Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East

Syrian Refugees in Egypt

Magdalena Suerbaum

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838604066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Following the outbreak of the Syrian uprising in 2011, many Syrians fled to Egypt. This ethnographic study traces Syrian men's struggles in Cairo: their experiences in the Egyptian labour market and efforts to avoid unemployment; their ambitions to prove their 'groomability' in front of potential in-laws in order to get married; and their discontent with being assigned the label 'refugee'. The book reveals the strategies these men use to maintain their identity as the 'respectable Syrian middle-class man' - including engaging in processes of 'Othering' and the creation of hierarchies – and Magdalena Suerbaum explains why this proved so much more difficult for them after Morsi was toppled in 2013. Based on in-depth interviews, conversations and long-term participant observations, Suerbaum identifies Syrian men's emotional struggles as they undergo the experience of forced displacement and she highlights the adaptability and ultimate elasticity of constructed masculinities. The Syrians interviewed share their memories and their understandings of sectarianism and growing up in Syria, their interactions with the Egyptian and Syrian states, and their experiences during the Syrian uprising. The book takes an intersectional approach with close attention to the 'refugee' as a classed and gendered person.

Chapter 1

BEING A MAN VIS-À-VIS MILITARIZATION, WAR AND THE UPRISING

If you had asked me whether I was against the regime in the past – no I wasn’t. All the Syrians had adapted to the situation. Since we were born, we had Hafez al-Asad and the Ba’th Party ruling us; however, things passed the limits. Now we can’t stand the injustice anymore. (Abu Walid)

This chapter traces how Syrian men remembered growing up under an authoritarian regime; how they adapted, struggled and negotiated; and how they eventually experienced the uprising and the civil war. As part of this endeavour, this chapter discusses Syrian men’s experiences of militarization and war preparation in Syria. It focuses on the predominantly negative meaning ascribed to the military service and the army. In most narratives, men were critical of the militarization of their lives in Syria and distanced themselves from the army, the regime’s war propaganda and the usefulness of the military service, even though they did not have the option to circumvent mandatory military service or military camps in their youth. Most Syrian men I met in Egypt did not identify with aspects of militant masculinity in their past and present, and sought and presented instead other paths to acceptable masculinities. Hence, I contend that literature defining an inherent relation of masculinity and military combat fails to incorporate the experiences of men who do not wish to fight and therefore act accordingly (Cockburn 2009: 163; Segal 2008: 30). After analysing Syrian men’s memories of militarization during their childhood, adolescence and military service, this chapter moves on to explore the specific vulnerability of young men, that is, living in a war zone when being of fighting age. Because of the risk of being targeted or forced to fight in the regime’s army or opposition forces due to their age and gender, young men were defined in several narratives as the main reason for the whole family deciding to leave Syria. Moreover, several men exposed their vulnerabilities when they described how they experienced the uprising in 2011. They recognized subsequent changes in their feelings and its impact on their life in Egypt. For some men, the uprising felt like a threshold to maturity, while others felt that the experience of the outbreak of the civil war numbed their emotions or evoked a previously unknown sense of fear and anxiety in them. This part of the chapter shows that masculinities are not constructed in a vacuum of ideals. Men were affected by their experiences of the uprising and consequent forced displacement and needed to make sense of them when rethinking themselves as men. Hence, there are elasticity and tensibility in how masculinities are constructed and sustained, adapting to emerging ‘unmanly’ emotions.

The versions of acceptable manhood Syrian men adopted in exile, namely, being a pacifist, observer or a father, presented at the end of this chapter, show that masculinities are subjectively and actively constructed (Connell 1995; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003) and that men form masculinities by weaving in attitudes, behaviours and practices they find available in their specific social context (Wentzell 2015). Syrian men presented themselves by discursively adopting versions of manhood they considered acceptable and honourable vis-à-vis their current situation as displaced men in Egypt, in which various versions of heroic masculinities were unavailable to them. Ultimately, this chapter is about nuanced responses to violence, military combat and militarization in Syrian men’s lives and challenges any direct, homogeneous linkage between masculinities, war and fighting. This chapter exemplifies, on the one hand, that masculinities are consciously created and composed, subject to the specific circumstances in which a man finds himself. In their search for acceptable alternatives to militant masculinity, some Syrian men proved that construction of masculinities meant strategizing and assessing one’s options in order to reach a stance that is worthy, accepted and beneficial. On the other hand, however, Syrian men experienced powerlessness, depression and anxiety that could not be incorporated in any form of positive and successful masculine selfhood. In contrast to the other chapters, whose setting switches constantly between Syria and Egypt, this chapter’s focus is mostly located within Syria. While touching on the emotional consequences of having experienced the uprising on their lives in Egypt, most of this chapter is dedicated to Syrian men’s memories of growing up in Syria, living as (young) men through the beginning of the uprising and deciding to leave Syria eventually.

