Archiving Remembrance of National Icons

Written by Moulay Idriss El Maarouf

INTRODUCTION

This essay marks a move beyond the transfixed demarcations of stationary life records. It signals a departure away from the conventionalities of biographic portraitures, and by connotative gestures, a dissemination of the local into the ultimate embrace of reception, at home and away. Several times throughout this essay, I identify the past a pivotal constituent of modern interplays of signification, a key metaphor in the borderlands of the present. I foster three reciprocally underlining positions in this essay. First, the iconization of elapsed actants of world theatres offers contact with the eclipsed, darkened national signposts in the line of history, just it as helpfully advances the pragmatics of archival and historical documentation. Second, Edwards Said's theories of contrapuntality are corrective rectifiers of ideological binarization and polarization of the world into them and us. By moving along the material conditions of contrapuntal reading, analogous interpretations are forcibly amenable to the understanding of cultural texts. Third, Louise Pratt junctures a vital scope for disquieting the western domineering hermeneutics of archiving. Autoethnography, one of Louise Pratt's brilliant idioms, foregrounds an imperative extension of peripheral writings of national identity.

CASE STUDY: FATIMA AL-FIHRIYA

I am in awe of her ever since my early days. I wanted to accept as true her grandiose attainments. I even had to. With so much optimism in heart, so much buoyancy in mind, I dreamt of having her name engraved with letters, golden, indelible, and bright, within the memoirs of the great, and the high-minded. The historians and the feminists have given so little import to so magnanimous a character who took pleasure in a heightened perceptiveness of her era. She outrivaled the rigid constraints of olden times as well as the unbending propensities of its people. Notwithstanding the capacious documentation existing on the marvelous men of her epoch, she continues alone to be a mystery in many ways than one, her existence a hallo of brightness resting luxuriously among the world's leading lights. By way of a biographical account, I endeavor to unearth, as did the enthusiasts of Egyptology with king Tut's tomb, the mystifying life of a multifaceted persona, Fatima Al-fihria. Excavation of the lives of the pharaohs entails more than simply the lifting of lids over treasures and riches, but, more importantly, the extrication of the mummified sovereigns from their dark coffins into the more vigorous elucidations of discovery. To my own understanding, biographies are splendid instruments of scholarly excavation.

Outlandishly, Fatima Al-fihria has been relentlessly under studied. The extravagant pens of official biographers parsimoniously denied her the right of entry into certified grandeur. Official biographies are always tricky because they are both licensed and constrained by their being so privileged (Friedman 118). Almost all biographies bring Fatima Al-fihria's life into an effortlessly straightforward summarization: an educated daughter of a wealthy Tunisian merchant in the 9th century; settled in Fez; inherited a great fortune; build Al Karaouine University and mosque in 859. The university is recognized by Guinness Book of World Records as the world's oldest educational establishment.

What outlines as such fail to draw attention to is how imperatively momentous Fatima Al-fihria was in the 9th century. Equally vital is the context, within which her intellectual move came to pass. Her constructed academic institution gave birth to a range of brilliant scientists and scholars, such as Pope Sylvester II and Mohammed al-Idrisi, at times where the foundation of universities in Europe was an unfamiliarly foreign undertaking.

In view of that, it has become more of an issue to pay attribute to a woman who resisted the double victimizing confinements of gender and patriarchy, insightfully crafting a counter discourse to the on-circulation universal tropes on femininity as the repository of licentiousness, subservience, ignorance and short-sightedness. Fatima Al-fihria, given her unique acuity of judgment, refused to go along with the dictates of patriarchy that deemed womanhood a taboo concept, handled at arm's length, with misgiving, with disinclination, with lack of enthusiasm. To be sure, patriarchy has always been more than happy to accommodate the feminine within the mute 'outsides' of nature, the non-rational landscapes of the mind, the queer extremes of the heart to name but a few of the seats where the repercussions of gendered categorization are deemed to have never been successfully transcended. Coming to grips with the foolish calculation of her social orders, being fully aware that the feminine, as variously perceived at that time, is transfixed into a crippled clock that hardly signals the motion in/of time, that femininity has been stabilized, hold captive in the immobile, stock-stills of history, she brought into play the most distinguished of womanly accomplishments.

