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Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 1 (2008) 101–121 www.brill.nl/mjccMEJCC

Towards a Th eory of Culture of Communication: Th e Fixed and the Dynamic in Hamas’

Communicated Discourse

Atef Alshaer School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Email: [email protected]

Abstract Th is paper proposes to use the phrase ‘culture of communication’ to unravel the relationship between language and culture that cannot be understood as merely unexplained mental signposts without constitutive enmeshed ideas. It engages with relevant core ideas and combines theoretical and empirical evidence to put forward the proposition that a culture of communication exists in every culture. Th e key constituents of a culture of communication, as an analysis of online images used by the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas will show, are diverse verbal, written and visual forms of communication, which relate to each other in intricate ways and which require orderly discursive interpretation. To make my argument, I highlight the concept of culture of communication and the discourses and issues that follow from it. Th en, I address the landmark literature on language and culture before considering the case study. My objective is to attempt to discern the relational aspects that underpin socio-political understanding and practices in terms of communication. 1

Keywords culture of communication; language; discourse; intentionality; signs: Islam; the Fixed and the Dynamic: Hamas; Palestine

Towards a Th eory of Culture and Communication

To make my claim, I start with the proposition that a culture of communication espoused and reinforced by social and political actors in the Palestinian terri-tories exists. Th e key feature of this culture is intentionality, based on organized

1 Th is article is dedicated to Dr. Dina Matar. She has worked gracefully on improving it in a dedicated and patient manner; she has shown enthusiasm and given encouragement for which I am grateful. Without her genuine involvement and encouragement, the publication of this paper would not have been possible.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI 10.1163/187398608X335784

102 A. Alshaer / Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 1 (2008) 101–121

ideological practices of political parties and institutions, authenticated and thrust into the public space by activists and civil servants (offi cials). Th is, in other words, means that political groups with specifi c agendas, cultural underpinnings and outlook, mobilize communicative channels and modes to publicize and reinforce their ideologies. Th e term ‘culture of communication’ is proposed as a core term that addresses societal values—mainly values that are socio-historically accumulated and which recur in the macro ideological sphere within which a culture is situated. In other words, a culture of com-munication can be described as involving intentional processes of enactments and reactions. For the majority of people, in so far as their practices reveal, it is the unintentional, unconscious and spontaneous that populate their cul-tural spheres. However, the power or what Foucault calls ‘the meticulous ritu-als’ or ‘the micro-physics of power’ (Foucault 1977: 27) which defi ne ordinary peoples’ lives on many levels are also largely intentional, managed and schemed according to plans and political calculations.

Foucault, writing with the Western socio-political development as his main concern, refers to ‘the micro-physics of power’, the institutions and bodies of regulation and ritualization that include, along with formal institutions, diff erent cultural spaces, such as mosques, churches and the like. Th ough arguably diff er-ent in terms of their historical and socio-political development, there are many examples in the Arab World where micro-physics of power, as envisaged by Foucault, exist in diverse forms and spaces. It is in these forms and spaces that the activities of ideological and religious movements, like the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and the Lebanese group Hizbullah, are promoted, refl ecting an emerging political culture which banks on the support of the ‘street’. From this perspective, the street, a popular way of talking of the masses, becomes a central space of defi ance and/or approval of existing autocratic regimes and other centers of power. Th ere is no doubt that the centers of power in which Islamic groups like Hamas, or for that matter any overtly publicly active Islamist movement, operate, are diff erent to some extent from what Foucault refers to. Mosques, for example, have traditionally set norms in societies and have regulated and instituted what is right (haqq) and what is wrong (b .atil), but it is not diffi cult to see that mosques can also serve as centers of power, knowledge and discourse, as constituted in the Islamist sense or “ Shari‘a politics” (al-siyāsah al-shar’iyyah) in the words of Islamist scholar Yousef Al-Qaradawi. Antonio Gramsci, too, has noted how ‘hegemony as consent’, is not only induced through state apparatus, but can also be produced and enacted through mosques, religious centers and movement-affi liated media. Th ese, this paper argues, appropriate any or specifi c cultures of communication through certain discourses that serve the present, yet selectively ossify these discourses in the image of a ‘glorious’ past.

A. Alshaer / Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 1 (2008) 101–121 103

It is my contention that the term culture of communication is useful to understand the crucial link between language and culture, as proposed at the start, in several ways. Firstly, it allows us to view the fi xed (al-thābit) and the dynamic (al-muta.hawil) in various discourses, to use the Syrian intellectual Adonis’ arguments. Adonis writes: ‘When plurality with respect to content stands on fi xed principles, the form of its expression becomes absolute, the endpoint” (Adonis 1974: 65). In his discussion of Arabic culture and poetry, Adonis expands on the idea of the fi xed and the dynamic components of Arab culture and shows how the fi xed, such as in the language of the Qur’ān, the sayings of the prophet and so forth, become even more fi xed in the minds of people so that they turn into unquestionable templates of sanctifi ed truth.