Growing up with militarization

Laith had baked khubs al-‘aid (the bread of the feast), a specific type of bread from his home town in the south of Syria. He had invited his friend Mu’ayad and me to share this bread with him. Its taste was slightly sweet. We were sitting in the living room of the small apartment in Nasr City which he shared with three Syrian students. Laith served tea and asked Mu’ayad to prepare arkile (water pipe). Laith and Mu’ayad knew each other since primary school. Mu’ayad had left Syria directly after the outbreak of the uprising because of having been injured during the protests. Starting from zero after a hurried decision to flee to Cairo was far from easy. His injuries needed expansive medical care and once back on his feet Mu’ayad needed to find a way to survive financially in an unknown city. Laith had arrived in Egypt in 2012. Despite his background as an engineer, he worked as a driver. When our conversation turned to memories of their home town, I learnt that war was omnipresent when they grew up. Both lived in a village close to the Syrian border with Israel and described how they constantly felt that there was an external threat to their country. Laith described that the conflict with Israel was used in his childhood to make him understand that he and his family could not be rich. He was told that all the extra income a Syrian accumulated should be devoted to the fight against Israel: ‘If you are poor you should be fine with that because we are in the state of war.’ Mu’ayad nodded in support of this statement. Following Laith, the state of war with Israel could be understood as an omnipresent and permanent national challenge and it was every citizen’s responsibility to live their life accordingly, that is, to sacrifice livelihood and individuality, as well as material and financial means for the sake of winning the war.

Syria fought against Israel in 1948, 1967 and 1973 and has lost part of its territory to Israel. Furthermore, Syria’s army was active in Lebanon: it entered the neighbouring state in 1976 to ‘regulate’ its civil war (Rabo 2005: 66). Following Perthes (2000: 151), militarization and war preparation in Syria were not a prelude to actual war making but instead ‘an end in itself’ that had political, social and domestic benefits. In the discourse of the Syrian government, the preparation for a potential war against Israel had always been given absolute primacy (2000: 151). According to Ziter (2015: 61), who analyses Syrian theatre, the Syrian regime tried to erase the memory of the 1967 defeat and its consequent territorial loss, while the 1973 war was omnipresent and celebrated in textbooks, monuments, war panoramas and government buildings. War was transformed into an ‘abstraction’ in the background of everyday life in Syria (2015: 57). The conflict with Israel can be furthermore defined as a national trauma and an ongoing fear in Syria’s citizens of losing more of their homeland. Theatre plays that followed the 1967 war with Israel illustrate men’s suffering because of their defeat in war and their experiences of oppression by the Syrian authorities (2015: 61). War, trauma and self-contempt are thus linked to Israel’s victory and to living under a dictatorial regime. Aghacy (2009: 5), approaching the theme from the discipline of comparative literature, considers the war with Israel in 1967 a threat to everything that was assumed to be constant and undisputable. It not only instilled a feeling of constant fear and threat in Syrian citizens, but also caused a male trauma because of men’s feeling of incapability to change the outcome of the war. Aghacy (2009: 6) contends that the history of defeats in successive wars in the Levant shook men’s self-perception and self-confidence in their dominant role in society.

War and militarization were the background in front of which children in Syria grew up, incorporated ideas, self-consciousness and an adult stand. Abd al-Rahman remembered the influence of the military in his everyday life as a child by referring to the regime’s propaganda and the school uniform that had the colours of the military. He had recently got married, lived with his wife Israa in a small flat in Maadi and worked for an NGO supporting the Syrian opposition. His wife and her two sisters were students of mine. Several times I was invited to Israa’s flat: for dinner, tea with another student from the English class and a female-only birthday party. During the first invitation, I was introduced to Israa’s mother and the youngest siblings. I also met Abd al-Rahman for the first time on that evening. He told me that he came to Egypt to study in 2006, that he had only paid occasional visits to Syria in the time of the uprising and that he worked with an NGO that supported the Syrian opposition. Sitting together in the small living room, Israa’s sister Susan asked me about my studies. When I answered that I was interested in gender, it sparked a discussion about masculinity. Susan wanted to know what men were like in Germany. Abd al-Rahman responded to her question by explaining that Western societies were characterized the by absence of religious norms and values and lack of care for each other. Over the course of the evening, Abd al-Rahman engaged me in several discussions about Israel, politics in the region and the Syrian uprising as if he was testing my knowledge and political position. Eventually, he began talking about his life and childhood in Syria. When it came to the topic of military indoctrination, he said:

We were raised up in Syria in a Ba’thi childhood and the party’s childhood. They [the regime] were always saying that we are in the first line of defence against the Israeli enemy. Therefore, the student was always wearing the brown uniform, which has the colour of the soil, so that the child grows up with a military appearance. However, there is something wrong if you look at it from the perspective of humanitarian principles. If I am between five and ten years old, I am still a child. I don’t understand what a weapon is. I don’t understand the meaning of war. The mentality of the Syrian regime was the mentality of the Ba’th party, which focuses on the topics of militarisation and carrying weapons in order to confront the Zionist enemy or the Israeli enemy. And this is nonsense to start with because for forty years the Syrian Golan has been occupied by the Israelis and not a single bullet was fired.

Abd al-Rahman drew the picture of childhood and youth defined by enforced military upbringing, a direct introduction of military values to the child’s everyday life and a normalization of the use of weapons. Shock and cynicism reverberate from his statement about the use of lies to prepare young people to loyally defend their country. Moreover, his memories illustrate the powerlessness of the individual vis-à-vis the authoritarian state: the state enforced militarized education, defined the dominant understanding of masculinity with regard to weapons and the military and the individual was left with little choice but to obey.

Conceptualizing militarization, Macmillan (2011: 63) argues that it does not only mean teaching someone physical skills to participate in war, but to also normalize violence and acquire a disposition to accept killing. Militarization does not only appear in ‘war zones’, nor is it static and always similarly shaped; instead, militarization should be understood as informing gender relations in various ways and in multiple locations, from factories to police stations and bedrooms (Enloe 1993: 68). As far as militarized masculinity is concerned, Jones (2006: 454) suggests understanding it as inherently extremist ‘with a momentum that rapidly pushes it beyond the bound of what would be considered “acceptable” behaviour in societies technically at peace’. Abd al-Rahman’s critique of a child who must carry arms in the military camps targets exactly this extremism and the imposition of a radical mindset inherent in militarized masculinities.

Military indoctrination came up as well in one of my discussions with Abu Walid, a short man who was the father of two boys in his thirties. I used to meet Abu Walid in the accessories shop in which he worked. Sitting behind the register with his eyes fixed on the sidewalk of the small street in front of the shop window, his voice slightly louder than the AC behind him, he described what he had experienced in Syria. Like Abd al-Rahman, Abu Walid remembered the military camps he had to attend when growing up.

Since we were children in the elementary school, there was a camp called ‘The children of Ba’th […] There, they are shouting slogans saying that the president shall live forever. In the intermediate school, there is another camp which is called ‘The youth of Ba’th’. You will find a guy who is fifteen or sixteen years old and they bring him to the camp and teach him how to use a gun. It is almost like the system in the army. He is shouting in the same way for the life of the leader. This is what we learned.

Abu Walid’s words illustrate how the regime manoeuvred children simultaneously through the process of militarization and glorification of the leader. His statement shows the inevitability of escaping the militarizing campaigns and efforts of the regime.

Serving in the Syrian army

In addition to the relevance of military indoctrination, I realized over the course of my fieldwork the prevalence of references to the army in conversations. The army was described not only as challenging and draining on the soldiers but also as loved and appreciated. The positive perception of the army changed with the beginning of the uprising when many Syrians felt that the army turned against them. Bashar was a student at the medical campus at one of the universities in 6th of October City. I was introduced to him when we both visited Mazin’s family. Mazin and Bashar studied at the same campus. Once, when we were talking about the beginning of the uprising in Syria, he underlined his initial sense of the army as a force uniting Syria which however changed with the outbreak of the civil war:

At the beginning of the revolution, the people had high hopes in the army. They were chanting: ‘The people and the army are united!’. The army represents the sons of the homeland. Maybe my friend and my cousin serve in the army or anyone else. You find people from many different ages, so the army represents all of our country. At the beginning, the army was with the people but the problem is that there are people in high positions in the army, but actually, they are not in control. So, the army started to apply their orders. At that time, the army started to lose the support of the people. For each action, you will have a reaction. When the army applied violence, it received the same reaction.

Bashar illustrated how the initially positive connotation of the army had changed and gave place for distrust, disappointment and outright rejection after the outbreak of the civil war.

