Journal of Refugee StutBes Vol 9. No.

1 1996

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies:

Rethinking Forced Migration and Identity in
the Middle East*
SETENEY SHAMI

The current enthusiasm in anthropology for the concepts of transnationalism and

globalization has significant implications for Refugee Studies as an emergent field,
for understandings of the contemporary Middle East, and for the practice of
ethnography. In discussing forced migration in the Middle East the argument is
made for the importance of retaining the analytical concern for forms and forces
of regionalism, while at the same time rethinking them in the light of global
changes. This entails a consideration of two problematic topics: Arab
nationalism, or rather al-'uruba (which translates best as Arabness, and which
highlights the identity rather than the ideology); and contemporary Islamic
identity, which is better conceptualized as transnationalism rather than
fundamentalism. A critical reading of the life history of a Somali woman offers
a commentary on the place of ethnography in the context of these analytical
concerns, and highlights the problem of using static concepts of Islam and
tradition to interpret lives that are transnational.

Introduction

In the past decade or so, anthropologists have been forced by many changes,
not least the international mobility of the peoples that they have traditionally
studied, to step back and take a broad view of the world which they seek to
describe. Through this process, the inadequacies of ethnographic and worldhistorical formulations have become increasingly exposed. Dissatisfaction with
previous representations has led to a focus on the global interpenetration of
peoples and societies on the one hand and the local construction of cultural
practices on the other.
In many ways, this new framework for the analysis of social processes
and cultural change has helped anthropology out of the impasse, or at least
the malaise, with which it struggled in the 1970s, as exemplified by such
texts as Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1974/1969), In Search of the
Revised text of the Seventh Elizabeth Colson Lecture, delivered at the Refugee Studies
Programme, University of Oxford, on 8 March 1995.
C Oxford Uravenity Prera 1996

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Department of Anthropology. Yarmouk University, Jordan

4 Seteney Shami

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Primitive (Diamond 1974) and To See Ourselves (Weaver 1973). In a world

where yesterday's 'primitives' were now engaged in complicated labour
disputes or were driving their herds in pick-up trucks or had become
refugees, anthropology appeared to have lost its object and, with that, its
purpose. Anthropology would have to transform itself or to disappear
together with the 'disappearing world' of the well-known ethnographic film
series, which privileged the primitive as a reservoir of knowledge about
humanity and its nature. Even the possible transformation of anthropology
threatened its demise: if it turned to the ethnography of industrialized
societies it would become sociology; if it elaborated on the incorporation of
non-western peoples into the world market system it would become social
history. Today, anthropology appears to have been given a new lease of life
as it turns to study social formations and cultural forms in the context of
transnationalism and globalization. Although the fields of cultural studies
and literary criticism in many ways lead the way in which these new
concerns are articulated and investigated, anthropology reassures itself and
impresses its widened audience by asserting its authority as the field that
monopolizes the understanding of Culture, especially in its comparative
sense, as well as the articulation of cultural construction with social
reproduction.
Following a brief discussion of the concept of transnationalism, this paper
will situate the category of the refugee within this analytical context.
Examples of forced migration in the Middle East show that a focus on
globalization may obscure the place of regionalism in structuring population
movements. Linkages, such as those wrought by Arab nationalism, are salient
in shaping identity, allocating mutual responsibility and hence informing the
geographical trajectories and consequences of migration. In spite of this, it is
Islam that remains as the main focus of scholarship on the Middle East. Here
the problem is reversed, where fundamentalism (conceptualized as a local and
archaic identity) obscures Islam's contemporary and historical transnational
character. Finally, how refugee movements, identity and transnationalism are
reflected in the central practice of anthropology, that of ethnography, will be
discussed.
As I pondered on the link between this paper and Professor Colson's work,
beyond the obvious references to forced migration and my own biography and
intellectual shaping as her student, it came to me that it was the spirit of the
enterprise that is inspired by her legacy from the classroom. The question that I
inherited from Professor Colson, and with which I embark on this enquiry into
the currently fashionable exegesis of the state of the contemporary world, is the
following: 'What exactly, if anything, is new in this?' Not a dismissive question,
although it may have sometimes appeared cynical to a graduate student
enthusiastic about a theoretical paradigm recently discovered. It is a question
that highlights the necessity to seek linkages, between past thoughts and
present ones, between past behaviours and present outcomes. It is also a
reminder to continually review past paradigms and present assumptions, not

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 5

merely to critique them gratuitously but because, as Elizabeth Colson puts it,
'What counts is quality of thought' (1989:4).
Anthropology and the Remapping of the World

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Transnationalism as a concept and perspective emerges, as Rouse (1995)

points out, from the synthesis of two modes of thought dominant during the
1980s: firstly postmodernism, which emphasized the new relationships
between knowledge and power brought about by the 'information age';
and secondly Marxist critiques, that attempted to situate the dialectic of
knowledge and power within broader transformations in the character of
global capitalism. Transnationalism, thus, is an analytical perspective that
privileges as its object of study, as well as its primary premise, the
accelerating circulation of goods, people, money, information and ideas
through and across national borders and cultural boundaries. As many have
noted, the circulation itself is not new in the world (Abu-Lughod 1989, Wolf
1982), although its scope and speed have become remarkable. This
acceleration, in conjunction with contemporary changes in the nature of
boundaries, production and power, constitute the main issues of investigation. Thus what has been termed 'flexible accumulation' in the late capitalist
era is characterized by the replacement of multinational corporations with
transnational ones (Rouse 1995)1. This challenges the ability of states to
control production and consumption processes within their borders, as well
as leading to new types of population dislocation and movement. The
tensions between economically dominant corporations, powerful supranational political organizations, embattled 'national' states2 and the
strategems of restless populations, structure the world as it is today. Called
into question by this inability of territorial states to sustain their ideological
hegemony and economic supremacy, are vested notions of class, ethnicity,
nationalism, race, citizenship and modernity.
Within this general framework of transnationalism are found differing
contentions, varying according to discipline and ideological orientation: some
emphasize the waning of national sentiments and boundaries, others the
retrenchment of state power and the rise of ethnonationalism; some extol the
cultural hybridity brought about by population mobility as well as by
unexpected combinations and juxtapositions of media consumption, others
bemoan reactive cultural and religious fundamentalisms. Some argue for the
specificity of the present moment while others favour a historicity which sees
societies and states as always existing within wider contexts and populations
that have always been mobile.
Ethnographic research, although full-length monographs are still few,
focuses on such instances of transnationalism as the lobbying of Caribbean
politicians for votes in New York, the consumption of second-hand western
designer clothing in street markets of Lusaka, the circulation of 'gifts' between
migrant families and their kin back home, and the 'public culture' created by

