Islamic Performance and the Problem of Drama

The way the United States sees the world has rarely been consistent or wide ranging. Instead, especially in popular culture, the American gaze is fitful and sporadic, its foci more determined by political ideology than by a sustained and balanced interest in global culture. In the 1960s and '70s Americans were very aware of Southeast Asian geography and politics; in the '80s, Central American. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, in the midst of a "War on Terror," Middle East, Arabic, and Islamic cultures are subjects of a relentless American gaze that looks intently but superficially at certain aspects of those cultures, for the most part ignoring depth, context, and history; and disliking, or at least not understanding, what it sees.

In what follows, I want to discuss certain Western problems with Islamic culture, specifically in the context of Middle East and Arabic performance. But let me try to make some distinctions clear. First of all, Middle Eastern and Arabic performance is mostly but not always created within an Islamic perspective; my focus is those Middle Eastern and Arabic performances that do reflect an Islamic point of view. I also include the ta'ziyeh of Shi'i Islam (performed primarily in Iran) and some aspects of Turkish performance because both Iran and Turkey are part of the Middle East, even though neither is Arabic. Secondly, Islamic performance in the Middle East is only a fraction of the wide range and multiplicity of performance traditions in Islamic societies from the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Given this complex situation—often misapprehended by Western scholars—I hope that my central argument about the West's problem with Middle Eastern and Arabic performance traditions will be clear.

The distortions involved in the West's look East have been a persistent problem of Western performance and theatre history. Various faces of Islam in the Middle East, including Ottoman Turks, North Africans, Arabs, Sufis, and Persians—complex overlapping categories conflating religions, ethnicities, and cultures—have regularly appeared upon the stages of Western Europe (and later the United States). Islamic characters appear in Western theatre in productions ranging from the 16th-century Coventry Shearmen and Tailors Play to Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme; the Sicilian Orlando Furioso cycles; most English mummers' plays; Peter Brook's 1985 ta'ziyeh-based Conference of the Birds; Jean Genet's The Screens; Ariane Mnouchkine's 1995 Tartuffe with the title figure as an Islamic fundamentalist; the annual Brooklyn "Giglio" ritual;Trisha Brown's whirling dances and Robert Wilson's use of Su fi performance traditions and Arabic calligraphy in Einstein on the Beach (1976); and Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul (2001). Even Iranian expatriate Reza Abdoh's Quotations from a Ruined City (1993) might be considered a Western theatre production that looks East for inspiration.

Counterpoints to these Western theatrical views are the performance traditions of Islamic cultures themselves, including not only the various forms of South Asian performance and Iranian ta'ziyeh, which have received much scholarly attention over the past 30 years, but also Arabic and Middle Eastern performance traditions, which have received far less attention. In such sources as Don Rubin's World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Volume 4: The Arab World (Routledge, 1999), Victor H. Mair's Painting and Performance (University of Hawaii Press, 1988), Metin And's Drama at the Crossroads: Turkish Performing Arts Link Past and Present, East and West (Isis Press, 1991), or Mohamed Aziza's Formes Traditionnelles du Spectacle (Société Tunisienne de Diffusion, 1975), one can trace aspects of the complex history and present existence of indigenous and Western-influenced performance forms across the south shore of the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, from Morocco to Iran. Most of these genres express an Islamic perspective. Whatever the nation, one sees in nearly every country the persistent presence of a few particular performance forms: al-hakawati solo storytelling, khayal al-zhil shadow theatre, various picture performance techniques (tamāthīl in Egypt, sandūq al-'ajā'ib in Arabia, parda-zan in Iran), and numerous versions of puppet...