An impressively large public braved some unusually cold weather in the middle of March to attend this year’s Arab History Days at the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris.
Between Friday 14 and Sunday 16 March, students, researchers, and members of the public filled the Institut’s iconic building on the left bank of the Seine in Paris for this annual event on a theme or themes from Arab history, with this year’s programme of lectures, discussions, films, and book talks focusing on Arab heroes and heroines.
Some of the invited speakers, most of them academics from French universities, had gone for a broad interpretation of the theme, proposing sessions on political heroes or heroes in literature or art, as well as heroes on the sports field, notably in football. Others had stuck more closely to particular individuals, both men and women, who in their view could be seen to exemplify some aspect of heroism. They included people as various as the ancient Egyptian ruler Cleopatra, the Egyptian Mameluke Sultan Al-Zahir Baybars, hero of the epic poem of the same name, the 19th-century Algerian freedom-fighter Abdel-Qader, and the contemporary Egyptian footballer Mohamed Saleh.
All brought rewarding perspectives to this year’s History Days, which is now celebrating its 11th edition.
The first of the Institut’s History Days took place in 2015 and established the format for those that have followed, with invitees asked to relate some aspect of their usually academic work to a theme chosen by an organising committee made up of leading figures from Arab studies in France. Having done so, their next task, often more challenging, is to present what might sometimes be quite specialised research to a general audience, in this way building bridges between the world of academia and the wider public, giving the latter a taste of what goes on in universities and obliging the former to communicate with people outside their usual remit.
This feature of the History Days makes the event particularly valuable, given the shrinking space available for informed public discussion of Arab history and society in France like in many other Western countries.
With the mainstream media under increasing budgetary and other pressures, and with even well-established brands threatened by falling revenues and sometimes buy-outs, the History Days represent a valuable vote of confidence in an alternative model of public information, free from the sometimes distorting agenda of the daily news cycle and able to step back from the noise that all too often accompanies the Western reporting of Arab affairs. They can take longer views and provide perspectives that may be less and less available elsewhere.
Another feature of the History Days that makes the event particularly valuable is the fact that it is open to contributors from all stages of their careers, from post-graduate students to eminent professors, as well as to individuals from different backgrounds and from civil society activists to the most dedicated archival researchers. All these individuals in a sense depend on each other, with students turning into professors as work in their discipline proceeds and voices from civil society sometimes setting the agenda for even the most seemingly recondite academic research.
Venues for such people to meet and exchange perspectives are unfortunately few, and so the History Days fulfil an important function by encouraging meetings to take place that otherwise might not happen and audiences to be reached that otherwise might go unaddressed. In choosing this year’s theme of heroes and heroines the organisers have also opened up space for a wide range of voices, since the subject is an unusually capacious one. Previous editions of the History Days have included the Arabs and the World in 2021, Women and Gender in 2022, Landscapes, Climates and Societies in 2023, and Love in the Arab World in 2024.
A final feature of the History Days, one of its most eagerly awaited and not only by those most immediately concerned, is the award of the Grand Prix of the History Days for the best work on an aspect of Arab studies to have appeared in French in the previous year. The Prize has established itself as a notably prestigious one, and it is co-sponsored by the Académie du Royaume de Maroc.
There was an unusually long shortlist of ten titles for the Prize this year that included works on mediaeval, early modern, 19th-century, and contemporary topics. The earlier category included a new biography of the mediaeval Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldoun by Moroccan academic Mehdi Ghouirgate (Ibn Khaldûn, itinéraires d’un penseur maghrébin), a historical work on “saints” in Islam by historian of Islam Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen (Le Culte des saints musulmans), and a long investigation of the early modern harem, particularly in Morocco, by historian and anthropologist Jocelyne Dakhlia (Harems et sultans: genre et despotism au Maroc).
The latter category included works on Palestine such as geographer Philippe Rekacewicz and historian Dominique Vidal’s historical atlas Palestine-Israel. Une histoire visuelle and historian of the contemporary Middle East Jean-Pierre Filiu’s essay Comment la Palestine fut perdue. Two valuable studies looked at aspects of 20th-century history in historian and sociologist Emmanuel Blanchard’s study of the archives of the Service des affaires indigènes nord-africaines (SAINA) in Paris, the so-called “Bureau Arabe” that dealt with the affairs of Algerian workers in France in the 1920s and 1930s (Des colonisés ingouvernables), and journalist Marwan Chahine’s Beyrouth, 13 avril 1975, an investigation into an attack on a bus carrying Palestinians in Beirut that acted as the catalyst for the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War.