6 Seteney Shami
entertainment industries (Basch et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Hannerz
1987; Hansen 1994).
Within this powerful new image of the world, where is the refugee?
The refugee in a Transnational World

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Interesting chronological parallels can be found between the concerns of

transnationalism outlined above and the emergence of refugee studies. Until
recently, refugees were barely acknowledged as an object, or subject, of
sustained scholarly interest Although there is a literature dating back to World
War II, in 1981 Stein and Tomasi could still note that 'Traditionally viewed as
localized, nonrecurring and isolated flows, refugees and refugee movements
stand singularly undefined and notably undocumented' (1981:5). In contrast,
the past decade has seen the emergence of refugee studies as a field. Institutions
such as the Refugee Studies Programme at the University of Oxford, have
played the determining role in developing this varied, multidisciplinary field
which requires imagination, compassion and acuteness as it straddles scholarly
and practitioner communities, and encompasses a literature spanning social
scientific writings, literary representation, journalistic reports, development
agency documents and political speeches. Refugee studies have shown the
complexity of the experience endured by the refugee as well as the range of
phenomena relevant to developing an understanding of this experience. It is
now clear that there is a need to take into account not just the demographics
and policy aspects of refugee movements, not just the contextual issues and the
impact of dislocation on individuals, communities and collectivities, but also,
to transpose Foucault's well-worn phrase, the 'governmentality' of refugees,
that is the 'mentalities that govern'govern the state of refugees, as well as
governing the states that govern the refugees.
Yet in spite of these theoretical and empirical accomplishments, in spite of
the increasing numbers ofrefugeesin the world, estimated at 16,255,000 at the
beginning of 1994 (US Committee for Refugees 1994), in spite of the
proliferation of organizations concerned with refugees and the actual volume
of output in print and visual media representing refugees, the category of 'the
refugee' continues to be invisible, or at least tangential and/or superfluous, in
scholarly mappings of the world as it nears the 21st century.
As noted by Stein and Tomasi above, this could largely be attributed to the
perceived 'transience' of the refugee phenomenon. However, this in itself arises
from a more basic bias in the understanding of society, such that in a world of
rooted, stable societies,refugeeswho are mobile and dislocated are seen as the
anomaly, the aberration. Liisa Malkki has delivered a trenchant critique of
what she terms 'the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national
identity' (1992:24). Based on her work among the Hutu refugees in western
Tanzania who fled the 1972 massacres in Burundi, she contests what she terms
'the national order of things' (1992:32). Arguing from the perspective of
transnationalism, she states that

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 7

There has emerged a new awareness of the global social fact that, now more than
perhaps ever before, people are chronically mobile and routinely displaced and
invent homes and homelands in the absence of territorial, national bases
(1992:24).

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Yet, Malkki asserts, scholars and common-sense understandings continue to

treat stability as the norm and depict the world as 'composed of sovereign,
spatially discontinuous units' (1992:26). Structured by ideologies of
nationalism, in this representation, 'one country cannot at the same time
be another country' (1992:26) and the world looks 'much like any school
atlas with yellow, green, pink, orange, and blue countries composing a truly
global map with no vague or "fuzzy spaces" and no bleeding boundaries'
(1992:26).
The language in which this world is represented rests upon metaphors of
roots and trees (the British oak for example) that serve to naturalize and
essentialize the congruence of place, society and culture (cf. Gupta and
Ferguson 1992). Through what Malkki terms a 'sedentarist metaphysics'
(1992:31) refugees fall into the narrow cracks between borders, between
societies and between cultures. They effectively disappear into the liminal world
of the aberrant where they are depicted as impure, immoral, terroristic and
criminal in a 'pathologization of uprootedness' (1992:32). This insistence upon
the 'externality of the refugee' in the 'family of nations' (1992:33) also
emphasizes the unstable status and the destabilizing impact of the refugee.
This eloquent critique enables us to situate the scholarship onrefugeessince
World War II, which has overwhelmingly focused on the so-called 'practical'
issues of repatriation and integration, or on social-psychological aspects of
'assimilation' in 'host cultures' (Schechtman 1963; Zwingman and PfisterAmmende 1973). In this way, solutions could be divorced from the causes and
contexts of displacement. If, as Malkki shows, the natural/national order is
represented in metaphors of trees, the refugee (dis)order is represented as
virulent disease, attacking roots, shoots and fruits. At best, the refugee is
grafted onto the social body of the host society.
Today we are forced to confront a world characterized by the increasing
permeability, dislocation and disappearance of borders and a disjuncture
between the conceptual mapping of the world-as-stable and the actual state
of its inhabitants-as-ambulatory. It would appear that refugee studies would
emerge as a most appropriate fin de siecle discipline. Yet, oddly enough,
even in the approach that brings to the centre of its analytical gaze the
movement and dislocation of peoples, the refugee once again disappears.
This time they are the norm in a world that is uprooted and fluid. Just like
everyone else, if more so, the refugee is mobile, uprooted, dislocated and
lonely. If the world is a 'nightmarish postmodern landscape of homelessness'
(Harvey 1989:77) then the refugee is simply one of many who travel this
landscape, together with tourists, guestworkers, exiles, business consultants,
expatriate experts, roving academics and the like. The fact that the refugee

8 Seteney Shami

Refugee Flows: Structures and Representations

For refugee studies today, two relevant shifts in boundaries and borders are the
disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the waning of asylum in
Western Europe (Frelick 1994). In the literature on transnationalism and
globalization, all too often, the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union is
discussed in terms of the collapse of ideologies and the (presumably)
consequent rise of ethnonationalism (cf. Laclau 1994), instead of through
the dislocation of borders and people. How semantics guides demography is
also reflected in the strange 'fact' of the declining number of refugees since
1993. As Frelick points out, it is not that people are dislocated in lesser
numbers than before but that

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appears as a term couched between other terms of mobile existence is

erasure through inclusion.
Even for Malkki, who is specifically basing her interpretation of
transnationalism upon the study of refugees, refugee narratives are simply
either ones of deterritorialized nationalism or of cosmopolitanism, depending,
respectively, upon residence in the refugee camp or the town. The value of
studying refugees is that it 'illuminates the complexity of the ways in which
people construct, remember, and lay claim to particular places as "homelands"
or "nations" ' (1992:25). In other words, the refugee is assimilated into other
categories and is simply the extreme case that reveals the power of the.
deterritorialized imagination.
Malkki argues against states, organizations and scholars that constitute
refugees 'differently from other kinds of deterritorialization' (1992:25). Yet
the challenge that refugees pose to territorial states is quite particular and
structured by their appeal to humanitarian (inter-national) regimes, to
global (trans-national) responsibilities, and to universal (trans-cultural)
human rights. There are certainly strong arguments to be made for a more
interconnected understanding of the parallel experiences of, for example,
war refugees, development oustees and disaster displaced (cf. Cernea 1993;
Hansen and Oliver-Smith 1982; Shami 1993, 1994). Yet this should be
clearly acknowledged as a compatibility between the victims of dislocating
forces and a search for an understanding of how power realizes itself though
the dislocation of people in different ways (cf. Asad 1993:10). While the
agency and creativity of such dislocated peoples should be in no way
minimized, there is little justification for celebrating their cosmopolitanism
as they bear the burden of global capital accumulation (cf. Bright and
Geyer 1987). One of the ways in which to critique celebratory notions of
modernity and to re-insert the actuality of inequality, dislocation and
suffering is through a global mapping of shifts in borders and the
accompanying reinscription of boundaries (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) as
well as through tracing the physical trajectories of mobile peoples rather
than only their cultural itineraries.