The great university she built is not merely a site of knowledge. It is both a proof for female agency and a reproof of the patriarchal currency. It was, in fact, an urgent testimonial donation to women, whose nature could almost be taught in geological courses to typify the roughly static life of granites and minerals. Fatima Al-fihria, however, breaks the rule of patriarchy and liquefies the rigidness cast onto the one word 'feminine', to give it life, dynamism, vitality. The concept 'feminine', in light of the life of so atypical a brainpower, resists definition, this is because the 'feminine' is neither a total lack nor a mystical plenitude, but a historically changing constellation of moments (Lynn 8). Fatima Al-fihria accordingly repudiates the essential definitions of patriarchy, and per se provides a multitude of achievable yet non-underpinned, nor classified definitions of herself and womanhood. Ambivalent, complex and motivated, she cannot be bargained, neither by history nor by the prudent memoirs of historians, to a monolithic, simplistic measurement.

This paper attempts at homing in on the 'footnotes' of historiography which open outlets, I am inclined to believe, into the social text's best insights. By dwelling on the 'undersized', 'petite' showgrounds of womanhood, one comes to terms with the most genuine of female enactments, endowments, aptitudes, originalities, divinities and more. The story of Fatima Al-fihria is a pleasurable tale for the generations to come, a vibrant melody on femininity, a frolic stimulus to the hesitant, the undecided. Her meticulous decision at building a network of cultural diffusion, her genuine choice of place and time, her artistic selection of structural design and architectural style, her philanthropic sacrifice of fortune in support of a national cause are a profusion of examples as much as necessary to honor the feminine. A woman of this magnificent grandeur certainly attracts, however skimpily, an austerely alert re-inspection into the correlation between the individual as an entity and the communal as a entirety, and what such abstractions might involve for speculations on 'culture'.

The purpose behind my highlighting the general limitations of femininity while at the same time weaving out a profile of a distinct woman is to come up with an interpretation that would carry a little further the discussion of this contextual recognition of historicity within an era characterized by its symbolic darkness. Instead of hammering to excess the broad-spectrum belief that women are obtainable commodities, submissive machines of desire, powerless, domesticated, unable to resist the stifling patriarchal ideologies, a randomized yet deliberate choice of a profile could be developed to plead for women's cause as well as unsettle and disseminate the very much easiness that suffuses the western discernments of Arab women. Dropping anchors into the bleak despondency of womanly fate whether in north Africa or Europe, this paper investigates the optimistic alleviations of resistance just by bringing to the fore an exemplary case in point. Extraordinarily, the story of Fatima Al-Fihria commemorates life and autonomy. From the split second she thought of sacrificing her fortune in aid of knowledge, she instantly gained admittance into a-historical acknowledgment. Fatima Al-fihria's move is so outstanding and persuasive that it generated radical transformations on the roadway of both capitalized History, on its supposedly 'harmonious' transcendence towards European ascendancy.

As an intuitive character in world history, Fatima Al-fihria transcends the likelihood of being but a name in the Guinness Book of World Records. Arguably, I do not have the intention to declare Fatima Al-fihria the embodiment of the ideal woman, but rather to seek the redressing of the tarnished image of women as seen through the lenses of Western ideologies. The grotesque scientist edifice she built is mostly a brick instrumental in the rectification of female autonomy. In the logic of the European dark ages, Fatima Al-fihria existed to delineate the complete opposite of the subservient other. At that gloomy era, European women's involvement in the world of man was very inconsequential. They did not add up to very much. This itched fiercely in my remembrance, and it was perchance this piece of information that made the seeds of regard for this woman to be implanted. However, it takes a deep reflection on and employment of her life in the days in store to grant these seeds outreaching roots and flourishing branches.

The world was and is still a man's sphere of influence. Surely, that is manifest. Men are in control of the world's networks. Even the nine out of ten historians, up till quite lately, have chiefly been male. They have contributed to the canon, filled most of the hugest book libraries and still enjoy the right to name the things to be added in world history as well as the things to be omitted. Great women were excluded, suppressed, or haughtily judged as exceptions. Therefore, Fatima AL-fihria is worth being reviewed not as an exception, but as one of the many gifted and pioneering woman who unlocked the unbending rigidities of male incomparability, locating avenues for women into knowledge and, via it, into power.

With enormous eagerness, I wait to witness the budding of a sense of urgency in the Moroccan scholastic provinces to expose new details on and facets of people of such rudimentary weight, as is the practice in other countries. In what competence did female agents partake in the generic "renaissance" of ages sinisterly dark? What motivationally urged a North African woman to reconsider the female plight? How did the religious and intellectual establishment hat sprung in Fez on account of this woman contribute to precipitate the steps of Europe towards an feasibly revolutionary 19th rebirth? How can we make use of this woman and others role heroines and superwomen, as the American media might possibly call them, to reshape the history of the African continent as essentially aberrant, incapable of change, backward, inferior, etc?

