Introduction
In August 1920, French high commissioner Henri Gouraud announced the creation of the new state of Greater Lebanon and welcomed the Lebanese to France's colonial family, a unit that ominously included the French imperial troops deployed on the streets of Beirut.Footnote 1 “France,” Gouraud declared, “has always found pleasure … to see marching by her side her adopted children like her own children. Who could believe that Moroccans and Senegalese, after having spilled their blood for four years on the battlefield, would sacrifice again, if France were not a true mother to them?”Footnote 2 His words implied that the Lebanese were joining France's adopted Moroccan and Senegalese children, with all the violent responsibilities this entailed. The division between “adopted” and biological children, meanwhile, reinforced the racialized hierarchies that fractured long-standing French colonial metaphors of familial intimacy.Footnote 3
Between 1920 and 1943, French officials justified their Mandatory power by arguing that the Lebanese were like children who needed French parental guidance to progress through linear stages of growth in preparation for self-rule.Footnote 4 This rhetoric was familiar across the Mandates created in the Arab East after World War I and in Egypt, where the British continued to meddle in politics long after the advent of Egyptian independence in 1922.Footnote 5 The logic of tutelage invoked by Europeans to justify their presence in the Arab East was most famously enshrined in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, which identified the region's residents as “peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”Footnote 6 This claim, and the ongoing semicolonial rule it authorized, outraged those who had participated in experiments in Ottoman parliamentary governance before the war and called urgently for full self-determination in its wake. But the League decreed that sovereignty in Arab lands was best “entrusted to advanced nations” who could oversee residents’ “well-being and development.”Footnote 7 Thinkers and writers in the interwar Arab East thus found themselves in a specific version of what Dipesh Chakrabarty famously called “the waiting room of history”—a state of “not yet” characterized not by aimless waiting but by European-controlled progress up a civilizational ladder whose rungs were defined by European example.Footnote 8
What did Arabs do in the waiting room of history? Influential answers to this question have highlighted how Middle Easterners adopted the temporal framework of progress, embarking on projects of “defensive developmentalism” towards civilizational advancement without challenging developmentalism's linear terms.Footnote 9 Others have explained how residues of older temporal cultures and the unpredictable outcomes of imperialism and technological transformation created “countertempos” that accompanied the emergence of modern temporal regimes.Footnote 10 This essay shifts focus from how inhabitants of Arab lands experienced the complexities of modern time to show instead how they theorized temporal multiplicity for their own political moment. In what follows, we see how writers working in Arabic in the heyday of linear, developmental time—the Mandate period—turned to the sexed body to rethink the temporal frameworks of imperialism and universal history, calling into question the very terms of the belatedness used to justify their subjugation. By identifying the heterosexual body as a site of political transformation, these thinkers forged an insurgent anticolonial biopolitics that challenges contemporary understandings of the straight body as a site of discipline and capture, and of the biological more generally as politically inert.
Queer times, straight bodies
This essay brings recent work on the history of temporal consciousness and queer theories of temporality into conversation with Arab writers of the interwar period who directly confronted the foreclosed horizons offered by the ideology of progress (what would later be called “modernization”) in colonial contexts. Doing so helps us to appreciate the political significance of the recent turn towards multiplicity in the history of temporality. Responding to Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog, historians have begun to emphasize that there has never been just one kind of temporal consciousness or “regime of history”: people in the past have always thought about how time worked in various ways.Footnote 11 The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were no exception. As Helge Jordheim has argued, “during its entire existence … the regime of temporality identified as ‘modern’ has been challenged by other times, other temporalities, slower, faster, with other rhythms, other successions of events, other narratives, and so on.”Footnote 12 Historical events, actions, and processes, Jordheim reminds us, “do not take place in one time and one time only, but belong to different temporal regimes.”Footnote 13
The Arab thinkers considered in this article likewise insisted that the apparently unified time of development could be made to offer multiple nonlinear possibilities. For them, however, this was no academic matter: they insisted on the multiplicity of time in order to imagine processes of political becoming that could suddenly interrupt both the reign of Mandate powers and the justification for their presence in the first place, i.e. the conditions of presumed inadequacy captured by the temporal metaphor of being “behind.” Existing scholarship has highlighted the difficulties that modern Arab intellectuals, from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) to Satiʿ al-Husari (d. 1968) to Jurj Tarabishi (d. 2016), faced in thinking beyond the powerful developmental logic of modernization.Footnote 14 These thinkers are understood to have brought “colonial evolutionary schemas” of modernization and progress into the time of anticolonialism and decolonization, limiting the radical potential of their moments with commitments to development inherited from colonial modernity. This scholarship recognizes important continuities between the temporal politics used to justify colonialism and the ways some anti- and postcolonial elites sought to shape the lives and daily practices of unruly subalterns to “synch up” with the temporalities of progress and development.Footnote 15
This article, however, sheds light on a different strain of temporal thought in Arabic in the interwar period. It explores the work of Arab thinkers who theorized a nonlinear, anticolonial biopolitics by proposing that within the growing human body—a metaphor for linear development in the hands of Mandate officials and nationalist elites alike—lay the spontaneous, mysterious potential to interrupt the temporal schemas that marked Arabs as endlessly “behind.” Like developmentalism, however, these nonlinear temporalities also worked to affirm heterosexual binaries and to anchor unstable bodies in reassuring “natural” frames.Footnote 16 Queer and insurgent times, in other words, forged straight bodies: as the time of revolutionary event became associated with young men, women became agents of linear (if also unstable and mysterious) development.
While recent work on the history of temporality has shown that temporal consciousness must be framed in the plural, it has been less attuned to how categories of embodied difference—such as race and gender—have meant that people experienced time differently within particular synchronic moments. Both Arab thinkers of the interwar period and contemporary queer theorists, by contrast, argue that time and the human body are mutually constitutive. If our experiences of bodies shape how we experience time, in other words, temporal regimes also shape how we experience bodies. Rather than naturalizing a single, unified body as an a priori basis for a universal temporal consciousness, as Koselleck once did by positing an intuitive understanding of “the blink of an eye,” reading Arab thinkers and the growing literature on queer temporalities together shows how bodies themselves cohere through processes and strategies of temporalization.Footnote 17 Doing so also reminds us that the nexus between bodies and times has been a key site for reproducing and subverting power—and thus for political contestation—in the era of anticolonialism and development as in the present day.Footnote 18
Recognizing this, the Arab theorists considered in this article addressed time and bodies together, arguing for the political potential of the straight body in a particular anticolonial frame. In the interwar period, heteronormative nationalisms, biopolitical state-building projects, and colonial logics of development pushed bodies and sex to the forefront of linear visions of progress and civilization in many locations around the globe. In this context, Arab thinkers turned to the human body, particularly the child and adolescent body, to develop other ways of thinking about development and time. Both queer theorists and historians of sexuality in Middle Eastern contexts have focused on how nonheterosexual bodies and forms of life destabilize the workings of power.Footnote 19 Scholars working on straight bodies, meanwhile, often focus on the body as a site of discipline and capture by modern biopolitical and temporal regimes.Footnote 20 The writers featured in this essay, by contrast, identified the heterosexual body as a site for the disruption of colonial temporality, legitimacy, and power, contesting Mandate-era arguments that naturalized colonial development and Arab belatedness by modelling them on the “normal” growth of the heterosexual body. In so doing, Arab thinkers theorized biological life itself as a central domain of political transformation, charting ways of thinking that can enrich contemporary debates about the political potential of the body.