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies

Since the end of the Cold War, refugees have been devalued in the eyes of
governments, which will seek to shirk their responsibilities on the refugees'
behalf. We have seen a variety of methods to do so: facilitating the return of
refugees before it is safe for them to go home; denning refugees out of existence,
by, for example, offering them second-class statuses like temporary protection;
creating 'orderly procedures' such as visa regimes and in-country refugee
processing programs that cannot begin to protect desperate people needing to
flee immediately; and either creating planned internal displacement in the form
of 'safe haven zones' or simply saying that internal flight alternatives exist
(1994:9).

... the script by CNN reporter Bill Delaney described the boy as protesting
against the peace process. No reference was made to the fact that his protest was
at the deliberate destruction by the Israeli Army of 17 homes. When I took this up
the same day with CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief, he said that the tape had been
'generic' and had in any case been taped by an outside agency (1995:15).
Popular and scholarly 'generic' representations have made of the Middle East a
region synonymous with conflict and war. Portrayed by media images of the
refugee victims and terrorist perpetrators of violence, different types of
conflicts and situations are lumped together, and causes, effects, contentions
and political nuances become irrelevant in a seemingly endemic state of
mayhem. Such representations certainly reflect an aspect of the lived experience
of the inhabitants of the region. The predicament and numbers of people
trapped in, or fleeing, arenas of military confrontation and civil unrest in the
Middle East should not be minimized.5 The issue does not lie in evaluating

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We see here the creation of a new vocabulary often with subverted usages of
its termsthrough which new types of territories and spaces come into being
as legitimated by world bodies. Thus, the UN Security Council has 'designated
"safe areas" that easily rated as the most unsafe places in the Balkans, if not
the world' (Frelick 1994:5).3
Powerful global forces, then, structure refugee movements, define the nature
of the spaces they inhabit and textualize their experience. In spite of this, it is
interesting if saddening, that, whether seen through the framework of
nationalism or transnationalism, refugees exist as a concept but disappear as
a category and as a collectivity in global representations. This may appear
preposterous given the space that the refugee, and more generally war and
armed conflict, gets in the media. On the one hand, this may indicate that the
media do not shape other discourses as powerfully as is commonly assumed.
On the other hand, it may be a result of how the media manage and structure
our 'inattention' 4 as much as our attention. The dissemination of repetitive
images of refugees and violence from around the world may be blurring
perceptions and creating indifference rather than awareness. Nowhere is this
truer than in coverage of the Middle East. A good example is provided by Fisk
concerning the use of a videotape clip of a young Palestinian from Gaza
throwing stones at an Israeli patrol. Fisk writes that

10 Seteney Shami
methods for enumerating displaced populations and their accuracy, or in
debating comparative proportions of violence in different regions of the world.
It is impossible to assess the numbers of those who are victimized by any
conflict, and numbers themselves are usually an essential ingredient of the
conflict and its management (cf. Asad 1994). Instead, conceptualizing violence
and displacement in the region requires the mapping of linkages and
temporality to replace the reiteration of unending parallel images.
The Arab Middle East: Towards a Theory of linkages

Linkages of Arabness
Writing in the Manchester Guardian during the Gulf War in 1991, Edward Said
commented:
It is curious, but profoundly symptomatic of the present conflict, that the one
word that should be tediously pronounced and re-pronounced and yet left
unanalysed was linkage, an ugly solecism that could only have been invented in
the late twentieth century America. Linkage meant not that there was, but that
: there was no connection. Things which belonged together by common
association, sense, geography, history, were sundered, left apart for convenience
sake and for the benefit of imperious United States policy makers, military
strategists, and area experts. Everyone his own carver, said Jonathan Swift. That
the Middle East was linked by all sorts of ties, that was irrelevant. That Arabs
might see a connection between Saddam in Kuwait and Israel in Lebanon, that
too was futile, this was the forbidden topic to broach, least of all by pundits
whose role wasn't to question but to manage popular consent for war, one which
never actually emerged... (Said 1991).
SaH is referring, of course, to the statement repeatedly made by George Bush
during the Gulf conflict that there was no double standard employed in the
'world' response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. At the very least, this position

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If the phenomenon of forced migration is situated within the issues highlighted

by transnationalist perspectives (global shifts in production and accumulation,
deterritorialization and contested nationalism, the reinscription of boundaries,
territories and spaces), then the importance of retaining a concern for forms
and forces of regionalism becomes apparent. For example, when considering
the geographical trajectories of displacement from and in the Arab states, the
continuing salience of regional politics and identities emerges (cf. Bocco and
Djalili 1994). While global forces play an important role in structuring refugee
movements and population movements generally, the causes and consequences
of displacement cannot be understood in isolation from the meanings that are
reinforced, contested and created through such massive movements. These
constructions inform people's decisions, within the space allowed them,
concerning where to move, how and when. The 'why' is also mediated through
such cultural meanings and the politics that shape and reproduce them.