Adonis, in many of his writings, highlights the fi xed rather than the dynamic, because it is more rooted and prevalent: ‘…most of the modernists rely on speech and positions of the past, i.e. they justify the change they engender by what was stable and fi xed; and they defend the changes they emit by referring to elements they use from the fi xed itself ’ (ibid: 66). However, he crucially makes a link between past and present, which he sees as an extension of the past in linear terms, so that the present cannot stand on its own without an ‘authen-tic’ origin. For him, ‘time and memory in this respect are not extensions, but a shrunk and reduced apparatus’ (ibid: 41). Furthermore, Adonis makes some pertinent observations that can help us understand contemporary political practices, their origins and meanings in everyday life. ‘Th e accuracy of the political opinion is measured by the approval of religion, and so is the accep-tance of a poet (and intellectuals in general) is measured on the approval of religion’ (ibid: 269). Adonis’s claims about the fi xed and the dynamic are per-tinent to the discussion of the discourses of the Islamist Palestinian movement Hamas as they highlight general elements that characterize Islamist discourses and their location and relation to what I call a ‘culture of communication’, as I will show below.

In this paper, I propose that this culture of communication relies on selective readings and appropriation of the rich and diverse literary, historical and linguistic repertoire of the Arab and Muslim worlds. All cultures of com-munication appropriate and select: this kind of selection referred to in this context is not representative, but searches for sources of approval of that cul-ture’s ideology, highlighting how discourse becomes inseparable from the practice. It is my contention that the concept, culture of communication, like the concept discourse, is a historical product of antagonisms with other culture(s) of communication and other discourses, albeit in diff erent ways. Indeed, cultures of communication are historically rooted in that they are located in various canons, such as religious texts, while drawing on traditional


and codifi ed values preserved in the literature, which in the Arab case mostly refers to poetry. As Suleiman (2006: 209) writes: ‘In the West, the novel is considered as the primary vehicle for delivering this (the) nationalist function. In the Arab context, this function is allocated to poetry which has a long and highly respected position in Arabic culture’.

Discourse draws on the notion of oppositionality and is often reactive to other discourse within the same socio-political context (Althusser and Psecheux, cited in Macdonell 1989). What defi nes a culture of communica-tion is the process of enactment that stems from the historical-anthropological rootedness of action in language and culture. In other words, a culture of com-munication is a communicated compendium of religious, historical, literary and mythological references used by a community as valid tropes for all times and, as such, are acted upon and treated as having authenticity. Authenticity in a culture of communication serves to manipulate language as a residue of resonant power embodied in culture as an anthropological, historical and lit-erary space in which the powerful, the spiritual and the pertinent (to the moment) are drawn on, selectively reproduced, idolized, talked of and visu-alized. Mainly, the resonant power of language which a culture of communica-tion acts upon, highlights the historical and spiritual dimensions that culture embodies. Th is is a power the manifestations of which take extraordinary shapes, mostly in peculiar forms of art and metonymic language, which I will return to when discussing Hamas images.

Furthermore, a culture of communication allows the recipients of commu-nicative practices (referred to as audiences in media and communication stud-ies) to recognize socio-political plurality and positionality within societies as well as the shared linguistic and cultural characteristics that a sociolinguistic community shares and reacts to. With such a conceptualization, language and culture become no longer separable in the sense that they become impossible to discern diff erences and diversities in and within them as Edward Said tire-lessly explained in several of his writings (Said 1979; 1994; 2004). Th e point is that it is from a continuous ‘contrapuntal’ relation between language and culture that a culture of communication emerges, a culture of communication defi nable in degree and kind in accordance with people’s interaction with their past as contingent by the conditions of their present. Th is understanding sug-gests that a culture of communication conveys cultural continuity and history unlike discourse which represents the moment and which emerges in response to conditions and situations; it is not disconnected from history as such, but is less rooted in history.

While a culture of communication is a spirit (geist) , a background that precedes and perhaps supersedes discourse, it is integrated into language as


a communicatory cultural repository. Th is can be seen in all societies, as diverse ideologies produce various discourses, while still drawing on a culture of com-munication which entails linking the past to the present. Raymond Williams viewed culture as a whole way of life in common (cited in Eagleton 2008), but language, too, is another distinctive and inclusive feature of ways of life and it is the integral interconnection between language and culture that makes up a culture of communication. Th us, the term culture of communication has the potential of inclusivity and embodiment that the conceptualization of lan-guage and culture as separate could not guarantee. Th is understanding tallies with Jürgen Habermas’s and Wittgenstein’s (cited in Salvatore 2007) explana-tions of the concept of lifeworld lebenswelt : ‘Lifeworld as represented by a cul-turally transmitted and linguistically organised stock of interpretive patterns…language and culture are constitutive of the lifeworld itself ’ (Salvatore 2007: 72-73). With such a philosophical background, one could say human life is mediated through discourses, while also drawing on a culture of communica-tion. In the case of Palestine, both Hamas and its rival Fatah, draw on the Qur’ān to legitimate and substantiate their political stands through discourses, but they do so diff erently, in the sense of their selection of diff erent verses or interpretations, and thus accruing to the whole Qur’anic edifi ce of diff erent valences.