The Grand Prix went to researcher Mathias Gardet for his Nous sommes venus en France. Voix de jeunes Algériens, 1945-1963. As Gardet explains in his introduction to his book, like Blanchard’s study of the SAINA archives a valuable piece of primary research, he was invited to work in the archives of the former Centre d’observation pour mineurs, a youth detention centre outside Paris, and particularly on the records of Algerian adolescents who had come to France between 1945 and 1962. This was immediately before and during the Algerian War of Independence against France, and they had come in search of employment or for family reasons and had been detained by the French authorities, usually for petty crime or delinquency.
Most of the adolescents were alone, and during time spent at the Centre d’observation they were interviewed on different occasions by teachers, psychologists, social workers, and police. It is the records of these interviews and the materials produced by these young people during their period of observation that Gardet has studied, producing a fascinating account of a generation in search of a life for themselves in a time of war.
In search of heroes: “I want a hero, an uncommon want,” wrote the English poet Lord Byron when introducing his epic poem Don Juan at the beginning of the 19th century.
Byron’s point was that even with his society disgorging an unprecedently large number of hero-like figures, true heroism had become more and more difficult to find, posing particular problems for the authors of epic poems. Needless to say, the hero of Byron’s finished poem, Don Juan himself, will not be to everybody’s taste, and in any case every heroic, or would-be heroic, gesture in the poem is undercut by irony.
Speaking at the History Days this year, translator and professor of modern Arabic literature Richard Jacquemond made similar points about the heroes and heroines of contemporary literary works in Arabic. While some modern writers have presented their protagonists as heroic figures, either because they are placed at the centre of the works in which they appear or because they are explicitly described as such, most of the time they are really anti-heroes or heroes whose heroism is continually undermined.
Speaking on a panel with French-Palestinian writer Karim Kattan and French researcher Noemi Linardi, Jacquemond said that in this respect modern Arabic literature has followed other modern literatures in investigating the lives of individuals who are heroic mainly in their mediocrity, people like French novelist Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Irish novelist James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. The heroine of Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Zaat, for example, born with the establishment of the Egyptian Republic in 1952 and living through its hopes and disillusionments, is a kind of everywoman, Jacquemond said, rather in the manner of Flaubert’s eponymous character.
However, even though modern Arabic literature has followed other literatures as far as literary fiction is concerned, suggesting that modern society, particularly modern bourgeois society, may not leave much space at least for uncomplicated heroism, this is not true of more popular kinds of writing. Material directed at other kinds of readers could still find an audience for heroes, notably in the shape of crime-fighting “superheroes,” Jacquemond said, or for the heroes of some types of genre fiction such as crime fiction and thrillers.
Love them or loathe them, every Egyptian reader is likely to be familiar with author Nabil Farouk’s rajul al-mustahil (“impossible man”) series of popular novels, Jacquemond said, describing Farouk’s protaganist, a highly trained commando often sent on spying missions, as “an Egyptian equivalent of James Bond.” Author and television scriptwriter Ahmed Murad has also had some success with a similar series of novels, beginning with Vertigo in 2009, though in this case the crime-fighting is done by apparently ordinary people called upon to bring justice to society and mostly lacks the glamour and international dimension of Farouk’s work.
As is so often the case with events like the History Days, so many discussions and lectures are likely to be going on simultaneously, in the case of the Institut du Monde arabe across three or more floors, that it is impossible for visitors to cram in as much as they might like. For this reason alone, it seemed a pity that the event was not being live-streamed for possible catching up later, though it was also a pity that this could not have been arranged for people living outside Paris and thus not able to take advantage of the exceptional opportunities the History Days provide.
On the day Al-Ahram Weekly visited, there were opportunities to attend discussions on “dissident voices in Yemen,” “heroes of the Algerian War of Independence,” and “the subsequent lives of Arab revolutionaries.” Discussions that caught the eye on other days included those on Al-Zahir Baybars, Egyptian feminist Huda al-Sharaawi, and Egyptian singer Umm Kalthoum, considered as a heroic figure notably owing to her political commitments, among many others.
One well-attended discussion on “the sunset of heroes from pan-Arabism to the Arab Spring” featured historians Melanie Henry, Jihane Sfeir, and Matthieu Rey considering the contemporary reputations of political figures from earlier generations, among them former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat, and the comparative absence of such figures today. While political heroes in the Arab World and elsewhere are to a certain extent self-created, the speakers suggested, they are also created by circumstances, with the present conjuncture not favouring the rise of heroic figures in politics or in other domains.
In some cases, historical heroes can suggest ways forward for the present, with Rey giving the example of the Syrian revolutionaries after 2011 invoking the name of Sultan al-Atrash who led the revolution against French colonial rule in Syria in the 1920s when describing the aims of their own struggle.
But the record of political heroes is often mixed, it was suggested, with historical distance acting at least as often to bring about disenchantment as to reinforce the charisma of heroic figures from the past.
Héroïnes et héros du Monde arabe, les journées de l’histoire de l’Institut du Monde arabe, Paris, 14-16 March.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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