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 11

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ignored the powerful fact that much of the popular support for Saddam
Hussein outside Iraq was by Arabs (and not just Palestinians) who saw a
moment of hope for Palestine or at least a less humiliating position vis-d-vis
Israel and the West. It also ignored the resentment, that was actually widely
reported in the press, felt by many Arabs from the labour-exporting countries
towards the Gulf countries concerning inequalities in the distribution of wealth
and resources in the region. Unreported was another sentiment that was
echoed widely, at least in Jordan and at least at the beginning of the crisis, that
even given what Saddam Hussein was, if his incorporation of Kuwait into Iraq
was a step towards Arab unity then it should be supported.
This last position is morally, strategically and politically untenable and
shows that the Gulf War brought out the worst in everybody concerned,
leading political actors and publics to reactive positions of xenophobia and
jingoism. What is significant, however, in this context, is that the sentiments
described above are instances of Arab nationalism, although an embattled
and defensive one. One of the indicators of nationalism is the mobilization of
sentiment around instances of perceived injustice, such as the case of
Palestine (Amin 1978). Even after the divisive Gulf War, even after the PLO
accords and the Jordanian peace treaty with Israel, Arab leaders are still
being judged by their publics in terms of the Palestinian cause. A suggestive
cartoon published in the Jordan Times recently showed two unidentified
Arab leaders duelling with olive branches, competing over which one is
making the better peace.
Such sentiments are all shot through with assumptions concerning al-'uruba,
a term encompassing many meanings: Arabness, a way of being Arab, cultural
authenticity, a set of responsibilities and rights that comes with being Arab. In
other words it expresses an identity, that is reinforced or violated or challenged
or ignored by various events. However contingent and informed by realpolitik
particular political positions and statements may be, there is constant reference
to a universe of discourse which is identified as 'Arab'.
As any identity, however, Arabness has to be constantly reinvented and is
constantly threatened. Its discourse is reshaped by historical events as it
simultaneously provides the vocabulary with which to interpret these events.
An interesting example is the term 'the Arab Arabs' utilized by King Hussein
of Jordan during the Gulf conflict, extolling those holding on to the principle
of Arabness (by seeking a negotiated solution) as opposed to Arabs who were
being less than Arab (by attacking Iraq). Significantly, negative reactions to
this term did not dispute the discourse itself but only disputed King Hussein's
right to appropriate it.
Nationalism, therefore, is not only a political ideology and strategy and a
means to an end, which is a political state. It is also a discourse, which leads to
and results from the construction of identity, an identity which the nationalist
discourse itself takes for granted. Anderson's (1992) felicitous phrase of nations
as 'imagined communities' is well known; however, it has been little applied in
the study of Middle Eastern identities, which are seen as 'age-old' and

12 Seteney Shami
unchanging ones. Anderson rightly emphasizes that the national community is
'imagined' because its members cannot know one another except in the
imagination and through the print-languages which manage this imagination.
However, of course, encounters do take place, in daily life, in ceremonial,
through migratory circuits and in situations of crisis. The nature of these
encounters and the actors involved play the decisive role in continually
transforming the nature of the communities to which individuals imagine
themselves as belonging.

In the same piece quoted above, Edward Said goes on to say:

Above all, Arab nationalism hasn't died, but has all too often resolved itself into
smaller and smaller units. Here too linkage comes last in the Arab setting. I do
not want to suggest that the past was better, it wasn't. But let us say that it was
more healthily inter-linked so to speak, people were actually connected to each
other, rather than staring at each other over fortified frontiers (Said 1991:6).

Here there is less to agree with, although it certainly is not a matter of whether
the past was better or worse, and the relevant issues are precisely those
concerning the mobility of people and permeability of boundaries. However,
the sentiment Said voices concerning the size of political units is one of
standard Arab nationalism. One that gives little weight to the discursive force
of nationalism, or the vehicles through which it is disseminated, or the identity
politics that it involves, but judges success or failure and connectedness in
terms of political unity as embodied in a state.
A plethora of books in Arabic have appeared in the past 15 or 20 years about
the failure of Arab nationalism and the retrenchment of what is called in
Arabic al-dawla al-qutriyya. This term is difficult to translate but may be
glossed as the 'regional state', or the 'country-state', or the 'territorial state'.6
Thus each Arab state is seen as a regional, part-state of the wider Arab nation
(Hopkins and Ibrahim 1985). Embedded in the term itself is the idea that each
of these states is transient, incomplete, local, while the natural/national state is
the unified Arab one.
Nationalism seeks a mechanistic congruence of place and person, of state
and nation, of means and ends. As discussed above, via Liisa Malkki's critique,
a de-linking of territory and nation may open our eyes to a phenomenon that
has been obscured through a fetishization of borders. Arab nationalism, since
it is a nationalism, an ideology inspired by West European models, conceives of
its ultimate fulfilment in the establishment of a unified nation-state (what
Anderson has termed 'the modular state'). As scholars interested in
interpreting ideologies but also practices, what we should examine is if, and
how, Arab nationalism, as ideology and discourse and political strategy, has
led to the construction of a sentiment, an identity, and an imagined community
despite the multiplicity of borders.

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National Identity and its Boundaries

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 13

Furthermore, the region is marked by long histories of diaspora and

diasporic communities. What are the linkages maintained by descendants of

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It is important to note, at the same time, that the present political moment is
one of significant changes for these territorial-states: some states are being
strengthened ideologically at the same time that they are being weakened
materially through structural adjustment programmes and unfavourable
bargaining positions in the world economy. While world attention is focused
on the dramatic creation of a Palestinian mini-state, negotiations and conflicts
are marking the delimitation of frontiers between various Gulf states, in the
southern Arab peninsula, between Jordan and Saudi Arabia and between
Egypt and Sudan. Almost daily, what sorts of relations should obtain between
the Arab states within the 'Arab World' are variously interpreted and
negotiated. The defection of Hussein Kamel Hassan, Saddam Hussein's son-inlaw and adviser, and his being granted 'refuge' by Jordan in August 1995
presents an intriguing example. Asked by reporters whether he would use
Jordan as a base for toppling the Iraqi regime, he replied that 'the whole extent
of the Arab arena' would be his field of action (Al-Dustur 16/8/1995). This
stated confidence in the freedom of political and physical movement within an
Arab arena somehow coexists with official Jordanian statements that this event
has no political implications for the brotherly relations between Iraq and
Jordan.7 At the very same time, the League of Arab Nations is celebrating its
50th anniversary and, in a bid to heal rifts after the Gulf War, its secretariat
has proposed establishing a 'Code of Honour' to regulate future inter-Arab
relations. This is accompanied by fierce debate, in local and regional
publications, over whether the Arab League has promoted or retarded Arab
unity throughout this half-century (Sayigh 1995).
The point here is that 'Arabness', as any other identity, obtains its power
through its very ambiguity and ability to contain different meanings at the
same time. These meanings, however, can only be arrived at by theorizing
boundaries and linkages within the 'Arab arena*. This is not simply to
document empirical phenomena but to reach a theoretical understanding about
how mobility and the encounters between people engender transformative
relationships. There are many examples that can constitute a starting point:
how labour migration, in all its forms, has reinforced the sense of Arabness
while at the same time heightening tensionstensions that are heightened
precisely because Arabs expect better, demand better, from fellow Arabs. How
expulsion from Palestine has led to the imbrication of the Palestinian people, as
refugees, labour migrants, intellectuals and exiles, into every Arab state. How
Egyptian professional migration has led to a certain 'Egyptianness' in
bureaucracies and institutions of higher learning in many Arab countries.
How 300,000 Jordanian citizens displaced by the Gulf War reconstitute
themselves as 'returnees' to a country in which most of them have never lived
before.8 How displaced Nubians become part of the remaking of the city of
Cairo and how displaced Iraqis become part of the art scene in Jordan and
poetry circles in Yemen.