Following the publication of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality in English in 1978, analyses of modern power have often approached the biological body as a site of discipline and regulation.Footnote 21 Foucault himself famously defined modern sovereignty as a matter of biopower—a form of power that turns on the management of living bodies rather than on the sovereign right to kill. “For millennia,” Foucault wrote, “man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”Footnote 22 But, as Catherine Malabou has recently observed, if biopower is indeed a political formation with the management of the “living being” at its center, then the domain of the biological itself—the living being—long received surprisingly little critical attention.Footnote 23 This tendency meant that the “entry of life into politics” was “unilateral, nondialectical, unreciprocated,” as the biological was “deprived of the right to respond and appear[ed] to flow simply into the mold of power.”Footnote 24 Like Malabou, other thinkers associated with new materialism have begun to engage recent discoveries in biology, neuroscience, and other life sciences to reconsider understandings of the body as politically inert, indicating a shift in discourse about the biological away from the Foucauldian paradigm.Footnote 25 The challenge they confront is how to “track the complex circuits at work whereby discursive and material forms are inextricable yet irreducible”—what Malabou poignantly describes as the challenge of thinking the biological and symbolic aspects of life together as “one life, and one life only.”Footnote 26
This idea—that there is “one life, and one life only,” or that the body itself may have a politics—is precisely the argumentative approach that interwar Arab anticolonial intellectuals adopted, albeit drawing on a different canon of authoritative knowledge. The world of science that enlivened Arab thought on the biological in the interwar period included works on human, childhood, and species development by the likes of Charles Darwin, G. Stanley Hall, Johann Pestalozzi, and, by the 1930s, Sigmund Freud.Footnote 27 Arab intellectuals probed the aporias and uncertainties of such theories to conjure multiple temporalities for anticolonialism. Their work shows how discourses around child and adolescent bodies in the interwar period did not merely “flow into the mold of power”—colonial–internationalist, reformist–nationalist, or otherwise.Footnote 28 Instead, the child and adolescent body also occasioned pleats, interruptions, and queer failures of both colonial and nationalist development politics and biopolitical agendas.Footnote 29 The bodies of children and youth served, then, not only as “instantiations of standardization of (secular, universal, progressive) time,” but also as sites to generate alternative temporalities.Footnote 30 Following Arab writers in thinking about time and the body thus suggests that all bodies—even straight bodies—do more than “flow into the mold of power,” and that all times—especially the powerful modern temporality of development, progress, and historicism—should be thought of in the plural.
The following sections draw on the Arabic women's press in the interwar period (1918–39) to show how writers brought the biological body to the center of anticolonial thought. Many, like Beiruti editor Julia Dimashqiyya, argued that women's proper care of the child's growing body could serve as a kind of temporal engineering. Through proper childrearing (tarbiya), Arab mothers would master the uncertainties of growth to raise a sovereign generation in a linear, predictable, top-down manner, not dissimilar in temporal terms to the Mandate rhetoric of colonial parenting. The key difference was that Arab women, rather than French men, would manage the process, govern its temporality, and determine its success. At the same time, writers also used discussions of child genius, illness, and the mysteries of biological growth to suggest that development might take strange and nonlinear paths.
By contrast, cosmopolitan Arab nationalist Fuʾad Sarruf, writing in 1922–3, contested the theory of biological development circulating in the women's press by tying the living body to the possibility of a sovereign future untethered from the colonial past. His account of the sexual development of the male adolescent modelled a pleated time, in which the contours of a desired future were already known but the mechanisms of arrival remained spontaneous, inevitable, and involuntary.Footnote 31 In so doing, he located the root of revolution in the insurgent male body, rather than in the coherent, agential, male mind. His anticolonial nationalism rooted a temporality of rupture and event in the sexual development of the male adolescent, harnessing an eroticism around the figure of the male youth that had older referents in the Islamicate world for the purposes of an anticolonial time and confirming the adolescent male as the subject of anticolonial revolution.
Both of these responses by Arab intellectuals to the problem of colonial belatedness offer ways to think with the unity of life as a material-symbolic category—Malabou's “one life, and one life only.” In a move rhetorically similar to today's new materialists, Sarruf and his interlocutors argued that changes in biological life could produce transformations in the space of the political. While Sarruf argued that young men could become agents of anticolonial rupture, others tasked women with managing a linear temporality of development centered on the yet-ungendered body of the child. Both temporal frameworks were fractured and unstable, but politically urgent nonetheless. Overall, this analysis shows how anticolonial political horizons in the interwar Arab East came to depend on, and invoke, sexed bodies and gendered times.
Mothers of a sovereign tomorrow: tarbiya as temporal engineering
The bodies that became central to nationalism, state building, and colonialism around the globe in the interwar period were increasingly marked by new categories of age.Footnote 32 The 1920s, as Ishita Pande has argued, saw the global rise of concepts of “childhood” and “youth” as universal, biologically anchored categories, newly standardized phases of life inspiring special protection, political attention, and regulation from both the League of Nations and local reformers in India and elsewhere.Footnote 33 Boundary struggles over age were also struggles over sexuality. Reformers of many stripes advocated for a childhood innocent of sex, and so sex came to define the boundary between childhood and adulthood for the modern world.Footnote 34 Anxieties about children and youth, in turn, forged the new categories—hetero- and homosexuality among them—that structured the emerging science of sexuality.Footnote 35 Adolescence, the ultimate stage of transition in both age and sex identified by G. Stanley Hall, often served as a “technology of civilization and progress, and of white, male, bourgeois supremacy” by linking assumptions about age, race, and sexuality.Footnote 36 Bodies, sex, and time were tied intimately together.