The army had an important role in Syria. It was the strongest instrument of the Syrian state, since it enabled the regime to monopolize the means of organized violence (Perthes 2000: 155). The militarization of Syrian society and mandatory military service helped to create a spirit of Syrianness beyond loyalty to regional and subnational groups. Instead, this spirit was related to the Syrian post-independence borders (Perthes 2000: 157). In Syria, military service is mandatory for men and lasts more than two years, unless the young man is the family’s only son, is incapable of serving in the army due to health issues or has enough money to purchase an exemption. Studying at university or college also means an automatic postponement (Davis 2016: 51). In general, military service had a very bad reputation in Syria and only through payments to the officers was it possible to change the location, treatment, tasks of the conscripts and to ensure a better quality and quantity of food (Rabo 2005: 152). Avoiding military service was however not a solution. Young men who had not completed their military service had, for instance, extreme difficulty obtaining a passport (Rabo 2005: 197). Nevertheless, there were ways and means to avoid conscription. When I asked Mu’ayad whether he did his military service, he explained that he, like other students in university, used to fail in his exams on purpose in order not to officially graduate from university as a strategy to defer military service. Retaining the status of a student meant that they could not be conscripted. Mu’ayad had refused to join the army because of the expected degradation and because of his deep opposition to any form of militarization. When asked why they had tried to avoid the military service, other men told me that they feared humiliation and ‘feeling like a slave’.

This stood in sharp contrast with Firas’ recollection of his time in the army. Firas was a married man in his mid-thirties who I met through my friend Mahmud. I knew Mahmud since my stay in Syria in 2009/2010. Mahmud used to work as a travel guide back in Syria. He managed to work in this profession in Egypt due to his vast network among independent backpackers, his ability to speak four languages, his knowledge of the Middle East, his presence and advertisement in social media and his self-developed tours and information booklets. He had arrived in Egypt in 2011 and often helped me with various forms of translation. We used to meet almost every week and I frequently asked him for clarification either if I did not understand certain words and phrases or if I wanted to get context for what I had heard during interviews and encounters. Mahmud tried to avoid contact to other Syrians; however, with Firas, he kept a distanced friendship and had invited him one evening to his flat so that he could help me with my research. I arrived a bit early in Mahmud’s flat and we prepared the living room together. Mahmud had bought nuts, sweets and lemonade for his visitors. All of a sudden, Mahmud received a call from Firas informing him that he would bring his friend Yasmin along. This required a change of plans. We went downstairs to the café in the street and waited there for Firas and Yasmin. When they arrived, we ordered and I began explaining the focus of my research. Yasmin seemed to feel uncomfortable with the constellation and the purpose of the meeting. She repeatedly asked aloud why she should help me. She was approximately of Firas’ age, even though I could only guess because she gave different hints about her situation, marital status and family background throughout our meeting. She and Firas had obviously met only recently. She did not know Firas’ actual name and called him ‘Ahmad’ throughout the conversation. At some point, Yasmin said that she did not want to continue the conversation in the café. Mahmud suggested to go to his flat; however, he urged us not to talk in the staircase because he did not want to give reason to the neighbours and bawab (doorman) to gossip about him. In Mahmud’s flat over tea and the prepared snacks, Yasmin seemed to warm up and I learned that Yasmin and Firas had met through their mutual search for a trafficker who could bring them across the Mediterranean to Europe, where they were planning to seek asylum. Yasmin became more talkative and willing to take part in the conversation after she had asked countless questions about visa procedures in Germany. She listened carefully to the questions I posed and to the answers Firas gave and began correcting him. After she had asked for a coffee and made sure that Firas would drop her at home, she agreed to stay until the end of the interview. When I asked Firas whether he went to the army, he told us that he managed to complete his military service in the position of the ‘sukhra (service boy) for the colonels’. He seemed proud of having been in this position. Yasmin interrupted him directly in order to point out:

He is of course only talking about himself. Not everyone in the army was privileged like him. In fact, the army is very challenging. Soldiers only get one meal per day and their life is really hard and exhausting.

Responding half-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION: STUDYING MASCULINITIES, MIDDLE-CLASSNESS AND RELATIONS TO THE STATE DURING FORCED DISPLACEMENT
• Chapter 1 BEING A MAN VIS-À-VIS MILITARIZATION, WAR AND THE UPRISING
• Chapter 2 BECOMING AND ‘UN-BECOMING’ REFUGEES
• Chapter 3 CLAIMING SUCCESSFUL MIDDLE-CLASS MASCULINITY THROUGH WORK
• Chapter 4 LOSS OF STATUS AND ‘GROOM-ABILITY’: MAKING SENSE OF CHANGES IN MARRIAGE NEGOTIATIONS
• Chapter 5 ESTABLISHING A LIVING AMONG SEVERAL ‘OTHERS’ IN EGYPT
• Chapter 6 MASCULINITIES, INTERACTION WITH THE STATE AND THE MIGRATION OF FEAR
• CONCLUSION: ON MASCULINITIES, FORCED DISPLACEMENT, MIDDLE-CLASSNESS AND RELATIONS WITH THE NATION STATE
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint