Lukewarm about Arab cool

Pep Montserrat for The National

Beirut sometime last year, on one of the beaches that dot the landscape south of the city. I'm here with a Lebanese musician, whose voice fills the gritty bars of Gemmayzeh on the weekends and who is now dancing to the rhythmic beat of Lebanese electronica, a silhouette against the waves.
The sun will rise any minute and we will drive, eyes half closed, sand in our hair, back to the urban world. At moments like this, I understand why people fall in love with the Arab world and wonder why anyone would leave.
Few who have visited the region walk away without similar memories, yet the narrative of those who don't visit or don't understand what they see is often quite different, a vision rooted in endless political troubles or extravagant wealth. Until the revolutions in North Africa began earlier this year, few of those long-held ideas were challenged.
This tapestry of an alternatively stagnant or opulent region, filled with apathy or luxury, which has gained currency among a host of Arab-watchers and a handful of Arabs themselves, is fatally flawed. Tug even briefly at its narrative thread and it unravels, revealing an outdated orientalism underpinning it.
To see why, start with that most ephemeral of ascriptions, the idea that the Arab world is suddenly "cool". Coolness is impossible to define, though entire industries thrive on a manufactured idea of spontaneous consensus. As near as possible, coolness is objective subjectivity: the belief of a select group of people that something matters, transmitted to a wider group who then believe it.
This is the case with music and fashion, where trends that are created from a consensus seem to be spotted like rare animals.
The current ascription of coolness to the Arab world because of the revolutionary spirit coursing through it hangs on two related ideas of coolness, one aspirational, the other assertive.
The aspirational part relies on the vague idea that revolutions are always cool, in the sense that upending an old order is exciting. Yet these moments are exciting because they can plunge either way, and somehow reducing this movement to fashion minimises the suffering and experiences of the people. As a journalist colleague pointed out:"It's distasteful to be talking about cool at a time when there's a war going on."
(This ascription also ignores the immense complicity of other countries in maintaining the status quo in Qaddafi's Libya and Mubarak's Egypt. Speaking metaphorically, many of those now cheering from the sidelines were handing out weapons before the game.)
Moreover, the idea that revolution is the only aspirational aspect of Arab culture ignores the rather glaring fact that the region's culture has been interesting to outsiders for centuries. Some elements of Arab culture have travelled easily around the world: one can find the influences of Arab literature, food and design everywhere, which is not the case, for example, with Russian décor or English cuisine.
The second part of this might be called assertive coolness, the implication that one region has the right to spot and thus confer social approval on another.
One of the hallmarks of the Arab revolutions has been how they have comprehensively undermined notions of the importance of the gaze of the Other (where the other is the West), not by proving it wrong, but by rendering it redundant. The military superiority of the West and its propensity to use that to inflict violence for political gain has meant that in many countries, particularly those that were colonised, the idea of the West still functions as a yardstick against which culture and society is measured.
That solipsistic idea has been maintained in the minds of many politicians, journalists, even Western publics; that the measure that matters is the measure they provide.
Thus for many in the West, it is hard to conceive of a reality that does not, by implication, fit into this framework.
One of the reasons why Western watchers have been so far on the wrong side of the public mood in the Arab world is that, for so many years, they were absorbing incorrect information. Talk of the stagnation of the region was framed as if it were a reflection of the propensities of Arab culture - or, for the more racist, talk of an Arab mindset - rather than the result of continued outside financial and military backing of unrepresentative regimes. The Arabs did not want to be apathetic, but the lack of political space forced the removal of participation from the political sphere.
Ditto the often meaningless discussion of modernity, as if the millions of people languishing at the tail-end of capitalism in the West were somehow more modern than the urbanites of Beirut and Baghdad.
Comparing the masses of poor in the Arab world to the rich elite of the West set up an impossible dichotomy, one that obscured understanding of a complex region while also whitewashing the lives of the millions of poor in the West.
Thus when the spark came in Tunisia, the framework of the Western gaze suddenly seemed redundant. It was the Arabs themselves who provided the leadership and tactics that overthrew the Western-backed regimes and Al Jazeera that provided the context and reporting.
American and European politicians scrambled to piggyback on the popular protests and Western media tried to frame a narrative that included a Western component. This process seemed to offer Americans and Europeans a compensatory feeling of significance, especially important given that their billion-dollar, decades-old constriction was unravelling.
It is this context that the assertion of coolness - and more broadly, the conference of approval - needs to be understood, as an attempt to explain the complexities of what is now happening in the region within the familiar language and framework of fashion. But that framework is redundant: the Arabs are not protesting because it's cool, they are protesting because it's essential. Far from being reflected through the gaze of the West, the revolutions have reduced the West to standing on the sidelines, watching a movement it can barely understand.
Writing from the region, it is hard to be comforted by the idea of popular uprisings having popular appeal abroad, given that they have been tough and bloody and may get bloodier still. There are plenty of sons who will not be going home, plenty of fathers who will not know their children. Such tragedy is only fashionable in the abstract.
In the West, we have struggled to understand all this because we've been using the wrong framework, viewing the region through the wrong lens. The Arabs haven't become cool just because we've noticed. Like walking in halfway through a movie and trying to guess what is happening, the West is only now catching up with a long-unfolding plot.
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