, before deliberate thought engages — and it shows up downstream in hiring callbacks, tenancy decisions, clinical assessments and screening rates, in people who sincerely report holding no prejudice at all.

Occasionally the pattern breaks in a way worth recording. The arrival of a Muslim protagonist carrying a flagship comics title mattered less for the character than for the commercial result, which retired the standing argument that such a lead would not sell.

How this site is organised

Everything carries a number, a publication date and a section, and everything keeps the address it was first published at. We update pieces in place as things change rather than pulling them, because what was said and when is part of what makes a publication worth reading.

The two editorial sections are Culture — the everyday material — and Media & Representation, the criticism. Both are indexed above.

A separate group of pages covers the Bay Area programmes of the Arab Cultural and Community Center, a non-profit that operated in the San Francisco Bay Area and is no longer active. They exist because the programmes are still cited in academic papers, grant reports and community directories, and a citation that leads nowhere serves nobody. They describe closed activity in the past tense.

What this site is not

It is not that organisation and does not act for it: it cannot take enquiries on its behalf, does not hold its records, and does not speak for the communities it served. The about page states plainly who publishes this site and on what basis.

It also does not speak for Arab communities generally. Nobody can, and the publications that claim to are usually flattening something. What it can do is make the ordinary material easier to find than it currently is — which, for a reader who arrived from a headline, may be enough to make the next headline land differently.