14 Seteney Shami

Islam as Transnationalism

Another obviously salient discourse, practice and force in the Middle East and
beyond, is that of so-called Islamic fundamentalism. Why talk about a
fragmented Arab nationalism at all, given the mobilizing power of Islam in the
region today? Many would argue that 'secular' pan-Arabism is being replaced,
as identity and ideology, by Islamist movements. More generally, arguments
are being advanced that religious identities are overtaking local and national
ones, especially in countries frustrated with their economic underdevelopment
(Kaplan 1994). Islam has become the prime example and the test case of this
view.

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those displaced peasants from Syria and Lebanon in the 1880s who emigrated
to Honduras, Argentina and the West Indies? How does the presence of nonArab peoples in Arab societies reinforce, heighten or challenge Arab identity?
For example, how does the presence of the Armenian diaspora in Middle
Eastern countries articulate with Armenian communities world-wide? How are
we to situate the fact that in Jordan, since December 1994, the small Chechen
community, descendants of those displaced from the North Caucasus at the
turn of the century, have been keeping vigil and sending aid for the victims of
the Russian-Chechen war?
Equally important is how a North African film week in Amman, Jordan,
shocks its audience by presenting divergent ways of speaking Arabic and being
Arab. How a Lebanese diaspora in Europe produces an intellectual output for a
wider Arab audience. How a performance by the famous Lebanese singer
Fairuz in San Francisco is judged by its Arab audience in terms of how many of
her songs were dedicated to Palestine versus Lebanon. How Algerian and North
African migration to Europe implicates the Islamic component of their identity.
Nationalism, of course, is not the only force and practice operating in the
Middle East, and the region does need to be seen in its global context. It is
important to locate nationalist discourses as only one particular type of
discourse of unity. There are others, some now defunct such as the
International, others in the ascendant such as Islamic 'fundamentalism', and
even the beginnings of ecological holism. These are discourses that seek unity
on completely different bases from that of nationalism. Rather than seeing one
displacing the other, what needs to be understood are the intersections of
identifications that may be mutually reinforcing or contending, but always
existing in relation to one another. What has been described for Arab
nationalism could be applied to other nationalisms in the Middle East, which
may challenge each other's geographical boundaries. These relations, however,
cannot be understood if the analytical emphasis is solely on fluidity and
mobility on a global scale without an adequate awareness of the regionalisms,
and their geographies, which shape the allocation of resources and wealth, of
mutual and collective responsibility, and of territorial integrity across a
multiplicity of borders and boundaries.

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 15

Islam and its Boundaries

What is the geography of Islam, and where lie its outer and inner frontiers?
Would such an entity be traced through the historical reach of its empires, or
through the contemporary distribution of the adherents to its faith? In contrast
to such territorial or demographic projects, Asad (1986) has persuasively
argued that Islam, as an analytical category, can only be employed with
reference to a historically constituted discursive tradition, rather than to a
geographical entity, a social structure or a collection of beliefs and practices.
Yet, a central concept in this tradition is that of the Islamic 'Umma, which
appears to collapse precisely all these aspects into one 'civilizational' unity. For
Huntington and others, this unity is what provides the basis of contemporary
'fundamentalism'. Thus:
The sense of community is very much alive among Muslims today. It cuts across
regional, national and linguistic barriers to create a great brotherhood that
stretches from the shores of the Atlantic in Morocco to the Philippines... (Adams
1976:36).
In spite of some exceptions,
The force of this community feeling may also be seen at the level of international
relations... Again the affirmative attitude toward other Muslims is almost
instinctive, for religion and tradition have taught that Muslims are an ummah or
community different from all others (Adams 1976:37).
This 'instinctive attitude', according to the glossary of an introductory volume
on Islam, is correlated with definite political boundaries, if not borders:
'Ummah: 'community'; a term with varying connotations in different times and
places, but most commonly used for the religo-political community of Islam as a
whole (Savory 1976:203).

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Islam is being portrayed, especially by those engaged in drawing global

scenarios, as a newly virulent mobilization of an old rooted identity. Thus
Huntingdon, in his article 'The Clash of Civilizations?', talks about religion as
the most fundamental and indivisible of identities and draws global 'fault lines'
that simultaneously mark religious divides, civilizational boundaries and the
battle-fronts of the coming world conflict between 'the West and the Rest'
(1993:29,39). Critiques of Huntington's thesis point out the fault lines running
through his own argument: his definition of civilization, his assessment of
political trends and alliances, and the probity of his conclusions concerning
how to maintain Western hegemony (Foreign Affairs 1993). Equally problematic is the forced neatness of his geography that supposedly rests upon an
understanding of long-standing historical formations that have produced
'cultural entities'.

16 Seteney Shami
The question is, to which and whose 'common' usage of 'umma is reference
being made? It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the theological and
historical permutations of this term; however, a few points illustrate the
difficulties of 'fixing' its meaning and inscribing it in space. In the Qur'an, the
references to 'umma could be read to mean community, but also people, nation,
group, tribe, religion and model (to others) and is certainly not restricted to
Muslims only. It is also open to interpretation what kind of community is
implied:

Paret notes that the term is not even restricted to people but is applied to jinn
and to all living creatures in so far as they are part of this divine plan.
Therefore 'umma always has to be qualified to clarify the precise collectivity
to which it refers. In early Islamic times, the term 'Mohammad's 'Umma' at
first included the Jews of Medina, and then referred to Arabs, and then
excluded the former and expanded from the latter to include all Muslims (Paret
1987). In later eras, as Hourani's (1970) overview shows, there were a variety of
conceptualizations of the Islamic 'umma among Muslim philosophers: for some
it was the embodiment of the principles of Islam, for others it was the rule of
law, whereas for yet others it was a unity 'of minds and hearts, not of political
forms' (1970:19). Still later, for Arab intellectuals of what Hourani calls the
'liberal age' (1798-1939), the issue was revitalized in connection with the
encounter with colonialism, imperialism and nationalism.
In spite of this diversity of interpretations, 'umma and 'umma Muhammadiyya
are used interchangeably by Von Grunebaum (1955) throughout an
authoritative work on Islam as a 'cultural tradition'. Without presenting a
sustained interpretation of these terms, Von Grunebaum consistently attributes
to 'the community' self-consciousness, needs, desires and purposes.
Whether or not Muhammad had in the course of his career come to envisage his
mission as addressed to all mankind, the Muslim community did so interpret
it... die task of extending the realm of truth on earth will not be fulfilled as long
as non-Muslims remain in control of any part of this globe (1955:12).
It is precisely these types of summary statements (and the paranoia they seem
to invoke) that Asad (1986) seeks to replace with an understanding of Islam as
a discursive tradition, a concept that highlights the place of argument and
reasoning in striving for coherence and encompassing diversity. Islam as
discourse and practice has meant different things for the lives of Muslims
through different historical periods and successive empires. However, across
empires, geographical regions and cultures, there were (and are) institutions
engaged in the production and dissemination of a heterogeneous Islamic
discourse carrying within it an implied practice and a conception of historical

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The passages in the Kur'an, in which the word umma (plur. umam) occurs are so
varied that its meaning cannot be rigidly defined. This much however seems to be
certain, that it always refers to ethnical, linguistic or religious bodies of people
who are the objects of the divine plan of salvation (Paret 1987:1015).

