Marwan Kaabour, ed., The Queer Arab Glossary / المعجم العربي الكويري (New Texts Out Now)

Marwan Kaabour, ed., The Queer Arab Glossary / المعجم العربي الكويري (New Texts Out Now)

Marwan Kaabour, ed., The Queer Arab Glossary / المعجم العربي الكويري (New Texts Out Now)

By : Marwan Kaabour

Marwan Kaabour (ed.), The Queer Arab Glossary / المعجم العربي الكويري (Saqi Books, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?

Marwan Kaabour (MK): I launched Takweer in 2019 as an accessible and engaging resource that aims to explore, archive, and celebrate queer narratives in Arab history and popular culture. The Queer Arab Glossary is the first realized project to come out of Takweer. The book as well as Takweer are a response to the lack of accessible literature that centers the queer Arab experience, which results in the community often looking westwards for references. By exploring and documenting the slang of the queer Arab community, I hope to have a home-grown resource from the community that can provide a sense of belonging and carve out a much-needed space in the wider Arab history. The book also aims to debunk popular myths that queerness is somehow alien to the Arab region, or that Arab communities are somehow innately incapable of embracing queer people. Finally, I wanted to challenge the dominant Eurocentric narratives around queerness, and make sure voices from the global south are heard, loud and clear.

The glossary’s entries touch on the cultural, social, political, historical, and linguistic make-up of the Arab world.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MK: The book is an exploration of the linguistic landscape around queerness in the Arabic-speaking world. The book is divided into two parts: the glossary and the essays. The glossary is the result of a four-year long research into the words and terms used to refer to queer people, or those who might be presumed to be queer. It is divided into six dialectic sections that cover the entirety of the Arabic-speaking world. The glossary’s entries touch on the cultural, social, political, historical, and linguistic make-up of the Arab world. 

The essays that follow present eight unique reflections on issues of language, slang, and queerness from a variety of writers including academics, researchers, organizers, novelists, musicians, poets, and translators. Each essay aims to contextualize the findings of the glossary within the particular area of expertise of each contributor. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MK: Over the course of the fifteen years that I have been working as a graphic designer, I have designed over twenty books. Designing books is a language I am skilled at and am able to think through. Text, language, and typography have always been central to my practice and often appear in my work as a narrative tool. 

When I launched Takweer, my aim was always for the archive to be an open-ended space of exploration into Arab queerness, which would later lead to subject-focused projects. As I began to explore in more detail the linguistic universe of Arab queerness, it was a natural decision to synthesize the research’s findings in book format. Glossaries (mo’jam) have a long history in Arab literature, and I envisioned the book as a reference and resource that can live in domestic and institutional spaces for many years to come. 

Unlike my previous work, this is the first time I am both the designer and editor of a book. This presented a unique opportunity to have complete creative authorship over the look, content, and choice of contributors and collaborators. It might be the first instance where audiences get to listen to my creative voice clearly. With that said, I do feel I have been threading the same authorial and creative mechanisms throughout my entire design, art, and writing practice. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MK: The book is first and foremost a love letter to the queer Arab community. For many of us who do not feel like anyone has our back or is willing to give our experience the time and care it deserves, this book attempts to rectify this exclusion. I hope that the queer Arab community, in the region and the diaspora, get to read and relish in the book and see themselves reflected in it. I also hope the wider Arab community shows enough curiosity to pick up The Queer Arab Glossary and learn more about a community that for too long have felt shunned from the narrative. The book can also be thoroughly enjoyed by queer people of any background who are curious to explore narratives beyond the Eurocentric one and to understand the multiplicity of expressions that queerness can take. The book also illuminates the social, political, historical, cultural, and linguistic world of the Arabic-speaking regions, and can be enjoyed by people who are intrigued by those parts of the world. Last but not least, The Queer Arab Glossary is a book about language, and so I hope it will be enjoyed by those who are interested in philology. Despite its specificity, The Queer Arab Glossary is universal in its reach. 

J: What was the most challenging aspect of editing the book?

MK: The book deals with language, slang, and queerness—all three being notions that are consistently in flux and that escape concrete definition. Trying to capture the varied nuances and contradictions of not only the glossary’s entries, but also the communities to which those entries refer, presented the biggest challenge. Instead of trying to set things in stone, I opted to embrace these contradictions and present my findings in a way that leaves plenty of room for interpretation, expansion, and disagreement. Perhaps it was my way of “queering” the glossary—not only in content, but also in form.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MK: My design practice and my work with Takweer, of which The Queer Arab Glossary is part, have always operated side by side. Only last week, two books that I designed were released: a new cookbook on Persian cuisine by Phaidon, titled Persian Feasts, as well as Tavares Strachan: There is Light Somewhere, which is the companion publication to Tavares Strachan’s incredible new retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London. 

I am currently working on a fascinating book that presents queer correspondences between writers and art practitioners from the Arabic-speaking regions, initiated by Haven For Artists, a cultural feminist organization out of Beirut; a monograph for Korean artist Do Ho Suh for Tate Modern; and a monograph of American artist Genesis Tramaine for Monacelli—all due for release in 2025.