In the Middle East, debates about protecting innocent children, in line with Romantic ideals of childhood, vied with anxieties about children as sources of danger and disorder.Footnote 37 Meanwhile, children became central to maintaining cultural authenticity under colonialism, as well as to building national communities for future independence.Footnote 38 In this context, Arab writers agreed that managing children and childhood was central to all possible futures: raising a child, they argued, was like “etching in stone” (al-naqsh ʿala al-ḥajar).Footnote 39 What was learned in childhood could never be erased, and the child became the foundation for all that was to come. This notion laid the groundwork for the child body to become central to envisioning a sovereign future. The importance of childhood and youth to technologies of power, moreover, befitted a global moment—the 1920s—in which the child became the “pivot on which the biopolitics of the population met the anatomo-politics of the nation” in many locations around the world.Footnote 40
Starting in the late nineteenth century, writers in the Arabic women's press turned to the body of the child to debate questions about temporality. This turn coincided with the rise of the body of the child to the forefront of global concerns about what historian Carolyn Steedman has termed “the mystery of growth.”Footnote 41 Steedman shows how English scientists and intellectuals at the fin de siècle came to understand growth as a predictable process of development from the smallest unit—the cell—to larger and more complex structures. What they couldn't understand was how growth was regulated: why it stopped before it became monstrous. In Cairo and Beirut, too, writers turned to the figure of the child to explore concerns about growth and the biological body.Footnote 42 In Arabic, however, discussions of childhood and growth were always-already tied to urgent questions about colonial development. In other words, Arab writers had to contend with questions not only about how growth worked, but also about how to harness growth in order to “catch up” with the West. For some, discussions of upbringing (tarbiya) normalized a controllable, developmental time through the body of the child: upbringing became a way for Arabs to advance up what one writer felicitously termed the “stairway of modern civilization.”Footnote 43 Others, however, raised difficult, untimely questions about child genius, illness, and the mysteries of biological growth that disrupted the linear temporality of child development.
Debates about upbringing were particularly vibrant in the women's press because Arab intellectuals and pedagogues had, since the 1860s, identified childrearing as women's work.Footnote 44 This was part of a larger debate about women and their roles in society that, as Toufoul Abou-Hodeib describes, “carv[ed] out a larger place for women in public life” by placing the woman “at the center of domestic life as manager, mother, and wife” and tying the domestic space of the home to broader debates about progress, modernity, class, and consumption.Footnote 45 Debates about proper childrearing reached across empire and sect, bringing Christian, Jewish, and Muslim writers together in a print community that stretched from Cairo and Alexandria to Beirut and beyond.Footnote 46 Because women's journals were often subscription-based, they sought to appeal to reader–consumers who had funds to purchase.Footnote 47 Writers and readers shared the concerns of a modernizing middle class, such as hygiene, companionate marriage, and women's education.Footnote 48 The estimated readership for one of the smaller Cairene women's journals at the turn of the century hovered at around 1,100 copies (for roughly 60,000 literate women in Egypt); in Beirut between 1918 and 1933, thirteen women's journals vied for readers among the city's 16,000 literate women.Footnote 49 Overall, the print community in Syria and Lebanon in 1930 numbered between 250,000 and 500,000, or 5–10 percent of the total population.Footnote 50 In Egypt, official literacy rates tripled between 1897 and 1927, from 8 to 23 per cent of men and 0.2 to nearly 5 per cent for women.Footnote 51 Official literacy rates probably substantially undercounted the number of people engaged in broader literacy practices.Footnote 52 A single journal copy might have been read and heard by multiple people in literary salons, women's clubs, girls’ schools, and private homes.Footnote 53
As writers in the Arabic press explored the mysteries of growth through the figure of the child, they linked women's work as childrearers to two major temporal contradictions of colonial development. The first contradiction was conceptual: while linear growth was the easiest to understand and perhaps to control, it also threatened to relegate Arabs to a perpetual state of being “behind.”Footnote 54 If all nations were progressing up the “stairway of modern civilization” at the same rate, in other words, how could the Arab world ever “catch up” with the West?Footnote 55 The second contradiction was more concrete: while Mandate powers encouraged subject populations to embrace “progress” along lines defined by European example, in practice those same powers pursued policies that seemed to work against, not towards, sovereignty for Arab peoples, for example by ignoring calls—voiced as loudly in the women's press as elsewhere—for national public education.Footnote 56
Their desires for a system of national public schools thwarted by French and British opposition, as well as by the recalcitrance of local elites, writers in the interwar Arabic women's press actively engaged the temporal contradictions of semicolonial rule through discussions of childrearing in the home. Many described how women could harness the power of linear, predictable, and controllable growth through the proper raising of children.Footnote 57 Authors explicitly identified good childrearing as a practical means to gradually transform a people deemed “backward” by European standards into one worthy of self-rule.Footnote 58 In 1921, for example, Bulus al-Khuli, a graduate of the Syrian Protestant College active in Syrian nationalist politics, wrote in Beiruti women's journal al-Marʾa al-Jadida (The New Woman) that when “people wonder how we are to progress on the stairway of modern civilization [fī maʿāraj al-madaniyya al-ḥadītha ],” they should look to childrearing (al-tarbiya) for an answer.Footnote 59 Al-Khuli's conviction echoed beyond the new boundaries of Greater Lebanon. In 1932, curator of the Egyptian National Library ʿAli Fikri wrote in al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya (The Women's Awakening), the Cairo-based journal of Islamic activist Labiba Ahmad, that Egypt had “not yet joined those [advanced and civilized] countries in elevating the bases of scientific childrearing and [realizing] the principles of true uplift.”Footnote 60 Bad childrearing, in other words, was what relegated Arabs to the time of “not yet”; the transformation of the future into a “horizon of planning” also made women responsible for the success, or failure, of developmental time.Footnote 61
Because childrearing advice in the Arabic press was largely directed at women, women became the idealized agents of regular, predictable, top-down change modelled on the body of the child. A new genre emerged that made the child's growing body a metonym for an understanding of time that worked through regular, normalized, and universal “stages”: the advice column broken up by month or year. Authors of such articles told women how and when to feed a newborn, how to wash and swaddle him, and how to ensure the healthfulness of milk. In so doing, they identified the key milestones of “normal” childhood growth and arrayed them in a linear progression ruthlessly standardized by the markers of homogeneous, empty time: days of the week, weeks of the year, and years of age. One such column in the Alexandria-based al-Sayyidat wa-l-Banat (Ladies and Girls), the project of Tripoli-born Greek Orthodox writer Rosa Antun, for example, declared under the heading “Month Seven” that a child's weight “should exceed sixteen English ounces,” and he should sleep exactly two-thirds of the time.Footnote 62 Articles like this one imposed regular norms and standards on uneven and often discrepant experiences of childhood growth. They arrayed exact quantities (weight, sleep) and particular qualities (the development of imaginary fears, new attachments, interest in the outside world) in linear time by organizing them according to standard increments of age.
This genre remained a staple in the women's press through the interwar period, serving to order and normalize in text a process that, in life, embodied uncertainties and unexpected outcomes. One article published in al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya in 1928 reported the findings of an American doctor about what kids should have “achieved” in terms of mental development in each month of life. “By the end of the first month,” it declared, “the child should recognize his mother's face, and put his hand in his mouth … by month nine, he should be able to sit up, unassisted.”Footnote 63 These monthly markers, still familiar to many twenty-first-century parents, harnessed the child's growing body to a linear, developmental time in which all bodies proceeded at roughly the same pace along a path that women could predict and control.