Obviously, Fatima Al-fihria did not exist in a vacuum. Her choice is pertaining to her self-reflective philosophical understanding of the social, logistic, strategic and cultural manifestations of her times. It is in this picture that I have though to place Fatima Al-fihria, as she features in the ever-complex bits of the fabulous puzzle of north African history. It is rare for any age to preserve so large a group of sources dedicated to women's achievements and rarer still for a period so impoverished in sources of any kind (McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley 1). Too many books about the Middle Ages make no mention of the part played by the women, leaving a lacuna in the description of medieval society (Shahar 1). The conduct and equally the voice Fatima Al-fihria is lectured to us from this religious and scholastic icon with a intelligibility hardly ever found in historical manuscripts. Although at a disadvantage of scarcity of information in compliance with aesthetic requirements, at least it is a profile that airs a distinct-featured subject. She existed in a irregular and cruel era, an era we have damned as "the dark ages", except that from the insecurity and distress of her life, she molded herself as a symptom of female command, female triumph, and female verbalization. She did not bury her lights under an obscure lantern, but spurred a profusion of radiance in the dimness and set it towering upon a beacon in so majestic a city, Fez. Today, this light still pours in abundant munificence. Now one can relatively speak of ours as an age of 'enlightenment' where women have more choices, more career opportunities, a wide-range of different possibilities. Within this construction of the present, the past served as a comparative index by which people could measure their relative liberation (Spigel 27). This comparison is partially possible if we investigate how the Church kept liberty in chains and progress in check, imposing backwardness on the "Dark" Ages (Novak), while in the other part of the world a woman was hectically democratizing access into scientific research in the heading of religion, shaping, however faintly, the world's civilization map. European women, during the middle ages, were advised to attach themselves to existing male orders but these orders were often either unable or unwilling to receive them (Conn 7). The authors of the period also declare that women must be kept out of public office, must not serve as judges nor wield any kind of authority, may not take part in councils or public assemblies, and must devote themselves to their domestic functions .They were aspiring for the spiritual life the church was denying them. For this reason, female charisms served as alternative to the male emphasis on the power of office. This religious crisis, I think, was not the case with the North African woman who was liberally conducting her spirituality outside the authoritarian harassments of ostentatious institutions, be they religious or political. Whilst women, to put it otherwise, were considered by Church Fathers to be the depraved and treacherous daughters of Eve (Morewedge 41), Fatima Al-fihria was eloquently writing a prologue to the volume on religious democracy and classlessness, thus not only throwing the forces of misogynism and antifeminism in disarray, but also serving the construction of the country's national identity.

This smoothly brings me to a fairly comparable terrain of criticism. Biographies are partially if not mostly about the manufacturing of national identities. The world seems now to be a huge market whereby nations excitedly indulge in the negotiation and writing of their identities, competitively generating tactics, campaigns, and procedures that would maintain the national enterprise's ethics and politics. Nationalism and concepts of national identity(…) are a means of collective and individual self-definition which can be seen as part of a broader process in which economic, social and historical forces interact with cultural processes to produce a range of identities which may be taken up, rejected, opposed, or adapted for individual or group need(Giles and Middleton 5). The USA, for instance, has been discursively aware of the significance of biographies as tools of narrativization imperatively necessary in the sponsoring of America's dominance-bound ambitions. Symbolically, the American tower is basically a brick-based fabrication, each block constitutive of icons deftly nationalized by the hands of the American craftsmen to be finally inserted as accommodative to America's national paradigms, a bone part and parcel of its commanding skeleton. My aims for this deliberate discussion of identity politics is to initially ease the argument on the ways, colossal and diminutive, in which an adamant focus on a single personage can foster the communal aspirations of a whole nation, as well as assist the cultural production of a particular Nationess. The version of Moroccaness herein foregrounded is, I believe, correctly that which could have been aptly pushed to the forefront amongst others to back, however illusively, the functional assembling of the Moroccan self. That Moroccan spokespersons: biographers, historians, novelists, painters, politicians etc offer a hardly distinct logic of what it entails to be Moroccan is not the subject matter; rather I would crave to articulate that the thinness of interest in this version that this paper seeks to bring to mind is reliant upon the very constrained sense of Moroccan identity being pronounced at that time. To comprise this version to redraft the Moroccan history and feeling of what it is to be Moroccan or to deconstruct the variously derogatory perspectives on Morocco initiated in Europe within alien contexts, would be to bestow credence to the national agents and, by the same gesture, lay the western tropes and prejudices bare of their consequence.

Farer from home, American media formulated, with fine nimbleness, a series of national icons, the most recent of which is perhaps 'the Rambo' Jesica Lynch, referred to as a "modern American war myth," an "icon" of the U.S.-led war on Iraq (Pin-Fat, and Stern). She was prostituted by the national executives to grant the American military outfit an extra golden medal in its war against Iraq. She was depicted as a prisoner of war, captured by the villain Iraqis, whom she had fought in the battle with unparalleled ferocity and soldierly stamina till the last bullet, before she passed out to be brutally raped by the Iraqi soldiers. Despite Jessica Lynch's assertions on April 24, 2007 before the congress that she never fired her weapon, that she sustained enough injuries from the explosion and crash to lose consciousness (Howard, and Prividera), waking up later in an Iraqi hospital, thus blaming the media and the military of lying for their own gain, these insist to discursively sponsor the memorization of her heroics. An authorized biography written by Rick Bragg, was consequently released in November 2003. NBC made a television movie called Saving Jessica Lynch which was about Mohammed's account of him rescuing Lynch. After she returned home, Jessica stated:

I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary....The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don't need to be told elaborate tales.

Oblivious Jessica lynch is unaware of the workings of the American media, and equally ignorant of the intricate dynamics of nation building. War is not the only exit towards the construction of national identity, but more effective are the poetics of writing the nation's icons by way of biographies. As a traumatized soldier, Jessica lynch cannot effectively write her own life story nor can she expressively put pen to paper, in half truths, the American style. After all, she is not interested, in accordance with the most palpable of her outspoken enunciations, in the rhetorics of universal recognition. Yet her life is not only hers. It is the nation's. In fact, the U.S. military fundamentally requires a rescued Jessica Lynch and the notion of femininity she represents in order to produce and sustain fighters who are willing to die for their country. Her seeming confusion as to the American motivations behind the legendization of herself reveals her ignorance of the subtle conceptualizations and recontextualizations of national identity. Her prominence has also been offered as a performance from which to review the gendered understandings of identity upon which the military is (im) possibly founded.

The Moroccan policymakers failed, I believe, to make of Fatima Al-fihria a possible Jessica Lynch. Badly informed and equally too shortsighted are the senior managers of Moroccan identity to consider the discursive productions of national icons en route for the ultimate promotion of identity principles in Morocco, together with the establishment, at times fabled, of the figures that would evasively enhance the national text as well as stage-manage the people's discernment of Moroccaness. My aim behind bringing an ancient figure into the post-modern limelights is essentially an attempt to make recourse to the past we seem to have flung into disorder. The post modern era is atypically one premised on wobbly grounds, given the cultural fragmentation and sociopolitical disintegrations of the present, a critical conditions which finds moorings in the blurred and uncertain past. By contrasting "successful" versus "failed" examples of rhetorical national identity construction, particularly in this Moroccan case study, I illustrate how we seem to necessarily operate without the sovereignty set by the structure of the past and the affluent climate of democratized individuality, in comparison with how nevertheless the artful legacies of the west work within the constraints of the present itself (Jessica Lynch's example) to turn national collective memory to their political advantage. In each case, these shall linger to be the dimensions of the existing acceptable narratives about the past, but we can simply through the different methods of construction accommodate or violate these textured representations.

Invocations of the past and remembrance do not seem to feature as prominently in Morocco as in England, for instance, which creates its past within the liberties of the present. A good case in point is notably the extravagant idealization and idolization of David Beckham who developed into a national icon, his societal arrangement not secondary to that of queen Elizabeth. In Thailand, not the least uncommonly, a soccer fan sculptured a statue of this player in Bangkok's Pariwas temple at the side of the various deities therein worshipped, making of him a senior idol. The media glorification of this English player venerated him in ways hegemonic, to use the language of Antonio Gramsci, originating the underpinning of multipart schemes of domination through consent . The Scots themselves empathize with him, regardless of the famous tensions that bind the two nations.

Stratagems of commemoration, in consequence, recommend much in the method of a model for a contextualized emblematical analysis, an input to communal memory studies, a testimony to the power of rhetoric in producing political, social and cultural upshots, and a workable design of the relevance of applying both the iconization of national figures and national identity promotion, especially where globalization looms large. The lack of a trouble-free blend of the other two extra examples with that Fatima Al-fihria is not of easy inference a weakness or a pointless digression of this paper, but rather a reference to my thorough esteem of the idiosyncrasy of the 'parergonization' of history by means of contextual identicization of icons, ultimately transmuting them into fundamental concerns. This essay exemplifies what is taxing about comparative studies: to come across rewarding aspects of contrast while making attribute to what is exceptional and characteristic about every situation. What is regularly collective across every single case, conversely, is the relevance of the methodology that I endeavored to put into practice, hastily enough, in order to escort the profile of Fatima Al-fihria into contact with the western strategies of recollection. Strategic essentialisms per se open up new realms for the coming generations, launching rituals of encounter where they can perhaps discuss the past not as a separate entity, but rather as a linking temporality.

