Swimming Against the Tide:
Personal Passions and Academic Fashions
(1997 MESA Presidential Address) Leila Fawaz

A new academic fashion in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and cultural criticism is to “foreground” authors in works of scholarship. But it is not in imitation of what is currently fashionable that I have chosen to make my address autobiographical. I am a historian who enjoys writing narrative history and who elsewhere has argued that the narrative remains as valuable and as legitimate in modern scholarship as theory. So here I wish to tell a story that may hold some lessons for those scholars who seek freedom from the constraints imposed both by the norms of Middle Eastern societies and by the rules of the western academy. In our post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial world, all the certitudes have been shaken, and the narrative might well be the only kind of story that we can relate to with any kind of authority.

If there is any lesson to be learned from this one career that is mine, it is to follow one's heart, to plunge into a subject, and seize opportunities with the passion of an explorer and without consideration for what is “useful” or “safe” or “needed.” Many decades ago, when I was watching the man who was to become my husband excel at the sport of tennis – his hobby when he was not absorbed in his otherwise all-consuming medical training – I understood the elementary and essential reality that if you truly love what you do, if you give your absolute best in one area that you are passionate about, you will acquire confidence and resilience in the face of challenges that will spill over into other areas of your life and help you do well. What matters is that in one area, for however brief a time we are on this planet, we do what we do with passion and joy.

They say that the humanities and social sciences are no longer “safe” careers. They say that the “global” is more important than the “regional.” They say that “theory” is more worthy than the “narrative.” Are they not just making a new elitism of their intellectual preferences? I did not leave behind the biases and intolerance of the circles that surrounded us in my youth on one continent merely to embrace those of the academic circles I chose to be part of on another. Let us follow our heart and study what we love so the we can be good at it, not what others think is currently worthwhile. If this field is to survive the onslaughts of the judgmental minority who tell us that, for example, global is bigger and better and regional is peripheral and trivial, its young scholars have to be allowed to be passionate about their areas of study. They have to love it in the different ways that appeal to them to excel in it, and when they will, all this talk about the end of regional studies – mind you, talk heard only in American academic circles – will recede. One makes one's intellectual choices along the way – at least I did. Certainly I never planned to have a career, I drifted into one because I loved what I did and just kept on doing it.

I was born in Khartoum in the Sudan. Far from being the country of civil war or famine that it is to many today, in the 1940s it was a land of opportunity, especially for educated Arabs from Egypt, Greater Syria, and elsewhere seeking employment in what were then still British-dominated territories. Charles Issawi's uncle and my father were inseparable, as were many of the members of such Christian, Muslim, or Druze families as the Kfourys, Licos, Maaloufs, Khabbbaz, Mirhijs, Hajjars, Tutunjis, Atiyahs, Bitars, Kronfols, Qattans, Salmans, and others. My father's young bride, my future mother, was enchanted by the beauty of the land, the orderliness of its administration, Khartoum's cosmopolitan and elegant social life, the honesty of its people, and the relative tolerance of its communities (which Edward Atiyah, the Lebanese writer who served as public relations officer in the Sudan government and later as secretary in the Arab Office in London, also praised in his memoirs).

The boundaries between foreign communities were rarely crossed, however. Along the banks of the Nile river on the outskirts of Khartoum's market place were the beautiful villas and houses of the most senior British civil service and the Grand Hotel which, when it got too full, would anchor a boat on the shore to serve as annex. Adjacent to, but not on the waterfront were the streets where the junior British civil servants lived together with the leading Greek, Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, and Armenian businessmen, teachers, and government employees; in other areas the various foreign national groups led segregated lives, and the Sudanese mostly lived in Omdurman. Close to the river, the houses were one story, with living and dining areas, a kitchen, a bathroom, and an outhouse which was cleaned in the middle of the night by a caretaker who arrived on a donkey to change the buckets half full of sand. Fans cooled the houses during the day; at night people ate and slept in the garden, if they had one, or on the roof if they did not. Milk was delivered to my parents' bedside, as the woman who delivered it crossed the garden hedge just where they slept.