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 17

Islamic Fundamentalism and the West

Provocative as it sounds, it may be useful to look at Islamic 'fundamentalism'
as a force being created in the West, and this in several different ways. First of
all, that an academic object of study called Islam was constructed in the West
has been definitively established by Edward Said's (1978) work on Orientalism.
While more self-critical and divested of many of its biases, 'Islamic Societies' as
a field of inquiry continues to hold centre stage in Middle Eastern studies
today. The historical distortion involved in ignoring the enduring presence of
Islam in Europe as well as the indigenousness of Judaism and Christianity to
the Middle East (Asad 1986) runs the risk of seeing East and West as
homogeneous categories, and reproducing them as metaphysical entities
opposed essentially in terms of Islam versus modernity.
Beyond scholarly constructions and more concretely, Islamist movements
have also certainly found their voice in the West, as political organization as

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continuity. Thus merchants, bureaucrats, scholars, mystics, nomads, and other

mobile populations of the pre-modem world, would encounter in cities across
vast distances, familiar yet distinct institutions and languages, as has been
recorded in the genre of travel literature {adab al-rihla).9
Within Islam as a tradition, it is at least useful to distinguish between faith,
community, identity and political organization in order to emphasize the
heterogeneity of practices and institutions and geographies operating within
each of these categories. The scope and reach of the practices encoded in
Islamic tradition were always determined, and limited, by the nature of its
institutions and consequently differed across time and space. As Asad notes:
"There has never been any Muslim society in which the religious law of Islam
has governed more than a fragment of social life' (1986:13). Outside daily life,
however, there were and are certain practices, such as the pilgrimage to Mecca,
which assert for the pilgrims, during a moment of heightened sensibility, a
feeling of commonality and (imagined) community. The reorganization of
daily routines during Ramadan, the fasting month, carries a similar meaning.
Yet, again, at every such occasion, the 'Muslim "Other"' (Eickelman and
Piscatori 1990:xv) is also encountered.
Islam, therefore, does have a geography. Certain spaces, buildings, cities and
locations all have their place in the construction of the imaginative domain of
dar ul-hlam (the house of Islam). However, this domain is better conceptualized as one of interpenetrations rather than one of blocs and divides. Its
geography is made and remade through travel, movement and encounter. The
point is that, historically, Islam has been a trans-state, trans-societal
phenomenon reproduced, in its diversity, through a circulation of goods,
ideas and people.10 Transnationalism, in this sense, is hardly new to Islam,
although the state entities concerned did not imagine themselves as nations.
What is new today is the expansion of the centres that produce Islam, perhaps
even the transference of these centres, to Western Europe and North America.

18 Seteney Shami

When the question is posed, 'Who are you?', the Muslim may reply in terms of
family, regional associations or even national identity, but he willfinda place also
for his 'Muslimness'. In the past his identity as a Muslim would likely have
loomed foremost in his mind (Adams 1976:37).

In place of such assumptions, a closer look at how empires, as opposed to

national states, constructed identity is clearly warranted. Keeping in mind that
after the first century AH and the collapse of the Ummayad Caliphate (750 AD),
there was no unified Islamic empire, how were identity and Islamic tradition
experienced at the local level, and how was the 'umma imagined?
It is against the background of this sort of historical investigation that one
must interpret the contemporary growth of a populist Islamic identity that
conceptualizes itself in terms of common blood across the face of the globe.
Demonstrators in Pakistan carrying a sign reading 'Yesterday Bosnia, Today
Chechnya, Tomorrow Who?' are making a statement about the shedding of a
common Muslim blood. They are also concurring with Huntingdon's conclusion, that 'Islam has bloody borders' (1993:35), although they would strongly
differ with Huntington in allocating the responsibility for this bloodshed.
Ethnography in a Transnational World

A transnationalist perspective highlights the interpenetration of peoples across

the world, which problematizes the relationship between boundaries,

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well as an identity that unifies immigrants and labour migrants and the
generally disenfranchised across and between nationalities and ethnicities.
Many of the major actors in Islamist movements have lived in the West:
Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris, for example, and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman
in New Jersey. Islam for many Arab, Asian and African migrants in the West is
a way of being global and transnational but not on Western terms." It would
appear important to engage in a comparative study of so-called fundamentalist
discourses in different settings, to trace the genealogies and contending visions
in this global discourse, instead of assuming that the source is in the Middle
East and that the West is simply at the receiving end. In other words, if Islamist
movements today are a result of transnational interaction, then the flows
cannot be assumed to be in one direction only.
Islam todayreflectsand participates in the making of a transnational world. It
has an increased capacity of producing homogeneity through industrialcapitalist means of communication (Asad 1986) and through mass education
(Eickehnan 1989), and it is shaped through the encounters between dislocated
peoples. It is not that migrants from Islamic countries 'carry' fundamentalism
with them to the 'new world', it is encounters and experiences across boundaries
that engender new interpretations of Islamic identity and faith. The above
discussion of 'umma serves as a word of caution against assuming a historical
homogeneity and solidarity based on Islamic identity. This argument may go
against the grain of most Islamic historians, who generally accept the view that:

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 19

One Life and its Boundaries

Aman's life-story takes us from her earliest childhood memories until she
reaches the age of seventeen. It is a detailed, well-written and lively narrative,
starting with an account of her grandmother's, and then mother's, life and
marriages. It is a story of women. Men as fathers, husbands, lovers, sons,
brothers, good and bad government officials and military personnel, are
present but transient.
Aman's mother goes through seven marriages, the first two arranged by her
father and the rest by herself. Aman's happy memories are of her pastoral
childhood. Aman, her mother and grandmother join a number of families that
make up the herding group. Her father drops in every now and then. Life while
moving around the pasture-lands of the Somali interior is presented as happy,
easy, beautiful and fun. Soon, however, there is a drought, the animals die of
disease, and Aman's mother moves to a village where she tries to sustain her
family by peddling vegetables, fruit and milk.
This is the first rupture, and Aman's life after that is a series of ruptures,
where every difficult situation is resolved by moving away or running away.
The economic situation of the family continuously wavers. At the age of
eight Aman decides to work as a maid and bakes bread to sell in the
marketplace. Around this time, she is circumcised, begins to go to school and
develops a taste for the movies. Then, at the age of twelve she falls in love with
Antony, an Italianfifteenyear old. There is afight,instigated by Aman's young
male relatives, Antony is beaten badly and a relative who acted as the gobetween is killed. Antony is sent to Italy.

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nationalism and other salient or emergent identities. This has been invaluable
in pointing out the static nature of previous understandings of society, culture
and identity. Yet images of fluidity obscure much as well. Through semantic
manipulation, refugees become a declining phenomenon and disappear as a
category. Enduring regional forces of mobility and sentiment such as
'Arabness' are displaced by cultural configurations such as 'Islam'. Paradoxically, situating Islam as the force in the Middle East fixes its contested
meanings and denies its historic transnational character. It also obscures the
intersection of religious and secular meanings in nationalist discourses, as for
example in the concept of the Arab 'umma, as well as how religious discourses
are informed by concepts of modernity.12
How is this complex world of national boundaries, Islam, globalization and
transnationalism to be conveyed in ethnography? One way would appear to be
through recording life-histories, a textual device with a long tradition in
anthropology. Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl by Aman (Barnes and Boddy
1994) is advertised on the back cover as 'the true story of what life is like for a
woman in Somalia... while at the same time illuminating the female experience
everywhere.' This is obviously a story for today's worldin the first person
and local in its narrative form, global in its implications.

20

Seteney Shami

When Somalia is rocked by Siyaad Barre's coup in 1969, Paul is deported

together with all other foreigners, and Aman is denied a passport. The passport
official tells her that she shouldn't be married to a white man. He says 'We're
not pimps, that we should give you passports so you can go and sell your
body... Go find a man who is black like you and leave the white ones alone...'
(p. 250). Paul sends Aman her divorce paper and she is alone again. Harassed
by soldiers when she resumes her round of nightclubs and restaurants, she
decides to leave Somalia. She leaves her son from Paul with her mother, takes a
truck to the Kenyan border, crosses on foot, ends up in Mombasa where she
gets emergency documentation and crosses to Tanzania where she marries a
Somali man who is prosperous in the trucking business.
Aman is now seventeen. She says "This is where I would like to end my story.
I struggled, and I survived' (p. 288).
Of course, her story does not end here. From the introduction we know that
she met the first anthropologist (Barnes) in Italy and that she was married to an
American serviceman at the time. At the time of the book's publication, Aman
is living in the United States, though it is not said if she is married or not.
In the introduction and afterword of the book (by Boddy), Aman's life is
represented as illustrating the changing of Somalia from a traditional pastoral
economy and society to the war-torn terrain of today.
... Somalia today is a tragic country, a land of death and refugees... Aman
herself now resides abroad. Yet her story allows us to turn the clock back to a
more peaceful time, when Mogadishu, the capital city, was hailed as the safest city
in East Africarelatively safe, that is, if you were a young girl on the run; safe
once you knew how to handle men. Aman's tale of hardship and triumph, of
"learning"becoming street and socially wiseallows us privileged insight into
the world of Somalia's most vulnerable citizen: the female child (x; emphasis in
the original).
Yet even the bare outline of Aman's narrative makes it strikingly clear that this
is a life story of a woman who is a refugee, has lived her childhood as a refugee,
and furthermore, is a third generation refugee. Aman's grandmother fled the
1890 battles between Ethiopia and Somali tribesmen in which all her male

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After this, the Romeo and Juliet plot takes a very local turn. Aman arranges
her own marriage to an older rich man, keeping it a secret from her mother, but
with the encouragement of an uncle. In spite of this decision, taking the brideprice herself, she runs away on her wedding night. After several unsuccessful
attempts by her family to affect a reconciliation with her husband, she finally
runs away to Mogadishu. There she goes from one relative's house to another,
meeting other runaways, getting to know girls from the wealthier classes, going
to parties, wearing western clothes, cutting her hair, putting on make-up. There
is a series of boyfriends and in the meantime, through the intercession of
several relatives, Aman arranges her divorce from her first husband. Soon
after, she marries Paul, a half-Indian, half-Arab Adenese guitarist in a rock
band in Mogadishu.

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies 21

Salient here are the controls intended to discipline women's lives:... girls are
"circumcised"... women's marriages are, for the most part, arranged; women and
men, in different ways abide by an honour code comparable to those found
throughout North Africa and the Islamic Middle East; married women are liable to

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relatives were killed. After a long trek with her three sisters and three female
cousins, they each got married to the first man who would take them. Marriage
emerges as a main strategy for women in dislocated circumstances. Concerning
her mother's first marriage Aman says 'My granddaddy gave my mama away
fast, before the Italians could grab her' (p. 7). Aman's mother's third and
fourth husbands were in the Italian Somali army and dispatched to Ethiopia
where the Italians were fighting the British. Later, drought made Aman's
mother an environmental refugee, constantly trying but unable to reinsert
herself into a pastoral life.
Struggles with poverty are what drive Aman herself to seek money through
mobility, men and marriage. Throughout her story, Aman is sending money to
her mother and grandmother. Finally, Aman herself is displaced from Somalia
and begins her journey to Kenya, Tanzania, Italy and the United States.
The analytical section in the afterword referring most directly to Aman's
narrative is entitled 'The Position of Women: Gender, Honour, Female
Circumcision'. Thus politics, dislocation, state policies, drought and poverty
are given little weight compared with the 'intertwining of sadism and sexuality
in a culture that practises female circumcision' (p. 108-9). The inferior status of
women is seen as inevitable in a society where people 'are raised to believe that
gender inequality is natural, as counselled by Islam' (p. 109). Marriage is
discussed entirely in terms of traditional patriarchal concerns.
Aman's story is therefore framed as one woman's search for freedom and
triumph over the restrictions imposed by her culture, a high-spirited woman
seeking to escape the prison of her Islamic society. Her vulnerability is solely
the outcome of her gender.
The Afterword gives important contextual information concerning colonial
and post-colonial policies that disrupted herding patterns, divided tribes across
borders, provoked conflict with Ethiopia and Kenya, induced population
movements within Somalia as well as population expulsions. Aman's tale itself
includesreferencesto Italian colonization (for example, in the conflict over her
relationship with Antony) and to exclusionary nationalism (the official
disapproval of her marriage to Paul). Although these are certainly instances
of patriarchy, and of state patriarchy, they hardly fit a framework that portrays
Aman's status and experiences as a woman in terms of ahistorical Islamic and
Somali tradition.
In spite of these discrepancies between Aman's narrative and the analytical
framework, Boddy generalizes by outlining similarities between Somalia and
Sudan where she herself has done fieldwork. She explains discrepancies in
terms of individual agency and cultural manoeuvrability and sums up women's
status in these societies as follows:

22 Seteney Shami
be possessed by capricious spirits and to participate in a cult called 'zar' (p. ix,
emphasis mine).

A Final Word
How is it that a feminist ethnography, which seeks to expose the salience of
gender inequalities, resorts to an uncritical representation of tradition? Why
are the details of a life of constant dislocation reduced to the disciplinary power
ofreligion?Where is 'Islam' and 'Somali Society' to be located as Aman spends
her youth negotiating permits and crossing borders? Feminism, the historical
imagination and critical ethnography, appear to be at cross purposes when it
comes to representing transnational lives.
There is a process that determines what our analytical gaze rests upon, and
this process eliminates as many phenomena as it elucidates. In the World
Refugee Survey, Ferris makes the important point that '... the powerful
brokers in the international game not only don't play by the rules, but are
constantly rewriting them.. .'(1994:25). Anthropologists may also be seen as
one of these brokersparticipants in powerful textualizing enterprises
through their practice of ethnography and their writing and rewriting of the
ways in which the peoples of the world are represented.
It is my firm belief that Elizabeth Colson would not have misread Aman's
story. She depicts her own perspective in the following words (and we may
listen with Aman in our minds):

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It is startling to encounter such a framework for such a narrative. Neither

Aman's nor her mother's nor her grandmother's lives fit these generalizations
although Aman says things that may appear to reinforce them. Boddy portrays
Aman as equivocal about her culture and tries to highlight Aman's agency and
decision-making. Aman is clearly a determined woman, rebellious of gender
inequalities, but equally of class inequalities, concerning which Boddy makes
no mention. Aman's life differs significantly in its detail from her mother's.
However, Aman's mother is no less 'rebellious', although she achieves through
marriages what Aman strives to achieve through a series of liaisons. Both
practise geographical mobility as a strategy of survival. Both seek independence and self-sufficiency. Yet both are passionate women who love at least
some of the men they marry and are deeply attached to their children and to
each other.
If, as the authors maintain, Aman's story represents a general experience,
then Somalia simply cannot be discussed in terms of a herding culture
intersecting with Islam, and somehow surviving intact through the social
upheaval discussed under a different heading of 'polities'. Aman's narrative is
here deployed as a legitimation of standard representations of Islamic,
traditional society, where politics and history are simply the background for
an unchanging and essential experience of womanhood. In order to do this
Somali society itself has to be dehistoricized and portrayed as static and
peaceful.

Trawnationalism and Refugee Studies

23

In the first place my central focus is on how people behave and the relevance of
that behaviour for their own further actions and the activities of others. I assume
that they are pursuing goals and have choices, and that these are limited both by
their own skills and by the fact that they compete with others in a social universe
where access to power is unequal. People act in an opportunistic fashion, which
does not mean that they have no regard for others or that they lack generosity.
But they are not bound to a code that tells them what must be done. They act and
then explain their actions, to themselves and others, in universalistic terms to
justify what was in fact contingent Since the conditions under which choices are
made shift from one moment to the next, all action in a sense is exceptional and
can be justified as such (1989:2).

... whatever it is we do observe, it is not an integrated culture or an integrated

social system. Of course it may be more comforting to talk in terms of cultures
rather than people, for while culture can be destroyed... culture cannot be hurt.
People can be, and horribly so (1989:3).
1. Multinational corporations are those 'integrating more or less self-contained production and
marketing facilities in a number of different national sites' while transnational corporations 'take a
single production process, redistribute it across sites in different areas of the world and use ever
faster communications to synchronize the interactions of its interdependent parts' (Rouse
1995:367).
2. One of the most interesting issues brought out by the transnationalist perspective is that of the
constructed nature of 'nations' and the increasing contestation of the cultural integrity of
'territorial' states (see among others, Appadurai 1990, 1993, Bhabha 1990, Foster 1991).
3. Frelick't evaluation is vindicated by the Serb attacks on, and takeover of, the Muslim 'safe
havens' in Bosnia in July/August 1995.
4 This term is borrowed from Shapiro (1994:491) who describes 'the structures of inattention'
embedded in geographical mapping and nation-building.
5. The refugee population in the Middle East is estimated at 7,629,000 (US Committee for
Refugees 1994). Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians and Lebanese have all been subjected to
displacement due to the Arab-Israeli wars. The Iran-Iraq war led to a large influx of Kurds into
Turkey which escalated dramatically during the Gulf War of 1991. In Lebanon, Yemen, the Sudan,
and Somalia, civil wars, as well as drought and famine in the latter two, have led to internal and
external displacement as well as to the influx of refugees to major cities. Border disputes in North
Africa have also taken their toll. Most recently, the Gulf crisis and war of 1990/1991 caused the
displacement of between four and five million people (Van Hear 1991). These included guest
workers, especially South and Southeast Asians, fleeing Iraq and Kuwait, as well as groups within
Iraq, most notably the inhabitants of Baghdad, the Kurds, and the Shiites. The crisis also generated
a unique 'refugee movement' of affluent Kuwaiti citizens, and the expulsion of over 300,000
Palestinians and Jordanians, as well as uncounted Sudanese and Yemenis, from various Gulf states.
The magnitude of this displacement serves as a poignant example of the importance of the
phenomenon of war refugees in the Middle East, as well as of its complexity.
6. Dawk means 'State' while qutr is both more general and more specific, and is defined in the
dictionary as 'region, quarter, district, section, tract of land, zone, country, land'. The Egyptian
constitution of 1958 states that the United Arab Republic is part of the Arab "umma. The name
UAR itself refers to the short-lived unification between Egypt and Syria. Egypt, in conventional
political science wisdom, is the state with the most viable underpinnings of a nation-state and even
so, has a constitution with the implication that it is a transient, or at least a partial, phenomenon.
7. The Prime Minister of Jordan further added that 'Jordan will not allow General Hussein to
smuggle the secrets of Iraq became we are no less nationalistic than any other Arab.' (Al-Dustur 18/

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The authors of Aman may do well to reflect on their interpretive choices, for as
Professor Colson says:

24 Seteney Shami

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Erhan (1994).

Transnationalism and Refugee Studies

25

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26 Seteney Shami

I would like to acknowledge the generosity of the Chicago Humanities. Institute at the
University of Chicago, and its director Dr. Arjun Appadurai, in providing research
facilities and arranging library privileges during the writing of this paper.

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