In any culture of communication, confl icting parties and oppositional discourses draw on the same canonical constructs that feed into a culture of communication, whether these are religious, literary or nationalist or com-bined, in diff erent ways. Th erefore, confl icting discourses that stem from the same culture of communication produce diff erent discourses in which mean-ings are embodied within speech blocks, be they words or statements, etc., but which hold diff erent ‘connotative values’ to diff erent parties as well as to diverse recipients. On this line of thinking, Layton (1978: 22) eloquently writes: ‘Th e individuals who share a common language use it, according to rules of syntax, to create an enormous variety of individual statements whose meaning depends on the choice of words and their combination in particular sequences’. 2 Th ese thoughts are in line with the views of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most original language thinkers of the 20th century, who directed us to ‘think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers,

2 Th ere are apt references to this in Bakhtin’s writings, ( Hall 2004: 329): ‘Th e word in lan-guage is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when…the speaker appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic expressive intention. Prior to this…the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language…rather it exists in other people’s mouths, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own’.


a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws—the functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects […]’ (1953, Para 11).

I use the term ‘connotative values’ above because the attitudes and reactions that people exhibit are based on the values they assign to words and statements that permeate their culture of communication, which is historically cultivated. ‘Connotative values’ draw on Sassure’s concepts of the sign, signifi er and signi-fi ed and the relationship that binds them together (Kress 2004). However, the relationship between the signifi er and the signifi ed is not arbitrary as arbitrari-ness cannot be associated with the ways in which centers of powers, micro or macro, play roles in instituting cultural norms and by implication language. 3 In the case of Hamas, our case study, one can argue that when one of its key ideologues, Mushir Al-Masri, delegitimizes politics that does not take notice of what he calls the afterlife as conceived from an Islamic perspective, or Shari‛a -based politics, he creates prototypical categories fundamental to humans’ cultural conceptualization, as proposed in Lakoff (1987), within which are embedded perceptual consequences and therefore communication and action. Th ese categories signify and assert conceptual possibilities of cul-tural and political signs; some are accepted, some delineated and others rejected. In his categorization of what is legitimate and what is not, and there-fore should be accepted, Al-Masri draws on the givens in culture, such as religious canons and authorities and in doing so signifi es possibilities of what is correct and right, and what confers legitimacy of thought and action to anything that concurs with his conceptualization. Signs are clearly socio-linguistic categories and realms of integrated inter-subjective cultural percep-tion, yet it is diffi cult to take a categorical view of signs. Signs are not on a par with each other: for example, one could suggest functional signs as political signs, as in a set of statements of phrases that signify/represent a discourse or a strand of discourse, and so forth. Obviously, the reference here is to signs that have categorical bearing on the lifeworld in the Habermasian sense of the term. For this paper, I use the idea of lifeworld as one that has historical cul-tural roots, though it was not historically constituted as such because the socio-political conditions which gave rise to it are diff erent. For some Islamist

3 Th ere are important references in Gramsci’s writings to the socio-historical background of language and its interconnection with culture, ‘language is transformed with the transformation of the whole of civilisation, through the acquisition of culture by new classes and through the hegemony exercised by one national language over others, etc…, and what it does is precisely to absorb in metaphorical form the words of previous civilisations and cultures’ (Ives 2004: 89). It is noteworthy to refer to the suggestion of Talal Asad (2003) that ‘we need to attend more closely to the historical grammar of concepts and not what we take as signs of essential phenomenon’ as this parameterizes within defi nite terms, such as sign, signifi er, signifi ed, connotative values and generative interpretation’ (Asad 2003: 192).


movements, most notably Hamas, politics and symbols that do not concur with what is signifi ed interpretively as shar‛ia -based politics, or approved of by religious canons authorities, are seen as arenas that require struggle to be redeemed of the wrongness in which it is constituted. 4

