Rana Kabbani - a voice through the night(s).

Floating between Cocktail Hour Glamour and Alexa Chung's left breast on the cover of June's UK Vogue are the words Road to Revolution - One Woman's Journey. They point to a four page article by Damascene writer Rana Kabbani about the Arab Spring. She talks about the horrors of living in a police state (in this case a Ba'ath party controlled Syria), the good people that stand up to a regime at great personal cost and the rejection of fear that is moving through the Arab world unifying people and overthrowing governments. Kabbani describes her family's revolutionary history from her grandfather, Tawfik Kabbani, who organised the strikes that were instrumental to the downfall of the French occupation to her own decision to write outspokenly about events in her home country.


She also touches on the slant of the Western media about some prominent Arab women: "Queen Rania of Jordan remains flavour-of-the-month abroad, no doubt for sounding so unthreateningly "Western", when at home she is pilloried for the corruption that shames a country struggling with poverty under a repressive monarchy." This isn't the first time that Kabbani has been vociferous about the way that the Arab world and its diverse peoples are represented by western writers - she is a vehement critic of the Arabian Nights.


In her essay The Arabian Nights as an Orientalist Text which fronts The Arabian Nights Encyclopaedia (and is an abridged version of some themes from her book Imperial Fictions: Europes Myths of Orient) Kabbani argues that The Arabian Nights was "manufactured" by Antoine Galland's propensity to dwell on his idea of a violent and sensual Orient with repeated imagery of "the cruel and vengeful eastern male" repressing the captive female. The fact that the readership embraced the book as a realistic depiction and a true translation "of a text of Arabic letters" shows an "ignorant neglect of the rich traditions of classical and contemporary Arabic letters (and) is a reflection of the West's political and cultural contempt for the Arab World, and for the Muslim world in general"
 
This imagined Orient wasn't benign because "depicting Eastern peoples, however colourful their attire or exotic their habitat, as intrinsically slothful, violent, sexually obsessed, and incapable of sound self-government made it seemed justified, even imperative, for the imperialist to step in and rule them".