After four years of working on The Queer Arab Glossary, I am now enjoying promoting and sharing the book with different audiences around the world. I am trying to make the most out of this moment, but I can already feel the ideas bubbling for follow-up projects.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the introduction, pp. 8-10)

Compiling and researching The Queer Arab Glossary was an ambitious undertaking. Both queerness and dialect are known to be in a constant state of flux and transformation, constantly evading limitation. To add another layer of complexity, there is no singular Arabic dialect, but countless iterations of spoken Arabic. ‘Arab’ and ‘Arabic’ are by no means a singular monolith. The Arabic language is diverse in its forms, as are the people who populate the Arab world.

What is often referred to as the ‘Arab world’ is a grouping of countries in Western Asia and North Africa, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south east. Most people in this area are ethnically Arab, but there is also a vast population of other ethnic groups such as Amazigh, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians.

A primary factor that defines Arab people is the fact that they speak Arabic. The Arabic language exists in its classical form as Standard Arabic, as well as numerous dialectic variations spoken by the inhabitants of the region. Standard Arabic is formally taught in an academic context, and primarily used in formal communications such as newspapers and news reports, period dramas and formal speeches. It is seldom used as a means for informal communication, that is, you wouldn’t hear people conversing in Standard Arabic on the street, only in dialect.

Spoken Arabic dialects vary massively, not only from one country to another, but from one small locality to its neighbour. The variations are based not just on accents or enunciations, but on significant changes in colloquial vocabulary. The latter is a window into the region’s socio-political makeup. The words we speak today are witness to and the result of years of cultural changes, imperial rule, colonisation and soft power.

The prevalence of the Arabic language itself exists because of Arabisation, the sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Arab society becomes Arab. Arabisation occurred following the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as various nationalist policies towards non-Arab minorities. Despite the diminishing prevalence of the languages those minorities spoke, their impact on spoken Arabic dialects remains, such as Aramaic in Levantine dialects, Amazigh in Maghrebi or Kurdish in Iraqi.

Ancient political alliances and trade routes have also left their mark on spoken Arabic dialects. Egypt was part of the Roman Empire for seven centuries, and numerous Italian words remain in Egyptian dialect to this day. Most of the region was later under the Ottoman Empire for six centuries and the Turkish-Ottoman lexicon remains a fixture of Levantine dialects. More recent European colonisation and mandates have also imprinted our tongues, with Italian words making their way into spoken Libyan, or French entering spoken Lebanese and Syrian. In modern times, as American culture has swept through the world, many English words have been entering our daily vocabulary. This phenomenon will continue to shape and shift our language and vocabulary over time. Language is malleable and impressionable.

As is the case with the rest of the globe, the nation states that make up the Arab world came into being as a result of imperialism, colonialism and civil, regional and global wars. The states and political borders that ensued do not necessarily reflect the cultural homogeneity of the communities that live within these borders. Language and vocabulary do not acknowledge political borders, but rather travel freely and bleed across, visa-free. 

When it came to deciding how to categorise the sections of the glossary, it would have seemed obvious to do so by country, but not necessarily the most natural way to proceed. For all the reasons outlined above, this glossary is divided by the six main Arabic dialects: Levantine, also called Shami (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan); Iraqi; Gulf (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen); Egyptian; Sudanese; and Maghrebi (Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco).

I invite you to engross yourself in the glossary’s entries, which run the full range of emotions: harrowing, peculiar, hilarious, shocking, saddening, joyful, sweet and sinister. Explore the outstanding creativity, wit, humour and sass that our community has utilised to create language that speaks to and is about us. Learn about the etymology of ‘dirty’ words that seem to have survived, unchanged, for centuries and that remain embedded in our language. But also engage with the entries that were designed to hurt us the most. Use them as an educational tool to understand how our communities perceive us, and the prejudices that exist at its core.

While reading through the glossary, you might notice patterns and themes that run across several dialectic sections. Some themes are expected – like words of kinship to connote a queer family connection – but others are rather curious. Why are there so many words relating to worms? Why do the names of animals and modes of transport keep coming up? Perhaps one of the most obvious things to note is the massive imbalance between the many words relating to queer men versus the few relating to queer women, whether derogatory or endearing. This phenomenon persists despite queer women having participated equally in the submission and interview stages of the research. 

The gender imbalance and inequality that patriarchy have fostered in the Arab world extends to the queer Arab community and the language surrounding it. While there are dozens of ways to refer to queer men and their sexuality, there are only a handful of words to do so for queer women. The misogyny embedded in our language limits the boundaries in which women are able to speak about their bodies, sexualities and queerness. The words that do exist mostly take agency away from queer women and bring it back to the man. This is effected by using words implying that women who are queer and/or are not feminine-presenting are somehow ‘manly’ – such as mistarjila (like a man; Levantine) or boya (feminisation of boy; Gulf). Or it is achieved through referencing queer women’s sex lives by using tropes popularised by mostly heterosexual men, such as laḥḥāsa (licker; Iraqi) or ḥakkāka (rubber; Maghrebi).

Despite it being particular to the queer community, the entries of The Queer Arab Glossary reflect the societies we live in and the linguistic landscape attached to them. The observations mentioned above are natural consequences of this landscape. It is my hope that this glossary encourages a conversation that leads to the innovation of new queer slang that fills in the gaps. I imagine an updated version of the glossary in the future with a wealth of entries relating to queer women, trans people and everyone else who presides under the queer umbrella.

And despite it being specific to the Arabic-speaking region, The Queer Arab Glossary presents a universal framework. It can be applied to any grouping of communities around the world, who share dialect and slang.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.