Social life was active if status conscious. Each community had its own social club – the English, of course, had the most prestigious ones: a junior club for middle- and lower-ranking town residents, and a senior club where other nationals considered it a privilege to be invited. Everyone looked forward to evenings at the nightclubs, especially when the famed Egyptian dancer Tahiyya Karyoka performed, or when elegant expatriate ladies modeled dresses that they sold to raise money for charity. Now and again, the Lebanese and Syrians took the boat and overnight train to Cairo to enjoy a vacation at the old Shepherd's Hotel before it burned down.

As a child I conceived a great wish to be thought Sudanese. When a few years later, against our wishes and in compliance with those of our parents, we children were sent back to Lebanon to take advantage of its schools, I told everyone that I was Sudanese not Lebanese. For a child of Lebanese parents born and bred in Khartoum and now living in the quaint if once provincial eastern Achrafiyeh quarter of Beirut, and as a Greek Orthodox child whose early years were spent with Muslims, the strict Catholic school in Beirut was not a good match. I was the despair of the nuns of Nazareth. To the amusement of relatives I prayed the way the people I cared for had done in the Sudan, prostrate on my knees, with my head touching the floor and my hands extended in prayer, proclaiming that God was Great and Merciful and that Muhammad was his prophet. In such ways, the first layers of our complicated identities begin to form, a long way back, as we try, sometimes against all odds, to be who we want to be, not only who we happen to be.

How I survived the strictures of the well-meaning nuns I will never know, probably in part because by the time I was thirteen they expelled me from their walled convent in the hills of Achrafiyeh and told my mother to find me a school more suited to my temperament – whatever that meant, I was fully aware that it was not a compliment. By then, we lived in Ras Beirut on the western side of the city, known for its mix of religious and national communities and for its worldliness. How cosmopolitan Ras Beirut really was is questionable – the sociologist Samir Khalaf has shown that close family ties and traditional life persisted despite the appearance of urbane modern living – but it was the most sophisticated part of the most commercial and western of the Arab cities from the 1950s to the early 1970s. It was where most of the foreign consulates, embassies, and schools were located, including the renown American University of Beirut a few streets down from Hamra, the elegant and busy shopping street where prosperous locals and foreigners mingled in shops, cafes, and cinemas.

It was the predictability and simplicity of daily life and, most of all, the latitude given us at home that safeguarded our freedom and independence of mind in a society where fear of “al wu eel” – gossip – governed behavior and left little room for youthful rebellion. How I loved our apartment building, with relatives and family friends on every floor. If one said no to a request, all we had to do was approach another until eventually someone said yes. In this way, we learned to get our way unhampered by social convention. Our family, friends, and neighbors freed us from the very traditions they were there to uphold.

Fighting convention in small ways prepared us to fight them in bigger ways as time went by. Although it was perfectly acceptable, even advisable, for a young woman to have an education, it was not to be single-mindedly pursued once she became engaged or was married – after all, why seek anything more? Love of learning, not to mention ambition on our part made people uncomfortable, however educated they themselves were. Neighbors who could see into our bedroom watched me forever bent over my writing table and became concerned lest this excess of reading and writing would damage my eyesight.

Despite the support of family and, later, in-laws, such reservations persisted. In graduate school some of our male friends found it bizarre that, now married, some of us would still be devoting so much time to our studies. On one occasion a woman friend and I commented to one of them that he would find it perfectly normal for us to spend the whole day playing cards or shopping, but that he thought it a sad reflection on us that, instead, we chose to spend our time in libraries. Poetic justice, then, that he ended up marrying a woman who appeared to be all feminine and fragile but who turned out to be completely committed to work outside the home and who, despite a happy marriage, motherhood, and an active social life, persisted in having a career.

The best and most memorable times were the carefree summers spent in the mountains. In those days, middle- and upper-middle-class families practiced “estivage," leaving the capital in the hot summer months for villages and resorts in the cool Lebanese mountains. In the Matn district northeast of Beirut, offering spectacular views of both the Mediterranean below and of the snowy mountains above, the village of Dhour Shweir provided a life that was the epitome of happiness to generations of Lebanese youth who continue to cherish it in middle age. My love for that village was put to the test by Edward Said's criticism of it. When we gently argued about it, he joked with me why don't I just write his memoirs for him, while I took pleasure in reminding him that some of his own relatives had the good sense to buy a home there. A great many of us still keep the warm memories and lasting friendships we associate it with.

Dhour Shweir branched off from a small village center, where a few churches, grocers, barbers, and cinemas clustered, to neighborhoods of stone houses and small apartment buildings, or terraced fields in the midst of limestone rocks and pine forests. There were no prefabricated games, no computers, televisions, no V.C.R.'s; we had virtually no schedules for leisure time -- art or sports lessons. What we had were a great many pine trees, hills, and valleys for picnics, walks, bicycle trips, and to play in. We could cross the whole village in no time and either go to the old Shweir or continue along the main road from Beirut to the Mountains to the local “Bois de Boulogne" or in the opposite direction towards the village of Bikfaya. We invented games, play acted, stole fruit from the apple orchids and green grapes from the vineyards, built bonfires, and read voraciously. We felt very grown up when on occasional Saturdays our fathers would take us with them to eat eggs with qawirma (meat, fat, and onions) served in the pan at al-Sarfad, a small cafe overlooking the valley where they and their friends would discuss politics. I would also try, without success, to join my older sister and her friends on their outings, or would tolerate, or oppress, my younger brother.

When we reached our teens, differences between the cultures of the city and the mountain that were invisible to us as children began to surface. The sense of family obligations so marvelously explained by the anthropologist Andrea Rugh in her recent study of a small Syrian village applied far more to the villages and towns of Mount Lebanon than to Ras Beirut where the mix of populations and the inevitable exposure to outsiders had weakened its conventions in comparison to those of the mountain. There was no privacy; everything was village business. When the grocer protested to our family help that it was unseemly for teenage girls to ride bicycles, we gave it up. When village matrons gently told us that it was unbecoming to speak loudly, or to show our teeth when we laughed, or to spend unsupervised time with young men, we learned with varying degrees of success to conform. We toned down our style, took up needlework, learned to cover our mouths when we laughed, and found pleasure in taking leisurely walks through the village, or going to the movies, or playing volley ball and tennis at the local club. We loved the village enough to respect its traditions, although with less and less conviction as the years went by.

The predictability of my summers was not echoed in my schooling. After my rout by the Nazareth nuns, my mother enrolled me in the much-sought-after premier school for girls, the College Protestant Francais, in west Beirut. I fell immediately in love with that school: it was as bright as my first school had been gloomy, as modern as my first school had been antiquated, as diverse as my first school had been homogeneous. At the convent, the overwhelming majority of students were Catholics from east Beirut whose mothers had attended the same school; at the College my classmates were Druze, Jewish, Sunni, Shi'i, and Christian; they came from different backgrounds, high society and low and showily nouveau riches.

I turned my energies to my studies where in the past I had used them mostly to join my fellow youthful conspirators to torment my robed instructors. For the first time I fell in love with the Arabic language, as Nazik Yared, a charismatic instructor, now a legend among the thousands of us whose lives she touched, drew us into the mysteries of Arabic grammar and the beauties of its literature. She was only one of the best in a series of wonderful teachers who introduced us to two worlds -- our own Lebanese and Arab one and France, whose detailed map all of us could draw from memory and whose history all of us had at our fingertips. Although the College gave us excellent tutelage in our own language and history, like foreign-run schools in colonial and post-colonial regions it also taught us notions of European, especially French, superiority. We were instructed about the world on our side of the Mediterranean only in relation to its ancient and past glories; of the present -- the harsh realities outside our classrooms, the build-up of Arab national aspirations and disappointments -- we knew nothing. We were wound in a cocoon, nurtured by the beauties of the arts, humanities, social, and natural sciences, but cut off from the hard realities around us. We were so encouraged to speak French with one another that even now in middle age, we lapse into French when we meet former schoolmates. At home, in that way that people who only speak one language either despise or admire, we spoke a mix of Lebanese dialect and French. We knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was more elegant to speak French than Arabic and more refined to listen to Western than to Middle Eastern music. Unlike today's Lebanese youth, we would not have been caught dead belly dancing, but it was chic to chacha and tango.

In the 1950s, war was at our doorsteps and civil war in our midst. The refugees from the first Arab-Israeli encounters were flooding into Lebanon to settle in the shanty towns on the outskirts of the capital but, like the three monkeys, we neither heard, saw, or spoke of them. Prejudice comes in various forms, one of which is to look the other way. We did just that. We learned to pretend that regional problems did not exist; we built walls, sometimes quite literally, around unpleasant realities. On the way to Matn, near the harbor on the outskirts of Beirut we drove by the slums of Karantina where ragged children could be seen from the passing cars until cement walls were erected around the slums so we no longer had to be disturbed by such brief encounters with poverty and misery. Everything conspired to keep us ignorant and blissful, and we let it happen.

What an awakening it was to attend the university! I had a field day at the American University of Beirut (AUB). I signed up for anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature. I enjoyed my readings, but most of all, I was swept off my feet by history, any history, all history. My days were filled with the Ottoman centuries, the "Eastern Question", the American frontier, Arab history, the Russian revolution, the age of nationalism, the German underground, and, my favorite, the French revolution. I puzzled over why, why not, or how empires, popular movements, and revolutions shaped our destinies. I could not get enough of it, and crammed a two-year MA program of eight courses and a thesis into nine months.

But by then politics could no longer be ignored. The protective cocoon I had lived in burst as soon as I attended university. The student body was more diverse than any other I had known, and the many who cared deeply about national causes made it impossible for the rest of us to remain indifferent to the tensions in Lebanon and around it. For a long time, I refused to be swayed by the arguments of the pan-Arabists; blind to the obvious need for more than one faction to have a fight, I blamed them for the escalation of violence on campus as shouting matches were replaced by brawls and as it became more and more common for students to hurl chairs, fire hydrants, and anything else they could lay their hands on, at one another. Eventually guns made their way onto campus, but by that time I had moved on to study in the United States where I had to face battles of a different kind.

The 1967 war changed all of us. Throughout the Six-Day War, which started on Monday June 5, the campus was delirious with excitement. We followed the war on the radio. Overnight, the student milk bar was turned into a make-shift command center for the war effort where students could debate the news, donate blood, and register for the army. Buses with medical and other student volunteers headed for Damascus. In the middle of the campus, on the second floor of West Hall which housed the student union, loudspeakers were hastily installed to rally students or inform them of the latest news from the front. Students listened intently to Ahmad Said of the "Voice of the Arabs" radio station in Cairo, as he described the Arab victories. They cheered when they heard of one Israeli plane after another being shot down. Classes had been suspended and they were not resumed that semester: many students left for home, while the administration provided those who were stranded on campus with money to live on. Commencement was not held.

How brutal was the unexpected news of a crushing Arab defeat. In a memorable television broadcast on the evening of Thursday June 8, Gamal Abd al-Nasser broke the news and announced his resignation. The news shook the Arab world. Student anger and frustration erupted in demonstrations and riots outside the AUB campus (the Lebanese elite police squad 16 had been brought inside the campus). Within minutes of Nasser's resignation speech, crowds poured out onto the streets along the main arteries to demonstrate in support of Nasser in front of the Egyptian embassy near our house, and along Hamra street and adjoining areas. They smashed every symbol they could find of the Lebanese right and of foreign presence, including hotels, shop windows, and foreign cars. Beirut was in a blackout for a week or more.

From the roof of our apartment building where my family lived, we watched the swelling crowd, heard the angry chants, and understood in some fundamental if as yet unarticulated way how momentous it all was, and how our lives had been changed forever. Lebanon could no longer remain aloof from the tragedies around it.

For many of us, the first reaction was denial. Things had not changed and life would go on as it always had, although of course it never did for the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and all the others drawn in this catastrophic event. For the first but certainly not the last time, I threw myself into the past partly as a solace for the present. I took special pleasure reading about the past beauty of Beirut's landscape and the serenity of its gardens and mulberry plantations; I traced the location and erosion of the old city walls; I worked my way through accounts of bygone days. This information turned out to be valuable when I applied to graduate school in the United States where my husband had decided to go to complete his medical training. For my course of study I proposed to look into the causes behind the growth of Beirut in the nineteenth century, as its new preeminence clearly could not be explained by economic or geographical factors alone.

In 1970 I began my graduate studies at Harvard. As soon as I arrived at the university, my first job was to undo the effects of a Lebanese male student I had never met who had spread the word around the Middle East Center that I was not serious about my studies and that all I had done in college in Lebanon was to walk up and down Hamra street (presumably he had seen me there because he, too, had walked it up and down). He was not the only one. The first Harvard professor I approached, a giant in his field, immediately decided from a brief conversation on the steps of a building that I would never make it through graduate school, as he is still fond of telling me, enchanted that he was mistaken. Indeed he was.

There were more surprises ahead. What had been a virtue in Lebanon now was a handicap. In Lebanese society, political neutrality or tolerance had been a virtue hard to acquire and to maintain. In Cambridge, after the 1960s it was regarded something of a defect – I think one word for it was “wishy-washiness.” To be middle-class and liberal was positively out of fashion. Well-meaning idealistic young Americans could hardly be expected to have much sympathy for foreign students with little or no political awareness or with political opinions different from their own. It was not easy for them but it was not easy for us either. We understood that our new friends meant well, but we did not necessarily share their concerns or priorities. Neither our political views nor our work was trendy by their standards, but they were important to us.

Enter Albert Hourani, mentor per excellence, who was as tolerant as others were implacable, as tactful as others were judgmental. Elsewhere I have expressed my admiration and affection for this scholar and teacher. I would only like to single out here his tolerance for different approaches to scholarship. In his own work, he combined intellectual, social, and political history. He admired good work of every kind from broad histories to specialized studies, and he took an interest in students of very different political and intellectual persuasions. I feel privileged to have basked in the warmth cast by the spirit of this gentle man for as long as I did.

The war that broke out in Lebanon in 1975 and lasted until 1990 deeply upset all of us who cared about the country and the region. We worried sick about friends, relatives, neighbors, and just about everyone and everything. We were at a loss about as to what to do; all day we listened to the BBC and to every other station with news about the conflict, we were paralyzed and simply did not know how to cope with a situation we could not alter. For a while the war put in question everything we were doing in the United States. How could I study nineteenth-century Beiruti society when Beirut was suffering so terribly now? How could I read descriptions of the city's growth when it was being torn apart? I turned to European history and took a new interest in its debates. I also became interested in American counter-factual history, in anthropology, and in literature which I had always liked.

One night a friend called us long distance to tell us that her father-in-law, a Maronite who had supported the left, had been burned to death in revenge for a sectarian killing by Maronites because his identity card listed him as Maronite even though he was totally averse to their politics. The absurdity of the war was so obvious that I despaired; “I am either going to drive myself mad or I have to stop caring,” I thought to myself. Blessed escape: somehow I shut my emotions out and pushed the war into the back of my thoughts. Overnight, I shut off the painful present and plunged into the past. I stopped talking about the war, I stopped reading about it, and I removed myself to the nineteenth century. In doing this, I had in fact rid myself of any vestige of innocence left from my protected childhood and high school: resilience comes at a cost.

Resilience also has its rewards. I became harder but also more professional, more competitive, and better suited to survive American academia. That freed me to launch into a rich and wonderful career. I have since been blessed to work with colleagues I admire, students I love, and subjects I find exciting.

It has all led to this moment in front of you. To the younger scholars in the room, I say follow your heart, throw yourself into the studies that enchant you, just take us over the cautious edge into a new world of intellectual leadership. We need you, we want you to go further than we did and to do it your way. Remember that the yearning for freedom has not been a monopoly of western liberalism, which can in fact on occasion be its invisible enemy. So do not by any means let the fashions and conventions of the North American academy stifle your spirit of personal and intellectual adventure.

For trendiness has come to dominate American academia. With every decade fashions come and go. That need not be a bad thing in itself, because new ways inspire the young and generate ideas and debates; we are better off today than we were fifty years ago. What is unnecessary is the intolerance for anyone whose interests become unfashionable in the process. We have created a new kind of straitjacket. One can only hope that the youngest scholars of our field can free themselves from it.

Much of what is trendy can limit the imagination. We are so busy following the lead of intellectual movements that we are stifling our creativity. How I admire the daring of the rare historian who can write something as audacious as Dead Certainties. How many are brave enough to produce such novel and imaginative work? More generally, I know that many among us are grateful to scholars who make us sit up straight in our seats and take another look at what we had taken for granted. If the field is to prosper, it must cherish imagination, creativity, abundance, even extravagance of thought. Better that, with all its dangers, than predictability and dullness. I will go even further: better creative history than dull history, better risky interpretations than predictable ones. Let us take risks and stretch our imaginations or at least be grateful for those who do.

Thank you for your support and for making our field enjoyable and rewarding. We are committed to it, and we hope that the passion we share for our field can triumph over fashion.