It is with this in mind that this paper argues that the norms and conventions that govern the understanding of discourse (Bourdieu 1991) are constituted in ‘connotative values’. Th ese values suggest that words, statements and ways of expression are interpreted according to cultural, social and political spaces that are themselves regulated, mediated and shaped by language. Th is approach is an attempt to fi nd a synergistic, undivided view of reality to account for multilayered trajectories of human existence. Contra Chomsky (2000), who maintains that language is generative (in that it reproduces itself infi nitely), this paper suggests that these generative qualities are not mental, but are socio-historical in the fi rst instance. Words, phrases, statements and so on are understood in one way or another because of the socio-historical connotative values that exist within a wider culture of communication. Th us, connotative values can be understood through what I call ‘generative inter-pretation’, which replaces Chomsky’s idea of ‘generative grammar’ and attempts to situate human language in those contexts within which language begins to have voice, form and meaning. Unlike Chomsky who argued that it is possible linguistically to distil the universal rules that underpin what he calls a faculty of language located in the mind, this paper suggests that lan-guage is located in history and culture, and that the conceptual triangle which a culture of communication embodies; namely sign, signifi er and connotative values, can be understood through a process of generative interpretation, where interpretation extends through identifying the historical, cultural and literary meanings that underpin discourses and the current world of references that they represent/signify. 5

4 Political symbols have a history and that history is one of naming and ‘connotative values’. Th e Palestinian Kuffi yyia is a case in point. What one might call the origin or the initial circum-stantial state of an idea ( Said 2000) fi nds support in the ‘story’ of the Palestinian Kuffi yyia, referred to in Swedenberg (1995). ( See also Mamdani’s ‘Th e Politics of Naming, Civil War, Insurgency’ (2007) and Suleiman (2004)). Th ese examples invite us to think of political signs and symbols and their implications and to identify linguistic items and constructions that have categorical embodiments, in the sense of representing one category of discourse or another and the confl ation across categories and to trace them to the sources that invented and gave them meanings and connotative values. 5 Th ere are, in Sassure’s writing, references to the fi xed and dynamic elements of culture and how they infl uence language: ‘…it will be seen that a diff erent proportion exists between fi xed tradition and the free action of society…coming back to language, we must ask why the historical factor of transmission dominates it entirely and prohibits any sudden widespread change….it is rather the action of time combined with the social force’ (Sassure 1999: 152 and 148-157).


In Context

Every language and culture embodies a culture of communication that is historically grounded, but is open to diff erent interpretations and appropria-tions in discourses. However, those cultures where history continues to matter are much more grounded in a culture of communication than societies that are more governed by the dynamics of changing economic and political factors. 6 Th is argument is particularly applicable to the study of Arab societies, where, broadly speaking, there exists a culture of communication or cultures of communication that produce discourses in which there is a synergetic connection between the past and the present.

Such a proposition allows us to understand the cultural background of discourses in expansive and more inclusive ways, and to address how dis-courses, especially political ones, gain socio-historical grounding within a wider terrain of a culture of communication rather than being seen as restricted political and disordered signs. Hamas, our case study, continuously evokes the past in its Islamist discourse to make it relevant to the present. For example, it refers to people and places, military sites, battles and state institutions from an appropriated past. Hamas’ model of Islamist politics thus can be understood as being both mobilizational and agitational in the sense that events become critical, gaining urgency and requiring action. In fact, one would be inclined to refl ect that there is also an element of dramatization ‘of the present’ in Hamas’ discourses, as in the discourses of other Islamist groups. Dramatization suggests the present is dramatized against the background of a glorious past whose restoration can only happen through paying it literal attention. As such, one could say, the past is used to substantiate the present, thus referencing, indexing and authenticating it. In these modes of politics, there is also a jux-taposition of sentiments, sadness, calmness, confi dence and happiness that would need to be mediated upon interpretively in relation to diff erent ideo-logical strands which the discourse, culture and politics of the movement rep-resent, something which is beyond the broad remit of this paper.

Th is paper treats signs and symbols and the connotative values that defi ne them as central to the ascendant popularity of Islamist movements—in the

6 Th ere are cultural norms that defi ne Europe and its communicative habits. However these norms lack immediate relevance in so far as history is concerned, since Europe, followed by the US, have shaped world politics in fundamental ways ( Said 1979; 1994). Th us, a culture of com-munication exists in Europe, like everywhere else, but this culture has undergone many eco-nomic, political and social changes explained by modernist cultural and literary approaches. Hence, tradition-based cultures have come to be viewed negatively by many Western social theorists, most notably Antony Giddens (1994). Also see Berman (1982).


same way Vico attributed the rise of civic institutions in the Western context and which he considered ‘the source of intelligibility of the symbolic struc-tures of the world’ (Salvatore 2007: 30). However, it is worth pointing out that the popularity of Islamist movements must also be seen in the context of the failure of other political movements in the Arab world, such as the secular movements, to produce coherent signs and symbols or present integral mod-ern historically grounded readings to the public. 7 It is my contention that the Islamist-political discourses of Hamas are grounded within a multilayered cul-ture of communication which requires several levels of interpretation and which draws on an imaginary Islam that ‘involves systematic references to an Islam that is isolated from the most elementary historical reasoning, linguistic analysis or anthropological decoding, operating as a psychological, cultural and intellectual obstacle to a serious approach to the major twin themes of rule of law and civil society’ (Arkoun 2001: 345).

With this in mind, I focus on specifi c statements and images from the com-municated discourses of Hamas and try to map them on the wider socio-political fi eld, to use Bourdieu’s metaphor (1991; 1999) and on the culture of com-munication within which these operate. Th ese statements and images are selected from the offi cial website of Hamas (www.palestine-info.info), a highly professional and comprehensive site that provides up-to-date coverage of Hamas’ activities, news and discourses. Th e images are selected on the basis that they represent multilayered embodiments of aesthetic, political and anthropological meanings, fi xed elements stemming from the ideological background of Hamas as well as mobile ones that adapt to the present’s dynamic politics. To make my argument that these images represent a culture of communication, I correlate the images with statements from Hamas’ reper-toire. Th is is because Hamas integrates images and statements in ways that highlight the totality and the coherence of its discourse and the ‘historical background’ that lends it legitimacy and authenticity. Before I do so, I provide a short background on Hamas.

Hamas: Culture of Communication and Discourse

It is impossible to give a comprehensive view of Hamas in a few paragraphs. Th ough Hamas has a short history, this is a dense and extensive one. For the

7 Given the context in hand, one could tentatively defi ne heuristic fragility as referring to the imported unrefi ned political practices of autocratic regimes, translated in discourses that do not refl ect the functional apparatuses of the state, the very ones over which it superimposes itself.


purpose of this paper, I refer to pronounced elements that underpin the movement’s popularity as a religious-political movement. Hamas, an acronym for the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement, was established in 1987. It was born in the refugee camps in Gaza during the fi rst Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993), emerging amid increasing trends of Islamization in the Arab world and the diminishing credibility of Palestinian secular movements, mainly Fatah following its unilateral decision to engage in a peace process with Israel. In January 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections by a landslide majority following a hard-fought campaign, drawing support on increased social services through charities and the use of sophisticated media campaigns. Along these moves, Hamas focused on the intellectual sphere to legitimize its Islamic credentials and refute other Islamist parties who refused to take part in the elections on the grounds that they were un-Islamic, such as Hizbo-tahrīr al-Islāmi (the Islamic Liberation Party).

Hamas has a crop of important leaders, including Ahmad Yasin, Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi, Ibrahim Al-Maqadmih (all three were assassinated by Israel), Ismael Haniyya, Mahmoud Al-Zahar and Khalid Mish‛al, the current de facto rulers of Hamas in Gaza. In addition, Hamas has a group of charis-matic eloquent leaders, including the younger Mushir Al-Masri, Sami Abu Zahri, Ayman Taha and Taher Nunu. All Hamas leaders are religious fi gures, all grew up in mosques, all are well-versed in traditional Islamic teachings and all are connected with the Islamic University in Gaza and a number of trusted Muslim ‘Ulama’ (scholars). All of its leaders are organized, disciplined and keep in touch with ordinary people through rallies, meetings and media appearances. One of the group’s key intellectual fi gures is Mushir Al-Masri whose writings are relevant to this discussion as they provide the most compre-hensive ideological grounding for Hamas’ practices. In his book “Participation in Political Life in the Context of Contemporary Regimes” (my trans.), Al-Masri provides exhaustive documentation with quotations from various textual canons of Islam, the Qur’ān and the sayings of the prophets, as well as various Islamic scholars, most notably the linguist Ibn Manthur, the theologian Ibn Taymiyah and the contemporary Islamic scholar Yousef Al-Qaradawi.

Al-Masri’s work represents a major theological and political documentation of Hamas’ background and is worth making use of here to underpin its political practices and discourses that dictate the struggle and the endpoints that have to be achieved. One of the key notions Al-Masri advances is his linguistic defi ni-tions of certain terms, like that of government, politics, freedom, consultation, political plurality, democracy, etc. Al-Masri gives several defi nitions from the Islamic perspectives; all of them asserting the primacy of the Islamic conception of politics. In talking about a l-fi qh al-siyasi ‘the political jurisprudence’, Al-Masri


notes that ‘the Qur’an paid special attention to governmentability because people’s destiny is connected centrally to it. If governmentability were for almighty God in all aspects and parts of life, people would be happy because the divine system which almighty God has issued and which regulates their life is compatible with their instincts:’ Al-Masri makes a distinction between secular and Islamist politics:

the shari‘a-based politics aims to run the aff airs of the umma and to safeguard its interests in accord with the Islamic system and its instruction; as to the man-made and real-time politics, a l-siyāsah al-wad’iyyah , there are several strands to it, which diff er according to the leaders and it aims to regulate life alone. (my trans)

It is noteworthy to highlight that Hamas does not follow any one book or the writing of one intellectual, but it is also widely known that the group is keen to square its political views with Islamic ideas. Al-Masri’s work provides the most serious eff ort to date to substantiate political practices through using historical and cultural references. In light of the last point, it is worthwhile reiterating Adonis’s theories and his concept of the fi xed and the dynamic in Arab culture. In this respect, I would argue that though Islamist politics is dynamic and changing, Islamist culture is fi xated in canonical texts and authoritative interpretations based on them. In his introduction to Adonis’ text, Father Polis writes that Arab culture is amenable to changes in accordance with modern deconstructionist readings of the tradition, but that political domination and Western hegemony, among other factors, play decisive roles in creating ideological blocks desperate for change from within and which fi nd in religion a structure, adherence to which inspires them to achieve victories, and as such, a culture of communication that champions religious discourses will continue to exist because of the essential sense of history it gives people at a time of political and cultural vulnerability and frailty. Th us, a culture of communication is embedded in historical lineages of connotative values.

