Islam and the ecology of mind. The cognitive reframing of an ethnographic approach in pre-war Taiz

Islam and the ecology of mind
The cognitive reframing of an ethnographic approach in pre-war Taiz

ABSTRACT : From 2003 to 2013 as part of a master and doctoral degree in anthropology, I conducted an ethnographic and interactionist approach to masculine urban sociability in Taiz, based on extensive fieldwork (24 months from 2003 to 2010) in the sector of Hawdh al-Ashraf, a famous square at the center of modern Taiz, with a souk and a nation-wide traffic hub coexisting with residential areas. At one point during my fourth stay, in 2007, I was compelled to convert to Islam by the circumstances of my study. Shortly after that, I became an avid reader of the entire works of anthropologist, linguist and psychologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), a founding father of cybernetics and system theory. The two conversions went pretty much together : a shift in the nature of my engagement in Yemeni society, through my conversion to islam, paved the way for a complete re-formulation of my research, and the discovery that Middle Eastern realities are indeed governed by the general epistemological rules of the Ecology of Mind. I believe something similar is currently happening for Yemeni studies in general, as current circumstances demand a shift in the nature of our engagement. After describing this transition’s clarifying effects on my research, I will explain the structural obstacles that compromised its successful conclusion.

The intuition of a theoretical breakthrough

Approached in terms of “zones of theory”, it becomes very simple to explain my research in Yemen, which represents ten years of my life.

I started doing research in Yemen as a young student in social sciences, ambitious as only a former student in physics can be. My theoretical ambition was quite self-conscious : the intuition of a theoretical breakthrough, inscribed in the historical configuration of that time. The date of my first fieldwork is 2003, but I started learning Arabic in early 1999, during my first year in Physics, with a comrade from Tunisia. 9/11/2001 was the moment when I decided to redirect my studies. Before setting foot in Taiz, the city where I wanted to do fieldwork, I felt somehow entitled to be a theorist, having already succeeded in my studies in physics at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure. Moving from physics to social sciences was a transgression, and I was quite conscious of that, but I felt the fall of the twin towers allowed me to make that jump - and anyway the department of social sciences in that same school actively sponsored that reconversion.

Though it remained a taboo in my relationship with most Academic interlocutors, this pre-existing context is crucial to understand my interaction with Yemeni society. When I arrived in Taiz, I looked for a partner in crime, someone who would be clever enough to understand the stakes and be my accomplice for the “heist of the century”. I found that partner in the person of Ziad, a young accountant from an urban family in Taiz with connections with the Regime. And together we did it. Up to the present day, 15 years later, I do think that Ziad and I are bringing a theoretical breakthrough, in the way we articulate pre-existing intellectual revolutions : monotheism on the one hand, cybernetics and the Ecology of Mind on the other¹.

At one point in 2007, during my fourth stay in Taiz, I was compelled to convert to Islam by the circumstances of my study. Shortly after that, I became an avid reader of Gregory Bateson’s entire works. The two conversions went pretty much together : a shift in the nature of my engagement in Yemeni society, through my conversion to islam, paved the way for a complete re-formulation of my research, and the discovery that Middle Eastern realities are indeed governed by the general epistemological rules of the Ecology of Mind.

Reframing and simplification

I want to give you an idea of how that breakthrough clarified the picture in my research. It stabilized the delimitations of the story and the sociological object under study. The story now was : how Ziad failed to convert me to Islam, during the first four years of my study, and what part did Yemeni society play in that failure. Approaching Yemeni society inside that frame, seems to me much more satisfying intellectually, if we are to mobilize the intellectual tools of generalist social sciences, such as interactionism and reflexivity. I did that already in the first memoir I wrote and defended in 2004, where I made up the portrait of a young charismatic leader in his neighborhood, and analyzed the limits of his authority. The conversion of the visitor already was the implicit question², but I was not fully conscious of it at the time. I returned to Yemen the next year without clearly understanding what drew me there, and I moved on to other sociological objects that were more classical : first the condition of the shuqât, rural day laborers in the city, which helped me better understand local social history (2005) ; and then I studied masculine sociability amongst the shopkeepers, especially the role of vulgarity in their socializing rites (2006). Though I presented them as separate sociological objects, I did all this in the same sector of Hawdh al-Ashraf, virtually below Ziad’s window. Meanwhile Ziad himself faced repeated failures on a professional and personal level, which quite affected me, and I started to be afraid of him.

On the 19^th of August 2007, the night of my return to Taiz for my fourth stay, Ziad set fire to the house of his family while I was standing on the roundabout, and everybody pretended not to notice the coincidence. This theatrical incident allowed me to realize the true connection between those separate sociological objects. Islam came simultaneously as a logical key, that unlocked my theoretical perspectives, and as an ethnographic door, that allowed me to step out.

People often misunderstand that point : becoming a Muslim did not make me intimate with Yemeni society, all of a sudden. It rather allowed me to perceive thresholds that I was unaware of until then, and slam the door myself in a diplomatic way. It allowed me to say : there is something wrong going on in that country, something wrong in the relationship between that society and the Westerner that I am. It allowed me to stop my fieldwork, close my object, which really simplified the whole picture.

Islam as an epistemic location

I believe something similar is currently happening for Yemeni studies in general, as current circumstances demand a shift in the nature of our engagement in Yemeni society. I am not talking about any “mass conversion” of foreign researchers, but at least the recognition that islam is not just a culture, or just a political fact, something “out there” waiting for social-scientific investigation. Islam is an epistemic location. And as such, Islam is in the head of the researcher, as much as it is in the head of the people under study. You may accept it and become a Muslim, or not fully accept it and remain an adept of whatever religion you have - that is something personal. But in any case from a scientific perspective, you must acknowledge that Islam is in your head too, as a virtuality.

Similarly, I believe Yemen will be in a much better shape when specialists realize that “Yemen’s problem” is not in Yemen, but rather in the relationship between Yemen and foreign observers.

These lines by Gregory Bateson perfectly capture the cognitive experience associated with conversion in my research :

The cognitive phenomenon described here has no link to the Islamic creed specifically. It is simply epistemological critique, simply an endeavor to ethnographic reflexivity. Still, that story could not be heard, neither in the Academy of the social sciences, nor amongst educated Yemenis. The reception of that story was blocked by something, which I believe is not unrelated with the fate of the country over the present decade.

The double bind of ethnography

Until 2007, Ziad had been a perfectly sound and rational person. His family sent him to the clinic after the death of his older brother, because he refused to take over his position in the souk police, but on his part this was a clearly assumed position towards the Regime’s corruption.

However, in the months and years that followed my conversion to Islam, Ziad became truly schizophrenic. After the fire, I established a renewed alliance with Ziad’s family, especially with his younger brother Yazid who suddenly found himself in charge of the family. Our political relationship grew ever stronger over the years. Meanwhile, Ziad himself started to make phone calls to an imaginary film maker, whom he cursed day and night. He did it with a real phone in his hands whereas just before that, around the year 2006, Ziad had gone through a mystical phase where he refused to use any modern device, especially the telephone. Ziad was resisting madness. And from the moment when I converted to Islam (and to the Ecology of Mind), Ziad grasped the telephone and went crazy. That was in 2008, approximately ten years ago.

What is the pattern which connects Ziad’s madness on the one hand, my own academic experience on the other, with the Yemeni crisis in the background?

For the last ten years or so, Ziad and I have been trapped in a double bind, between a personal contradiction and a collective one. Since the work of Gregory Bateson in psychiatry (1956), we call “double bind” the situation of an impossible choice between two equally repelling perspectives. If I address my personal contradictions in that story, then I will sound like a narcissist, and I will only convince my interlocutors that I have a problem. But if I address the collective contradictions, people will just refuse to listen. As Bateson notes, such situations are favorable to inventiveness and creativity, because you have to bargain, addressing the two sets of contradictions at the same time. And that is what I’ll try to do here once again. But please remember that it is only one half of the creativity involved in that story : Ziad is out there, and he has things to say too.

The collective dimension of a personal contradiction

My conversion to Islam definitely does not fit the ideal image spread by islamo-nationalists : homosexuality played a crucial role in that story. From my second trip in 2004 until 2007, homosexuality was the question that allowed me to problematize fieldwork as cognitive experience and epistemology. It was always clear for me that “homosexuality” was only in my head. I did not study “homosexuality in Yemen”, and never broke the norms of public decency in Hawdh al-Ashraf. Still the contradiction remains, because one sexual interaction happened in deed at a precise moment in that story : the very end of my first stay in Yemen, at the moment when I had to leave the field and head back home.

That moment when I had to acknowledge that Ziad and Yemeni society failed to convert me, corresponded at the time to a very clear sentiment, that I can recall today through my field notes. Yemeni society at that time consistently declined the invitation to mutual understanding. Ziad had finally retired to his village and left me alone in his neighborhood, because he did not want to be responsible. And the rest of my interlocutors, even though they presented themselves as the most friendly and open-minded Yemenis on earth, consistently declined the moral obligation to testify. I felt it confusedly and that situation drove me mad, because the stakes were huge for me. The date of my return flight was approaching, and I could not give up the intuition of the truth that I was looking for : I had to leave with a relationship based on that intuition. Finally, I went to Sanaa and turned to an exiled cousin of Ziad. After three days of discussion, Waddah was overwhelmed, and that thing happened between us. He did not mean it, and I did not mean it either. This had absolutely nothing to do with homosexual desire : this just had to happen. [My first proposal for Exeter was centered on this smaller story : “The dream that chased me from Hawdh al-Ashraf. Challenging the socio-anthropological divide in Taiz before 2011”]. As weird and provocative as it may seem to the ears of Yemeni modernists, testimonial took place precisely in those paradoxical and extreme circumstances, in the moral consistency of actors. And this explains the rest of the story. When I came back on the next year, what appeared to Yemenis as the greatest shame, still remained associated for me with the greatest pride. And we have been wrestling with this paradox up to this date.

The collective contradiction is also that of reflexive ethnography : the institutional incitement to draw oneself and others into such double binds, using the observer’s weaknesses as an “empirical tool” to reach a more truthful testimonial on the social life - see for instance Jeanne Favret-Saada’s “Being affected” (1990), the corner stone of the French tradition of reflexive ethnography. In spite of its proximity to the Christian witness, as an obvious anthropological filiation, I certainly don’t mean to refute that methodological creed, which allowed me to reach Islam. It allowed me to understand that my tendency to divide the social world between indigenous and informants - or between allies and persecutors, which I once perceived as a personal inclination to homoerotic passion - was inextricably linked with the condition of the Western observer, projected into Yemeni society by the sole permission of his passport and research permit. Hence my only true ally since 2003, Ziad, had become by 2007 my only true persecutor, because he refused to actively collaborate and jeopardize the mystery of our relationship…

The tragedy is not so much the story in itself, rather our difficulties over the past twelve years to understand its message, for Western academics and educated Muslims abroad, including myself : our collective unconsciousness of the problematics of islamo-christian dialog, and the theological structures underlying interaction. Back in the times of Orientalism, I believe these problematics were much more present in the minds of researchers, many of whom were clerics. The geopolitical equation of our times somehow developed in the blindspot of that question.

2011, a Muslim denial of witness

When the year 2011 took place, after the political transition started to get stuck, the nature of Ziad’s madness changed. In 2012, he started saying that he was Jesus, and kept announcing in the streets of Taiz the imminence of the Day of Judgement. As for me, I became growingly aware that my first field experience in 2003 had been a small scale “Arab Spring”, centered on my subjectivity³.

In all the Arab Republics hit by the revolutionary wave (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria), the political consensus behind the Head of State was founded on an implicit logical premise : the requirement of witness in modernity. That collective moral obligation finally came to crumble when the now literate Arab societies started to envision the “empty-headedness” of Western political elites - in relation to the Wikileaks affair, and more generally the political situation in Western countries, that Arabs did perceive from afar. The same thing happened at the scale of my own little story in 2003 : at one point, the idea asserted itself in Ziad’s environment that I was not going to enter Islam. And at that very moment, the za’îm lost his charisma and authority.

If we start to envision the Arab Spring, not as a moment of communion with the world, as European progressive thinkers like to think of it, but on the contrary as a denial of witness, I think it really clarifies the geopolitical perspectives ahead of us. Especially at a time of global uncertainty resulting from the Western political deadlock (Todd 2019), unveiled in France by the Yellow Vest movement.

Unlike most foreign researchers I believe, I am no more “in love with Yemen”. Allowing me to express and elaborate on my debt to specific individuals, finally relieved me from any general indebtedness towards Yemeni society as a whole. This surely disturbs the tacit moral economy associated with Arab and Yemeni studies. But as a Western Muslim, it also frees me from any allegiance to opportunistic political entities like ISIS and such. It compels me to trace my own path, provided that social sciences and their Muslim interlocutors are willing to let that happen.⁴

3I already reckoned with this parallel elsewhere : for instance in my contribution in 2013 to the conference in London on the “Challenges for the Yemen’s Future”, which was one of my last intervention in the academy. But at the time I was not really able to formulate where this was leading us. The answer for me was to be found by stepping out of the academy, and negotiate an issue with French society and its Muslim minority. In the little city where I settled, this question of testimonial, citizenship and laïcité, gradually came up to the front, as I became growingly angered by the intellectual dismissals of many educated Muslims in France.

4Being aware of the difficulties to promote this change of perspective from within the Academy, and as well from within French society and Yemeni society, I recently founded the association “Ziad’s Kingdom”, designed to supervise the three fronts : https://old.taez.fr/sites/2018-2020/Royaume-de-Ziad/ (in French).

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