Aspirations towards normal and governable growth, however, also produced new opportunities to make mistakes. While most of the tarbiya articles were addressed explicitly to women, one 1922 article recast the genre of year-by-year advice by addressing both parents in the voice of an imaginary child. “A Child's Advice, Addressed to His Parents” adopted the linear, age-segregated form to predict the most likely mistakes parents might make in each year of the child's life. “In year one,” it read, “a tight swaddle can weaken my power”; in year two, “cleanliness strengthens and empowers my body of tomorrow, so wash me once a day.”Footnote 64 It is notable that a (presumably) adult writer took on the voice of a child to discipline and school caregivers and to make independent demands: this vision of agential childhood pointed to the complexities of parental authority in the new, child-centered world. And although most childrearing advice in the women's press was directed rhetorically towards women, this article's address to both parents perhaps sought to appeal to male journal readers who would relay childrearing advice to their wives. And it suggests that even as these columns gave parents, especially women, advice about how to normalize and control growth, they also occasioned judgment about what childrearers were doing wrong. As a tool for managing growth in the colonial context, then, the temporality of childrearing combined hope and confidence with deep, and often gendered, uncertainty about parents’ abilities to achieve expected outcomes.Footnote 65 As Beth Freeman has argued for a different context, a “queer reading of time of the middle-class household” thus reveals not a state of timelessness or “pure temporal plenitude,” but a temporality of constant fragility and monstrosity sheltering within the inexorable “undertow of forward time.”Footnote 66
The fragile time of uncertainty and mistake, however, was not the only countertempo that fractured the temporality of linear development modelled on the child body. Writers introduced other countertempos by highlighting the mysteries of biological growth in a variety of contexts, from the household to the fields. While the growth debate would reach its apex in discussions of childrearing, similar concerns animated discussions of many living bodies, not just human ones. In 1925, Jurj ʿArqtanji, writing in al-Marʾa al-Jadida, warned readers about the dangers of drinking milk. He revealed that milk was one of the foodstuffs most likely to harbor microbes, dangerous organisms that “breed and reproduce with a strange speed … spreading through the air and becoming hundreds, thousands, millions.”Footnote 67 Microbes were dangerous and curious because they did not obey linear processes of growth. Instead, they grew in uncontrollable and unpredictable ways, transforming a simple household staple into a threat.Footnote 68
Amina Khuri, another contributor to al-Marʾa al-Jadida, raised similar concerns in her long-running series for children, “Samir al-Sighar.” She introduced the question of exponential growth by beginning one installment of her series with a simple question in a fictional child's voice: “where does fruit come from?”Footnote 69 In answer, Khuri first assured her readers that they knew how growth worked: “if we plant a seed in the earth,” she remarked, everyone knows that “it will grow into a big tree.” She followed this comforting prediction, however, with a more confounding claim. “When we plant one pound [raṭl] of tomato seeds,” she wrote, “it will yield a hundred qanṭār of tomatoes, each of which will produce another hundred seeds. And each [seed] contains within it hundreds of seeds more.”Footnote 70 Khuri thus linked the predictable development from seed to tree to an exponential form of growth that was harder to conceptualize. How did one pound of seeds produce one hundred qanṭār of tomatoes? And how many more tomatoes would those hundred seeds in each tomato produce? A reader, especially a child reader, might easily be overwhelmed. In the end, Khuri could offer only a very enigmatic response to the child's original query—where does fruit come from, or, in other words, how does growth begin? Fruit, Khuri answered, comes from “the astonishing power of the plant or tree” (quwwat al-shajara aw al-nabāt al-mudhisha). Even the exponential mathematics of horticultural reproduction could not fully answer a child's simple question about how growth worked and how one could expect it to proceed.
While seeds and microbes modelled disturbing forms of exponential rather than linear growth, the mystery and anxiety of development reached a peak in discussions about child bodies. Interwar women's journals featured articles about unusual children—child geniuses—who embodied not linear growth but untimely forms of “precocious or too-rapid development.”Footnote 71 In 1925, for example, the Cairo-based women's journal al-Marʾa al-Misriyya (The Egyptian Woman), edited by Coptic Christian writer Balsam ʿAbd al-Malik, published a piece recounting the story of a Miss Phyllis Mawkat, a young Scottish lass who played the piano better than anyone in the world. Mawkat, the article emphasized, had “astonished a group of artists with her “uncanny ability” (maqdaratihā al-ʿajība) to memorize any piece of music placed before her—unusual for such a young age.Footnote 72 In London, meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Tom Edward was reported to have published a book of philosophy and literature that “dazzled” scholars.Footnote 73 News items like these identified exceptional children who appeared to exist outside the realm of predictable development; while they were presented to readers in positive terms, their stories also undermined assumptions that mothers could ensure “normal” human growth. Just as nobody knew exactly where fruit came from, or how to figure out why microbes multiplied so rapidly in a glass of milk, nobody could explain why Tom Edward could write a philosophical masterpiece at the age of thirteen. The mystery of growth endured. Discussions of child precocity and genius thus queered the predictable hierarchies of age that undergirded gender regimes, linear time, and international order across the interwar world.Footnote 74
Other writers in the women's press turned to discussions of illness and maldevelopment, rather than to genius, to fracture the developmental time of childrearing from within. The threat of childhood disease, from syphilis to diphtheria to colic to paralysis, loomed over the childrearing project presented in the women's press.Footnote 75 These diseases had myriad causes, from the vagaries of nature and infection to particular and deadly parental mistakes. Many theorists of upbringing presented new practices of scientific householding and childrearing as ways of fending off illness and protecting normal childhood growth. In 1911, editor of women's journal Fatat al-Sharq (Young Woman of the East) Labiba Hashim gave a lecture from the stage of the newly established Egyptian University in Cairo on the popular subject of “physical upbringing” (tarbiya jasadiyya). She explained that improper upbringing could have terrible consequences for the growing child, even causing illness and maldevelopment. “The small child,” Hashim argued, “needs food sufficient for growth more than the adult”; that food, moreover, had to be easy to digest and delivered at ordered intervals throughout the day.Footnote 76 Mothers who fed their children too much or too little or at unregulated times, or provided sweets, bread, or other nutritionally deficient foods, would damage children's stomachs and digestive systems and cause fevers.Footnote 77 These forms of physical damage, in turn, would “inhibit the child's growth.”Footnote 78 Thus maternal practice could undermine as well as facilitate the embodied process of childhood development. These omnipresent discussions of bad upbringing, illness, and their harmful effects on the growing child body rendered the time of maternal childrearing fragile and uncertain, always hovering on the brink of failure.
Some articles even considered the phenomenon of retardation. One 1938 piece in al-Nahda al-Nisaʾiyya summarized a 1937 book by University of London psychology professor Dr Cyril Burt, entitled The Backward Child. The book, the article reported admiringly, brought thorough research methods to address the problem of the “delinquent” child (al-ṭifl al-āthim); that is, “the child who has congenital anomalies or weakness [shadhūdh aw ḍaʿf khalqi].”Footnote 79 The word “delinquent” was given in English in the text followed by an Arabic definition, suggesting that this author viewed the term as a potential neologism for Arab readers. The phrase the author suggested as a translation for “delinquent,” al-ṭifl al-āthim, captured two meanings of “delinquent” also present in English—both backwards or behind, and also morally suspect or corrupt.Footnote 80 The clarifying phrase likewise linked physical to moral deficiencies: the word “anomalies” (shadhūdh), in the singular, can mean deviant or inferior of character, and the word for congenital, khalqi, is the adjectival form of khalq, which in the plural invokes the long tradition of Islamic ethical thought, akhlāq. An important way to address these deficiencies, the article averred, was for government educators to reform the home, teaching childrearers to “apply the correct rules of upbringing, offering these children a form of education that would make them into citizens.”Footnote 81 By tying an emerging European science of child delinquency and retardation to an older discourse about ethical selfhood, the review of Burt's book expanded both the stakes and the demands of childrearing, a matter now requiring “the cooperation of science, medicine, ethics, and law.”Footnote 82 Furthermore, by introducing the problem of “delinquency,” in all its conceptual fullness, as a potential challenge for childrearers, articles like this one introduced new potential wrinkles in developmental time.
As writers in the Arabic press tied the temporality of linear growth (replete with countertempos) to practices of feminized tarbiya or upbringing, they proposed a form of anticolonial thought that rooted resistance to the Mandate in the body of the child and the work of mothers in the home. As colonial and elite authorities underfunded the public schooling of Egyptian and Lebanese children—the institutional foundations for forging an educated society capable of self-rule—women working in Arab homes took charge of child development and civilizational progress for themselves.Footnote 83 Writers theorized proper childrearing, performed by women, as a form of temporal engineering through which middle-class mothers could marshal linear time to harness the mystery of growth, wresting the management of political becoming away from French overlords and rooting it instead in the middle-class home and the work of the Arab mother. Writers in the women's press, in other words, recognized that they had been put in the waiting room of history, and redefined the autochthonous management of biological life as a path to political sovereignty, albeit one that was never guaranteed. In so doing, however, they also tied anticolonial political subjectivity itself to gendered constructions of time grounded in biological difference: while women were tasked with managing a linear, determinist temporality of development centered on the body of the child, the bodies of young men—as we will soon see—became sites of anticolonial rupture.
Fuʾad Sarruf and the eventfulness of biological life
In 1923, Fuʾad Sarruf published Tahdhib al-Nafs (The Cultivation of the Self/Soul), a slightly revised book-length version of a series of articles on childrearing he had published months earlier in al-Marʾa al-Jadida under the title “Durus fi al-Tarbiya” (Lessons in Childrearing). Like his interlocutors in the women's press, Sarruf argued that harnessing biological growth was a central problem for anyone hoping to escape the Mandate's hollow time of “infinite deferral.”Footnote 84 As Sarruf himself expressed it, “the life of the child before and after birth is a concise history of the growth of the human race [namū al-bashar]”: as the child grew, so too would the people.Footnote 85 In Tahdhib al-Nafs, Sarruf used emergent theories of human growth and sexual maturation to undermine the developmentalist temporality used to justify Mandate governance. He did so by juxtaposing the time of child development—a feminized, linear process theoretically amenable to prediction and control—with the time of sexual maturity (al-bulugh), which Sarruf identified as a dramatic point of biological, temporal, and political rupture. He discussed sexual maturity in depth only for the male body, where the maturation of sexual organs and instincts would open a “new age” in which young men would gain access to new political capacities and to a nonlinear temporality of growth.
In what follows, I read Sarruf's account of male adolescence as a discontinuous crumpling of time rather than a linear process of development: a form of “pleated time” similar to that illuminated by Michel Serres.Footnote 86 If you take a handkerchief and spread it out to iron it, Serres suggests, “you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities,” but if you “take the handkerchief and crumple it … two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed.”Footnote 87 Embodied male adolescence, for Sarruf, occasioned just such a crumpling, which suddenly and irrevocably brought the “infinite deferral” of colonialism to touch the eventful time of anticolonial resistance and becoming. In contrast to other Arab theorists of adolescence in the interwar period, who saw it as “the most dangerous” stage of human development, Sarruf insisted that adolescence in the male body suddenly enlivened the positive capacities necessary for sovereignty and self-rule.Footnote 88 This theory of male adolescence as a site of temporal crumpling between colonial and sovereign time harnessed an older eroticism around the figure of the male youth for a new anticolonial biopolitics.
The question of the male adolescent body and its relationship to social order has a specific historical trajectory in the Islamicate world.Footnote 89 Scholars have demonstrated how male-gendered and androgenous adolescents served as objects of adult male desire in premodern Islamicate contexts.Footnote 90 The rise of imperial and nationalist state-building projects and the intensification of European imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century precipitated a new regime of sex and desire built around the heterosexual, reproductive couple.Footnote 91 Changes to elite householding and inheritance strategies, the emergence of a transnational middle class and an early women's movement invested in ideals of companionate marriage, and the intensification of encounters with colonial officials obsessed with Arab homes and families brought the nuclear family and heterosexual couple to the center of late nineteenth-century discussions about the ordering of collective life.Footnote 92 Thinkers and writers also began to embrace a biopolitical logic that venerated reproduction and generation. As one article published by Greek Orthodox writer and editor Alexandra Avierino's Alexandria-based journal al-Anis al-Jalis (The Intimate Companion) put it, “a wealth of offspring is a wealth of wealth” (kathrat al-nasl hiya nafs kathrat al-ghināʾ).Footnote 93 This logic helped to make heterosexual desire a focal point for nationalist, feminist, and reformist efforts. In the early decades of the twentieth century, nationalist movements in the Arab world began to figure male citizens of the nation as “brothers” to replace older, vertically oriented systems of political power figured through patriarchy.Footnote 94 To uphold this fraternal ideal, early nationalists normalized heterosexual desire and sublimated the erotic potential of older traditions of same-sex love between men.Footnote 95 By identifying the male adolescent body as the site of revolutionary potential, Sarruf directed these older structures of same-sex desire towards a new object: sovereignty.
The power of male adolescence as a site of anticolonial resignification would only have been heightened by American and European attentions, both critical and desirous, to men's same-sex practices in the Middle East.Footnote 96 Sarruf, who was fluent in English and a graduate of the Syrian Protestant College (SPC, renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920), would have been well aware of American administrators’ concerns about same-sex love in the mission context. The SPC, his alma mater, had long identified male sexuality as a locus of deviance and social decay. Indeed, the SPC had been working to police students’ sex lives since its founding in 1866. As one of the first institutions in Greater Syria to board male students away from their families in large numbers, the SPC's faculty minutes are replete with accounts of students being reprimanded, suspended, or expelled for potential sexual misconduct.Footnote 97 Students were forbidden to leave the grounds at night without permission, although some disobeyed in order to visit bars and brothels in the city center; others were disciplined for obscene talk or being caught with dirty pictures.Footnote 98 In 1903, when the SPC moved to establish separate dormitories for older and younger boys, administrators remarked somewhat cryptically that “there is a reluctance in this country, amounting in most cases to an absolute refusal, to allow small boys to associate with young men. The reason for this is a good one but one that can hardly be understood by the Western mind.”Footnote 99 It seems plausible that the “reason” in question, apparently so difficult to understand and yet so evidently arresting to the “Western mind,” was administrators’ suspicions about sexual liaisons between older and younger male students.
Sarruf, who finished his BA at the SPC in 1918, would also have been aware of the heightened anxieties around sex and sexuality that flourished in Beirut during World War I. Inhabitants of the city and nearby Mount Lebanon interpreted the social breakdown that accompanied the famine, depopulation, and extreme violence of World War I as a breakdown in gender, family, and sexual norms—what historian Elizabeth Thompson aptly termed a “crisis of paternity.”Footnote 100 Wartime conditions also led to concerns about venereal disease among men displaced by war or conscripted to the Ottoman army.Footnote 101 When Sarruf became headmaster at a mission school after the war, the problem of policing his students’ sexual behavior would have become his personal responsibility. Sarruf would thus have been intimately aware of the potential for adolescent male sexuality to serve as a destructive and destabilizing force, even as he joined a rising global class of reformers working to reframe sex as a healthy and natural part of biological life—as long as it stayed within the realm of heterosexual reproduction.Footnote 102
Sarruf's 1923 publication of Tahdhib al-Nafs marked an early intervention in the formal study of child and sexual development in Arabic. By the 1940s, the work of theorizing adolescence and human sexual development would become the province of experts who derived authority by hybridizing older traditions of virtue ethics and Sufi training of the soul with new medical knowledge and foundational texts in the emerging discipline of psychology, such as the work of Sigmund Freud.Footnote 103 This hybrid form ran, in Arabic, under the old Aristotelian conceptual banner of ʿilm al-nafs, which could be translated as either “the science of the self” or “the knowledge of the soul.”Footnote 104 As Sara Pursley has argued, psychology became a particularly important field for debating development in the later interwar period because psychological diagnoses of deviance and precocity allowed individual development to diverge, in certain cases, from species development.Footnote 105 But unlike later Arab theorists of psychology such as Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar, both of whom received formal training in France, Sarruf's authority did not stem from internationally recognized academic credentials or expertise, but from his work as a translator, educator, and science popularizer in the Arab East.Footnote 106
Sarruf was a well-known figure in Arabic publishing in the interwar period.Footnote 107 In 1922, he moved from Beirut to Cairo to become assistant editor of the premier literary-scientific digest, al-Muqtataf (The Digest), founded by his uncle Yaʿqub Sarruf and fellow SPC graduate Faris Nimr. Like many intellectuals of his generation, Sarruf engaged anglophone thinkers closely, navigating a transnational, multilinguistic space. As Omnia El Shakry has argued, it is not enough to view thinkers like Sarruf as “bad copies” of American or European writers.Footnote 108 Fluent in English, Fuʾad approached modern knowledge as a shared patrimony between East and West, one which could only be enriched through the ongoing translation into Arabic of new discoveries from Europe and the United States.Footnote 109 He did not seem to worry that his engagement with anglophone intellectuals made him somehow less “Arab,” or less committed to a sovereign, independent Lebanon.
Sarruf drew on readings of texts on child development from Europe and the United States to theorize the biological as an active force that could pleat the linear temporality of progress so central to Mandate rhetoric and elite nationalism alike in the interwar period. A short bibliography at the end of Tahdhib al-Nafs listed as sources Luther Allan Weigle's The Pupil and the Teacher (1911); William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890); the London-based revue My Magazine (1922); and a somewhat enigmatic entry for “Cole's Moral Education,” possibly a reference to George Coe's October 1912 article in the Journal of Religious Education, “Moral Education in the Sunday School.”Footnote 110 Of these, Weigle's text appears to have provided particularly substantial inspiration.Footnote 111 Sarruf followed Weigle in dividing the stages of child and adolescent development according to major mental, spiritual, and physiological changes, rather than by standard markers of months and years. Like Weigle, too, Sarruf divided human growth into early, middle, and late childhood and early and late adolescence.
Sarruf joined colonial officials as well as other writers on childrearing in the Arabic press in identifying the body of the child as a space for ordered, processual growth. In the middle stage of childhood, for example, Sarruf advised teachers to introduce new ideas through familiar phrases, because the child, like any human being, “cannot grasp the new without finding a relationship to something he already knows, just as we cannot grasp the future without studying the past.” Indeed, Sarruf asked rhetorically, “What is history but an ordered chain of episodes [ḥalaqāt] that links what is to come with what has come before?”Footnote 112 In this stage, the rearer was also to introduce the child to key lessons (asrār) that he could understand, so he would be prepared for “the next step on the stairway to scientific progress [al-taqaddam al-ʿilmi] and in the stages of intellectual development [marātib al-nushūʾ al-fikri].”Footnote 113 The regimented time of the “ordered chain of episodes” and “the stairway to scientific progress,” however, was precisely the temporality that adolescence would interrupt.
The ordered time of childhood foreshadowed its own undoing: for Sarruf, childhood was a phase marked first and foremost by what had “not yet” developed. Sarruf prefaced each observation of what children could not yet do with the phrase, “in this stage” (fi hatha al-dawr), suggesting that coming stages might inaugurate other capacities. In the first stage of childhood, for example, he explained how children “cannot distinguish between living and nonliving, or between different kinds of living things,” nor could they tell the difference between “fables and established truths.”Footnote 114 A small child, not yet able to make key determinations between “truth and imagination,” might treat a rock as a living being.Footnote 115 Early-stage children were also, in Sarruf's telling, selfish creatures, not yet moved by concern for others. “The child in this stage,” he remarked, “sees himself as the center of the world, and he can't be moved by graciousness, compassion, or love of the other.”Footnote 116 Overall, Sarruf characterized children as sites of lack—marked by the absence of capacities not yet developed—as well as sites of future becoming.
The third stage of childhood brought the child to the brink of sexual maturity, and the temporal landscape of child development began to transform. As adolescence loomed on the horizon, Sarruf began to highlight children's positive capacities and characteristics alongside what they could not yet do. Children in this stage, for example, would develop a spirit (rūḥ) of courage, audacity, and love of adventure; they would acquire a sense of independence and self-reliance; and new social instincts would inspire them to respect rules and the force of public opinion (al-raʾi al- ʿamm).Footnote 117 Although this subtle transition from lack to capacity had clear political implications, it was rooted in biological transformation. In this stage, Sarruf averred, “sexual instincts begin to appear; with this, the child's health begins to improve, the power to fend off sickness rises, new movements strengthen, and the child becomes more active.”Footnote 118 The arrival of adolescence inaugurated a time of biological, political, and social becoming, but tied the new space of political sociality to the emergence of “sexual instincts,” which as we will see, separated boys and girls.
Standing on the cusp of adolescence, the child also gained access to a new kind of temporal existence: he began to embody the potential for unpredictable outcomes, i.e. for the future to diverge from the past. The youth, in Sarruf's words, became “completely different in all respects from what he was in the first years of his life, or what he will become in the near future.”Footnote 119 With this promise of “complete difference,” Sarruf began to overturn a key premise of the linear, gradual time of child development—that what came later was always linked to what had come before in an ordered and predictable way. The promise and prison of linear time began to break down. Absolute newness was now possible. The potential for temporal rupture, however, also brought with it a new emphasis on gender difference. In the third stage of childhood, Sarruf began to divide the category of “child” (walad/awlād, a grammatically masculine term often used to refer to both boys and girls) into “boys” (sibyān) and “girls” (fatāt).Footnote 120 In fact, “the appearance of sexual characteristics,” he wrote, “requires the separation of boys from girls by the rule of nature [bi ḥukm al-ṭabiʿa].”Footnote 121 Binary gender difference, too, became a form of both prison and promise. On one hand, the rule of “nature” determined women's physiological and psychological incapacities, as they proved “unable to join boys in various activities requiring strength, bravery, and fearlessness.”Footnote 122 On the other hand, “nature” meant that boys would not “incline towards the games of girls,” leaving girls to follow their own “natural” desires while boys took to fishing, hunting, and swimming.Footnote 123 Depending on one's point of view, this naturalized separation of genders might represent either limitation or opportunity.
The third-stage child, however, still shared with his younger contemporaries one last vestige of lack, with important implications for political capacity: he had not yet fully learned how to respect the “will of the majority” (raʾi al-aktharīyya). This capability would ultimately equip the boy to “emerge into the school of the great world, where he will see democracy guiding associations, councils, and governments.”Footnote 124 Sarruf explicitly linked this final stage of childhood development directly to questions of political status in semicolonial times. “The peoples of the East,” he argued, were like the third-stage child in that they had “not yet learned” how to be governed by majority rule, and thus they “remained this way, not welcoming to the representative democratic rule [al-ḥukm al-niyābī al-dimuqrātī] that we pursue.”Footnote 125 Luckily, the well-trodden path of biological development meant that the next chapter of Tahdhib al-Nafs would naturally and inexorably plunge the child, and by extension the “peoples of the East,” into the stage of adolescence and the possibility of total transformation.
The arrival of sexual maturity in adolescence inaugurated broader processes of political and ethical becoming rooted in changes in the biological body. “The growth of sexual instincts” (al-gharāʾiz al-tanāssuliyya), Sarruf explained, “is the true root of every change and upheaval [inqilāb] that happens in the stage of adolescence.”Footnote 126 These changes on the level of sex and the body had enormous implications for every other realm of life: while the process of maturation was first “completed in the realm of bodily power, its effects extend[ed] to mental and psychological power.”Footnote 127 The biological body, in other words, came first.
Adolescence also transformed the body from a site of leisure to one of labor. Childhood, for Sarruf, was best governed as a domain of pleasure and play. This stage, Sarruf declared, was “a period of preparation, which enlivens a person's various psychological powers to undertake great works in the future.”Footnote 128 Play would teach key skills for later labors, by “quickening the mind, regulating the self, making deduction more precise and rapid, and [instilling] respect for others.”Footnote 129 Ultimately, these lessons would stay with the child throughout the great embodied transitions to come. “We must teach the child,” Sarruf declared, “not to consider the transition from childhood to young adulthood [al-shabāb] solely a transition from play to work, but [to see] that there is pleasure and joy in work, as there is in play,” thus preparing the child to take pleasure in work as an adult.Footnote 130 At adolescence, children would begin to crave work, making it difficult to keep in school the boys who felt “an inner impulse [dāfʿ dākhili] towards work and earning a living.”Footnote 131 “Work,” Sarruf concluded, “is noble, and respect for work is even more so—so let parents cultivate this noble, holy spirit in their growing children.”Footnote 132 These discussions of adolescence as a stage that turned the body of the male youth towards labor normalized the laboring masculine body, in unspoken contrast to the spectral alternatives foreshadowed by articles about childhood illness, genius, and retardation—the deformed, the weak, the lazy, and the ill.
As adolescence turned the male body towards labor, it also turned it towards heterosexual love, amplifying the gender differences Sarruf introduced in late childhood. Gender difference, too, was rooted in the biological. Sarruf explained that girls’ bodies matured earlier than boys, girls gained proportionally less height and weight, and girls’ physiological growth stopped earlier. While Sarruf recounted the embodied transformations of adolescence for both boys and girls, his analysis of the political and psychological effects of adolescence specified only the male adolescent—al-shāb—as its subject. In young men, he argued, adolescence inaugurated a host of positive capabilities with political significance: to cooperate, to seek out work to make a living, and to submit to what was right (al-ḥaqq).Footnote 133 In this, Sarruf's optimism differed from those of better-known theorists of adolescence like Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, and G. Stanley Hall, for whom adolescence was seen as “a problem that needed to be solved.”Footnote 134 Sexual maturity perfected man's social instincts, allowing him to develop a sense of justice, sacrifice, and generosity that, unlike the selfishness and amour propre (al-anāniyya wa ḥubb al-dhāt) of childhood, would enable him to practice discernment and good judgment (al-tamyīz wa-l-ḥukm).Footnote 135 Most importantly in a semicolonial context, the young man attained a feeling of “independence and self-reliance [al-istiqlāl wa-l-iʿtimād ʿala al-nafs] different from that experienced in the third stage of childhood”: the adolescent sought independence because he “realize[d] that he has a right to participate in give-and-take with humankind.”Footnote 136 Adolescent boys, in other words, suddenly became everything they had “not yet” been as younger children. But Sarruf's text identified only the male adolescent as the site of these new political capabilities, many of which matched the demands of the quest for sovereignty in the interwar Arab East. In so doing, he cemented the idea that the social and political collectivity that could fend off colonial control would be structured by biologized, binary gender difference and heterosexual desire.
In addition to political capacity, the second thing that changed for male adolescents was the temporality of change itself. Unlike the linear time of child development, Sarruf's male adolescent time was insurgent, unpredictable, and replete with the potential for total transformation and complete rupture with the past. Sarruf described the stage of adolescence as defying any stable temporal logic, proving “very difficult to delimit in time.”Footnote 137 He went on to remark that adolescence represented “the opening of a new age,” so momentous that it could be termed a “new birth.”Footnote 138 With these temporal claims, Sarruf emphasized the potential for male adolescence to pleat the linear time of childhood development, suddenly inaugurating a “new age” of sovereign potential, while still linking the stage back to the familiar temporality of reproduction through the metaphor of birth.
This “new age” of social solidarity, independence, and eventful potential came at a price: the normalization of naturalized gender difference and the rise of gender complementarity as apparent biological fact.Footnote 139 We saw how the appearance of sexual maturity on the horizon for the third-stage child brought with it “the separation of boys from girls by the rule of nature.”Footnote 140 This separation expanded in the first stage of adolescence, when boys and girls would demonstrate a “mutual repulsion not present in the last stage of childhood.”Footnote 141 By adolescence's end, however, boys and girls would start to “draw together” on new and different terms, through simple love affairs and companionate pairings.Footnote 142 If sexual maturity brought new capacities for rupture, independence, and democracy for men, it also brought the realization—by both sexes—that nothing “is holier than the emotion [of sexual love], which leads people to establish a home and raise a family.”Footnote 143 As sexual maturation in the body enabled men to pleat a new age of brotherly democracy and independence over the “not-yet” time of childhood, it also established heterosexual attraction and reproduction as rooted in biology.Footnote 144
Sarruf clarified for readers in Beirut the political implications of this pleated time and the insurgent male adolescent subject it enabled. In 1922, when his essays were first published in al-Marʾa al-Jadida, the wartime hopes of many Beirutis for independence and democratic governance under an Arab king had just been cruelly dashed in favor of a French Mandate justified by the idea that the Lebanese were “not yet” ready to rule themselves. To elucidate the political stakes of his argument, Sarruf noted that it was adolescent male youths (al-shabbān) who performed “the great deeds of history”: Napoleon was only twenty-four when he “astonished the world at the siege of Toulon,” while Lafayette “sailed to aid the English colonies in their rebellion [thawra] against the English (1776)” at nineteen.”Footnote 145 While both of these examples were drawn verbatim from Weigle's The Pupil and the Teacher, they carried a specific connotation in the Lebanese context.Footnote 146 Instead of harking back to a glorious national history of political revolt located safely in the past, as they might have for Weigle's early twentieth-century American readers, these examples reached across the water to construct a trans-temporal and trans-imperial link between male adolescence and the potential for political rupture, even revolution. This would have been a potent suggestion for readers living under colonial administration.
Later Arab nationalist thinkers like Satiʿ al-Husari (d. 1968) and ʿAli al-Wardi (d. 1995) in Iraq would follow Sarruf in identifying adolescence as “the stage of revolution.”Footnote 147 For them, writing in a country which had already received independence from its Mandate power (in 1932) and come under nationalist rule, this link was something to worry about and to control through the same developmental logics invoked by colonial predecessors. Al-Husari, for example, countered the extreme parsimony of the British-led educational agenda in Iraq by “insist[ing] that Iraqi subjects must be made worthy of sovereignty” through education and development; al-Wardi, for his part, advanced the idea that national development depended on “block[ing] psychological deviances” that could interrupt the healthy, progressive stages of nationalist growth.Footnote 148 While al-Husari and al-Wardi sought to coopt a colonial temporal order to maintain elite hegemony in an early postcolonial state, Sarruf—writing long before independence—sought to pleat colonial temporality through its own embodied logic. He cast the link between adolescence, sexual development, and revolution as an opportunity, not a liability, displaying none of the “ambivalence about the relationship between youth and insurgency” entertained by later nationalist leaders.Footnote 149 Like these later theorists of sovereignty and sex, however, Sarruf too cast heteronormativity and biological sex difference as guarantors of stability in a changing temporal and political order. Between Beirut in 1922 and Iraq in the 1930s and 1940s, then, what changed was not the link between adolescence and political upheaval, but the normative assessment of it—the eventful potential of male youth went from being an object of hope to an object of fear. What remained, however, was the assumption that a heteronormative sexual order would undergird a political order designed and imagined by men, revolutionary or nationalist–progressivist alike.
Conclusion: the gender of revolt
By theorizing anticolonial time as a capacity rooted in the biological body, Sarruf linked male sexual maturity and heterosexual desire to insurgent politics. These links accompanied the rise of the male youth as the preeminent subject of political action in Egypt and Lebanon until the 1950s.Footnote 150 In Egypt, where Sarruf based his career from 1923, young men anchored the revolutionary organizing and street politics of the 1919 revolution and proved central to mass politics and new political movements throughout the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 151 In interwar Lebanon, male youth became central to political contestations between rival visions of the nation. The rise of popular politics in Lebanon relied on youth organizations that were “collectively grassroots, urban-based, and dominated by middle-class young men, although the class, gender, and geographic components of these groups would change by the 1940s to 1950s.”Footnote 152 Paramilitary groups like the Najjada (established in 1937) and the Kataʾib (or Phalange, established in 1936) shared with Italian and German fascist contemporaries the “conviction that youth organization represented an ideal means to national revival after defeat.”Footnote 153 In 1937, contested elections brought Sunni and Maronite youth, many associated with the Najjada and the Kataʾib, to fight in the streets of Beirut, leading to a declaration that the parliament must be independent from both the Maronite patriarch—an established political power in Lebanon—and from male youth groups and scouting troops, whose political power was waxing in 1930s Lebanon, across the region and beyond.Footnote 154 These groups “adopted … the fetishisms of male physical strength that were associated with fascism,” and marginalized women.Footnote 155
Sarruf's argument about the adolescent male body as the site of temporal and political potential shows how young men became the preeminent subjects of political action in Arab thought as well as in the streets of Beirut and elsewhere in the interwar period. Thinking with Sarruf and his contemporaries in the Arabic women's press about time and anticolonial biopolitics also reveals the gendered contours of anticolonial nationalism in the Arab world. As boys matured into revolutionary youth, girls and women were directed instead towards childrearing as anticolonial praxis. Conceptualizing the relationships between time, sex, and power forged in the Arabic women's press reveals that these two experiences were mutually constitutive: feminized childrearing promised to govern political change in top-down and predictable ways, while the bodies of male adolescents took on enormous insurgent potential. Arabic writing on child development linked women's political labor to a linear, progressive time controlled from the colony rather than from the metropole, while young adult men embodied a temporality of rupture and event. This suggests that the history of anticolonialism should be understood as a history of gender, sex, and power, even when women appear to be absent from the barracks and the streets. It also shows how thinking through biological and political life as inextricable and co-constitutive forces—as “one life, and one life only”—once opened multiple paths towards a sovereign political future.
Acknowledgments
For their thoughtful comments, I am grateful to Angela Giordani, Matthew Shutzer, Matthew Ghazarian, Pedro Regalado, Rachel Nolan, Rachel Newman, Marianne Gonzalez Le Saux, Kathryn Lasdow, and Mila Burns, and members of the Department of History at Smith College. I also thank the editorial team and reviewers for Modern Intellectual History for their incisive suggestions.