Th e Images of Hamas: Th e Fixed and the Dynamic

Against the above background, I analyze three images selected from the Hamas website, and explain diff erent ideological strands that they convey in order to locate the fi xed and the dynamic as embedded within the image. I conceive the relationship as interpretive of cultural perception, which underpins cul-tural production, such as the images discussed below. Th e term culture of communication gains substance as these images and the writings on them signify cultural and political orientations drawn from the broader Arab culture of communication, but streamlined in specifi c textual and visual ways. In what


follows I attempt to highlight what these images say and to underline the current and historical realms of signifi cations to which they lend themselves.

Th is fi rst image and the various statements emblazoned over it ride on various historical premises which underpin Hamas’ discourse and its culture of communication. Th ese historical premises are timeless; they bind the past with the present and envision the future with confi dence; they are presented as solid, trenchantly righteous and confi dent of the victory that the Divine (God) has promised. Th e importance of this image lies in the fact that it sum-marizes the history of Hamas and its beginning as having been delivered ‘from the womb of the Muslim Brotherhood’ (Hroub 2000; 2006; Mishal & Avraham 2006). Th ere is the Egyptian father, Hassan Al-Banna, the proto-typical fi gure of the Muslim brotherhood established in 1928 and associated with the quintessential martyrs of Hamas, the founder of the movement Ahmad Yasin and his heir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi. Like Al-Bana, the Palestinians Yasin and Al-Rantisi followed the same path, hence the phrase above Ahmad Yasin in the middle and Al-Rantisi and Al-Bana at the top which applies to them all, fursan al-Haqq, ‘the knights of righteousness’.

Th e ‘within-the-image-images’ of the martyrs who in diff erent capacities have given birth to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s logos inscribed on both sides of the image refl ect how the two Islamist groups have been true to

Figure 1.


their promises and their beliefs. Both logos share the crossed-sword as the traditional Islamic fi ghting weapon; it is the sword that fi nally sets and separates the right from the wrong, in accordance with the Qur’anic verse, li-uhiqqa alhaqqa wa-yubtila al-bātil wa-law kariha al-mujrimuna : ‘ That He might cause the Truth to triumph and bring vanity to naught, however much the guilty might oppose ’ (8/8). Both are painted in green, the Islamic color, the green being the color of Paradise and the symbol for martyrdom. Both share primal canonical elements of Islamic symbolism, the Muslim Brotherhood has the Qur’an perched between the crossed-swords, Hamas has Al-Aqsa mosque, the noble sanctuary, the third holiest site in Islam. Hamas, which shared with the Muslim Brotherhood the word ‘and prepare…’, has ‘fi nished’ with that since it is fully engaged in a struggle against Israel now—preparation and fi ghting proceeds hand-in-hand for Hamas, but not so for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere who still hold onto the elliptical mantra of ‘and prepare…’ in tandem with the Qur’anic verse, “wa’iddū lahum ma ?istata‘tum min quwwatin wamin ribāt al-khayel turhibūna bihi ‘Aduww Allah wa‛adwwakum… ”, ‘Make ready for them all thou canst of (armed) force and of forces tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy…’ (60/8).

In turning to the mobile/dynamic in the ideology of Hamas through this image, all we have seen so far is the fi xed, the known, the history and the beliefs, but where is the mobile/dynamic/politics? I would argue that the mobile resides in the fact that this image was released in March 2008 when Hamas breached the borders between Gaza and Egypt where the Muslim Brotherhood Movement comes from. Th us the dynamic in Hamas’ current Islamist politics is its reminder to members of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere of the need for unity to break Israel’s siege on Gaza. It is worth noting that the image does not show the late Palestinian President and Fatah leader Yassir Arafat, nor the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. And it is worth noting that at the head of the ‘ideological’ tree is Al-Bana, followed by the Palestinian Ahmad Yasin, ‘Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi and so forth’. Th is image sets the ‘us’ and ‘them’: the ‘us’ the Palestinian Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as opposed to the ‘them’, the Egyptian regime and Fatah. Th e image suggests that these three Islamic leaders are united in thought and struggle. Th e message is clear: we are in the same boat, on the same journey. Our alliance is not born today, or yesterday, and it is going to be bequeathed to the next generation, like the statement separating the logos, ‘we are the bridges and the generation of victory passes through us’. Th e image combines visuals with language and inte-grates ideological strands, political necessities and aesthetic considerations per-tinent to this historical moment in which Hamas is embroiled. Th us, this image is a work of imagination whose constituents can be unearthed (by the imagined


recipients) through a process of ‘generative interpretation’, where attention is paid to decoding meanings implicit in the words, the picture, and the political conditions and discourse that correlate with release of this picture.

Figure 2.


Th is second image celebrates Hamas’ 20th anniversary, its ascendancy to power and popularity through using artistic and historical means. Th e artful design shows leaders, fi ghters, people and symbols, refl ecting the harmony and order on which Hamas thrives. Images, however, rarely stand on their own in Hamas’ Islamist politics; there are linguistic constructions of poetic qualities that complement and embolden their content and Arabic calligraphy to substantiate the images. Th is is a form of a ‘double art’, rooted in the culture of communication, motivated by political conditions and presented with aesthetic considerations. Th is picture exhibits confi dence and measured robustness. Hamas leaders are smiling and there is a sense of jubilation as the fi ghters are credited and celebrated. Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, referred to in Hamas literature as al-Sheikh al-Muasis ‘the founding Sheikh’, was assassinated by Israel whilst on his way back from the mosque where he used to pray. He is mentioned here alongside his heir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi, himself a poet and a writer, but uncompromising on the political stance of Hamas as enshrined in its charter.

Th e other two images are of the founder of the military wing of Hamas, Izz Al-Din al-Qassam, as well as Salah Shihadeh and Ibrahim Al-Maqadmeh, another founding member of Hamas. Th e leaders of Hamas are the only fi g-ures given an identity - all other fi gures shown are obscured. Interesting as well, the signature (Hamas/Hebron) can be seen as a message of defi ance of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Th e image is painted in diff erent colors for visual appeal - orange, black, white, red - but the most pervasive is green. Green is a sign of abundance, vegetation, fertility and life. Th rough green, we are united with nature at its ripest shape. Th ere are the venerable leaders, the unnamed Hamas fi ghters who step on every color, but the green. We have an infi nite number of people gathered to celebrate Hamas’ anniversary under the banner ‘from the heart of the siege, the dawn of victory’. In the distance, black is slowly creeping towards the green to cloud it; it is time for the evening, darkness, the siege, but the moon shines from afar, and with it the most visible color becomes the green, suggesting the dawn of victory.

In this image, Hamas artfully integrates the imaginative visual and the fi xed lexical. For those who do not know the identity of Hamas, it tells them clearly that there is no ambiguity here about what it is: hamāsiyyūn ‘we are Hamas’, using the semantically strongest plural form possible: the leaders, the fi ghters and the people, all in harmonious unison. Th e poetic line makes a Qur’anic corollary that is likely to have inspired them in the fi rst place, ‘as a goodly tree, whose root is fi rmly fi xed and its branches reach to heaven’; in other words, this is what Hamas is like. Hamas leaders refer to their movement as ‘a divine movement’, harakah rabāniyyia , and invoke this frequently, providing a powerful medium of communication, at once arresting in its condensing of


history, aesthetic, politics and literature and one that is open to interpretation in some aspects, but closed in others. It is open in that it contains colors, poems, masked fi ghters clothed in battle gear and supporters waving fl ags: all these elements are open to interpretation, but closed when referring to leaders as their identities are known.

I chose this last image because of the visible representation of women who were initially invisible in Hamas discourse and restricted to providing protec-tion to men and serving them to carry out the struggle against the Israeli occupation. Indeed, we fi nd stereotypical references to women in the early literature of Hamas. Consider the following from a communiqué released in the fi rst Palestinian Intifada (uprising):

Th e Jihadi women can do what a man can not do. In addition to their real participation in confronting the soldiers of the occupation, they can embark on a heroic role in aiding the young men by daringly attacking the soldiers who arrest them and by screaming in their faces. …beware, beware of chattering and having a long tongue or showing off or exhibiting curiosity, all this could add to peoples’ problems and increase the occupation’s grip on them (Legrain 1991: 159, my trans.).

As Hamas became a popular movement with a wider base of support, this role has changed. In this image, there is a Palestinian woman, whose identity

Figure 3.


as a Palestinian is unmistakable as she wears the Palestinian kuffi yi a. But here her k uffi yia , unlike other traditional secular Palestinian kuffi yias that are nor-mally draped around the shoulders or loosely used to cover women’s heads, is used as niqāb , a veil that covers the head and the face. In this image, the woman represents a sign of the diversity and Islamization of Palestinian soci-ety, which became more widespread after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993. Since then, women can carry the Qur’ān, hold a gun and sport the evocative slogan, ‘O, Aqsa mosque, we respond to your call’ on their fore-heads. Th ere is a green copy of the Qur’ān, which in Hamas offi cial discourse is referred to as ‘our constitution’. Th is image is used as a logo for the military wing of Hamas, the Ezz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigade, whose signature is at the bottom of the image. Th is woman belongs to the brigade from which women were excluded. In Hamas, women are often talked of as belonging to al-Janāh al-Nisswi, the women’s wing, which has been incorporated into various politi-cal and military fi elds in which Hamas is involved. Th ere are six Palestinian Hamas-affi liated women in the Palestinian Legislative Council, in which Hamas commands a comfortable majority. Th us, the discourse of Hamas on women has increasingly included progressive moves allowing women to engage in vital arenas of life, yet it remains limited as it is not fi rmly grounded on total equality between men and women. Men make political decisions while women are given voice in less concrete ways than men. However, women are given a leading role in political activities which they themselves invest in with senti-ments of honor and urgency. Th is was demonstrated in the women’s storming of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt to force the opening of the crossing, a time when this image above was made prominently visible on the website of Hamas to credit Hamas women for their role in the struggle to break the cruel siege of Gaza.

Th is image is of a demonstration honoring the struggle of women, thus refl ecting Hamas’ approval of the role of women as activists in the struggle against Israel at all levels. Th ere are many references to equality between men and women in the struggle in this picture; the woman is brandishing an M16 rifl e, carries the Qur’ān, with a celebratory Qur’anic background, since the verse at the top of the picture: ‘it is not who slew them, it is Allah’ (17), as well as the fl ag of Hamas. Th is verse draws inspiration from the context of the fi rst Muslim victory in the fi rst battle of Islam in the Battle of Badr (624 CE) in which Muslims believe that God aided them to achieve victory, as their number and material power were beneath that of their opponents, the Quraysh tribe. Th is image contrasts with images of women fi ghters produced by Fatah and the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine, whose archetypal image of women fi ghters are modeled on Laila Khalid, the famous Palestinian


guerrilla of the 1960s and 1970s, and whose visible face and dress embody anti-colonialist struggles. Women confer sanctity in the discourse and visual repertoire of Hamas; they appear against an Islamic background, and as such this is a refl ection of diff erent discourse, diff erent frames of reference and objec-tives as well.

Conclusion

Th is paper proposed the phrase ‘culture of communication’ to understand the contrapuntal relationship between language and culture. It drew on Sassure’s conception of language and his defi nitive terms: sign, signifi er and signifi ed as well as connotative values to capture the historically discursive formations of these terms. Unlike Saussure who saw arbitrariness governing the relationship between the signifi er and the signifi ed, this paper suggested that social spaces and dynamics are schemed according to power distributions and hegemonic modes within societies. As such, language and culture are not realms with which arbitrariness can be associated wholesale per se . Th e term culture of communication can help us understand human dynamics and relations, the most distinctive of which being language and culture. Language is a formida-ble source of resonance and identifi cation, but it is the existence of a culture of communication that gives meanings, shows positions, oppositions and diversities, all encompassed within its perimeters.

Th is paper contends that a culture of communication exists in every culture as human beings draw on the historical inventories that underpin their present consciousness of who they are. 8 Th e past is generated through a past and the present is generated through a past; it is this generative and regenerative quality of human life in which language and culture fi gure distinctively which endows any culture of communication with meaning. Th is paper argued that generative interpretation provides a conceptual signpost that allows individuals to identify the historical, literary and cultural backgrounds of present discourses and their socio-political contingent conditions. Using Foucault and drawing on Adonis’ interpretation of the fi xed and dynamic elements in Arabic culture, I have made

8 Th is accords with Bourdieu’s conceptualization of culture as summarized in his term ‘ habitus’ (Bourdieu 1999: 444): ‘because the habitus is an infi nite capacity for generating products— thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions—whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its productions, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning’.


a selective, yet representative, demonstration of what is fi xed and dynamic in the discourse of Hamas. Th e fi xed and the dynamic are not mutually exclusive realms, but their marriage in political discourses is evident, as the assessment of three Hamas images has shown. Th e term ’culture of communication’ is pro-posed as a core term that addresses societal values—mainly values that are socio-historically accumulated and which recur in the macro ideological sphere within which this culture is situated. In other words, a culture of communica-tion can be described as intentional processes of enactments and reactions. In this paper, I propose that another element that pertains to the Islamist culture of communication is that it relies on selective readings and appropriation of the rich and diverse literary, historical and linguistic tradition of the Arab World. All cultures of communication appropriate and select; the kind of selection referred to in this context is not representative; it searches for sources of approval of its ideology, highlighting how discourse becomes inseparable from the prac-tice (Foucault in Hall 2004). Th e concepts, culture of communication and discourse, share the fact that they are historical products of antagonisms with other culture(s) of communication and other discourses, albeit in diff erent ways. Indeed, cultures of communication are historically rooted in that they are located in various canons, like religious books, while drawing on traditional and codifi ed values preserved in the literature.

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