Autoethnographically textualized, the past runs high above the spirals of the present into scales futuristically defined. While ethnographers observe from outside, so that the term describes the methodology they use to explore the borders between themselves and their subjects of inquiry(Martineau 242), autoethnographers write from within to fashion currents of local resistance. I would like to demarcate the University of Al Karaouine an autoethnographic text, which, if read simply as "authentic" self-expression its transcultural character is obliterated and its dialogic engagement with western modes of representation lost(Pratt 102). On the basis of the above, autoethnographic is (national) autobiography being deployed by postcolonial writers to renegotiate their own subject positions in writing, interrogating identity and selfhood via strategic counter-narratives. (Watson 35).

An unconcluding afterthought

This paper sought to scantily air some aspects of the use of biographies, either ashore fabled or genuine landscapes, in world media, the ways in which bygone narratives can be revitalized to tumble gracefully, in compatible gestures, with the modern ever-increasing turmoils and greater-than-ever radical transformations. This profile is to possibly regain new shapes, to be introduced to trangenerically new-fangled laboratories of cultural cloning, attached to a variety of dissimilar domains to eventually provide a perpetuity of innovative hermeneutics. Given this infinite generation of meanings and recontextualization of domains, this paper seeks to delineate no conclusive remarks, nor does it attempt to afford fulfilling closures or myth of a stylish ending. Perhaps I would minimally and altogether toss the discussion to an utterly same track, manufacturing thereby new closing-overtures that might well constitute an intensifying scent of a following composition.

I would like to keenly arrest the profile of Fatima Al-fihria in its moment of metamorphosis from a fetishized into an freshly identicized nomenclature, in its taxonomically phoenixal escape from the ashes of oblivion into the inscriptions, now self-regulated and predominantly self-assertive, into an infinite variety, into the game of remembrance, declaring an engine to contemporary negotiations of identity, national, cultural, political. This synthetic transmutation into the politicized domains of discourse, this dropping of legendary anchors into the realms of a globalized scenery is attributable to characteristics of biographical narrativization. The least thing achievable is to perhaps contrive means to (re)write non-western history, the peripheral biographies that were lengthily over-towered by the fortified hardcover Meta-biographies of the west.

Contrapuntally portraitured, I designate Fatima Al-fihria a strategic limestone in Moroccan history, a metaphor of great of import because it establishes vivid references to the extemporizations ideologically analogized to produce manifold adaptation, variations and adjustments to the wide-ranging employments of biographies within the Moroccan context. In line with Edward Said's deployment of contrapuntal analysis, the sketchy rendering of this female portrait, together with the analogous insertion of Jessica Lynch and David Beckham into the texture of reading, I strive, on the one hand, to locate verandahs of resistance to the western rhetorics of empire, counterplots to official History, and, on the other hand, achieve what Said calls 'contrapuntal ensembles'. Contrapuntality emerges out of the tension and complexity of Said's own identity, that text of self that he is continually writing, because it involves a continual dialogue between the different and sometimes apparently contradictory dimensions of his own worldliness (92). To further drive this idea home, Ashcroft and Ahluwalia mark contrapuntal reading as a technique of theme and variation by which a counterpoint is established between the imperial narrative and the post-colonial perspective, a 'counter-narrative' that keeps penetrating beneath the surface of individual texts to elaborate the ubiquitous presence of imperialism in canonical culture. A contrapuntal reading, then, is not necessarily aligned with one particular systematic theoretical orientation. It is the beneficiary of several theoretical traditions, but it focuses on the historical experiences of people as they maneuver within the localized manifestations of global forces (Friesen 20).

Contrapuntal reading captures the intrusion of marginalized threads into the fabric of western designs, plotting an instance polyphonic governance. The proliferation of biographies as such would rejuvenate the ephemeral body of Moroccan history. They would pioneer an ample space for hybridized interactivity. Refurbished shall be the track to Moroccaness. The elapsed shall now be lionized. The western pigeonholing of Arab women into disparaging frameworks shall be now put, à la Derrida, under erasure. Fatima Al-fihria can perhaps be resourcefully deterritorialized by being incorporated into Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, among the people who shaped the course of world history.

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