histories and ideologies, and thus of presenting a sense of what it means—and doesn’t mean—to be a citizen or subject of a country. As Viola Shafik has pointed out, film came to the Middle East relatively soon after the spread there of print media (newspapers and magazines) and has in many respects adopted the role of nation building attributed to the latter by Benedict Anderson through the construction of “imagined communities.” Cinema’s importance in this light is, indeed, borne out by the high degree of government control and censorship of the medium that, sadly, also characterizes the region, insofar as regulations are most commonly enforced to limit the discussion or depiction of material deemed contrary to desired images of the state.
This nation-defining capacity of Middle Eastern cinema is nowhere more apparent than in the anticolonialist films that have characterized newly independent states. Algerian cinema has commonly been seen as a textbook example of this tendency in the years following its independence from France. Early films that celebrate the liberation movement include the well-known Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by the Italian socialist Gillo Pontecorvo, a film that records an important moment in that struggle, emphasizing how Algerians fought back against a commensurably greater colonial violence. Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s expensively made, award-winning Chronicle of the Years of Embers (1975) stands as something of a national epic, seeking to further define what it means to be Algerian through an analysis, both melodramatic and starkly realist, of the prerevolutionary experience. Although Algerian cinema now covers a wider range of material, it still harkens back to its earlier defining moments from time to time.
Women filmmakers have been prominent in the critical renarration of nationalism in the Maghreb and elsewhere. Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli, probably the most influential of these, dwells explicitly on the patriarchal structures of nationalism in her Silences of the Palace (1994), a film set mostly in the days just prior to Tunisian independence but framed by a more recent time, the images of which serve to critique postindependence society. In the past, the heroine, Alia, as a girl, sings the national liberation song “Green Tunisia,” but the film opens with her adult performance of a love song by the Arab world’s most famous singer, Umm Kulthum (who supported a pan-nationalist platform). Juxtaposed with her unsatisfactory relationship with her partner, a former revolutionary, this performance serves to underscore the continued oppression of women under conditions of ostensible liberation. Tlatli was the editor of Moroccan woman director Farida Benlyazid’s compelling A Door to the Sky (1988), which also ties the nationalist project to gender oppression. In this instance, however, a Westernized Nadia, returning to Fez for her father’s funeral, gradually sloughs off her Parisian values to embrace a Sufi-influenced form of Islam—although this, too, she will eventually question. Islam’s often fraught relationship with nationalism and national identity is indeed a key topic in many fine films from the region. In Algeria, the civil war and the growth of Islamism were the subject of several of the limited number of films made in the first years of the 21st century. Documentarian Djamilia Saraoui, for example, issued a plea for tolerance in her Enough! (2006), in which the heroine’s own loss leads her to confront the violence of the country’s recent past in the context of the earlier independence struggle and the need for a peaceful future. Meanwhile, Nadia El Fani, a Tunisian director, has examined—and challenged—continued French influence with her Bedwin Hacker (2002). She also attempted to counteract an increasingly autocratic turn in the political landscape with The Children of Lenin (2007), a commemoration of her father’s socialist and cosmopolitan values, and offered a plea for secularism in Laïcité Inch’Allah (2011), which provoked an attack on the Tunis cinema in which the film was screening at the height of the revolt against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali—a formative moment in what has been called the Arab Spring but to which we refer, more inclusively, as the Arab Uprisings throughout the new edition of this volume.
El Fani’s critical nostalgia is a frequent means of instilling a sense of how a nation’s past might be used to question its present course. Tunisian Férid Boughedir’s A Summer in La Goulette (1995), for example, memorializes—and sentimentalizes—an era of religious tolerance in which Muslims coexist and interact joyfully with Christians and Jews. While Islam is the dominant religion throughout the Middle East, its practices and formations vary historically and geographically. Minority religions commonly coexist within Islamic civilization, and in Egypt, for example, a considerable and noteworthy Coptic Christian presence exists in the film industry, exemplified by directors Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah, and Henri Barakat and performers Naguib el-Rihani and Yousra. Some of Chahine’s films, in particular, celebrate the cosmopolitan character of his birthplace, Alexandria, and a tolerant Islam, personified by Saladin, leader of the Muslim Arabs against the Christian Crusaders, who nevertheless respects Christian values and includes in his army Arab Christians equally opposed to the Crusades. The full Arabic title of Chahine’s Saladin (1963)—El Nasir Salah El Din—explicitly connects Saladin to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who briefly united his country with Syria to form the United Arab Republic and who was, for a time, revered throughout the Arab world for his ability not only to redefine his own national ideology but to adapt it to the wider, pan-Arabist movement, which has inspired political liberationists to this day.
In Iran, the influence of Islam on cinema has also led to a contestation, within film, over what defines that country and its national religion. Many Iranian filmmakers worked on behalf of reformist ex-president Mohammed Khatami, who in his prior position as minister of culture and Islamic guidance was an important facilitator of cinema. The screening of previously banned films under Khatami helped define his vision of the nation, just as their proscription has defined other regimes, and current President Hassan Rouhani has echoed Khatami in some ways while also appointing more conservative figures to key cultural posts. By the same token, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s documentary Our Times (2002) records Khatami’s election victory while also acknowledging the many female candidates who ran against him, thus drawing attention, from a woman-centered perspective, to certain limitations of the nationalist project. Meanwhile, a change in disposition toward the dominant modes of Islam in Iran can be traced across the films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, which first emphasized the central role of religion in defining national identity, then rejected and finally abandoned it, with his The Gardener (2012), which examines the still marginalized Baha’i religious movement, being shot in Haifa, Israel–Palestine.
Turkish cinema has very specifically been a site of struggle over what constitutes Turkish national identity. Debates about the nature of a “true” national cinema have been ongoing, with Islamic values weighed both against national folkloric traditions and Western, secular-rationalist norms. This debate is very much alive in the 21st century, as an Islamic renewal movement has been fostered in order to bolster the increasingly autocratic nationalism of the Tayyep Erdoğan regime, even as earlier in the century the country had applied for admission to the European Union (EU). Indeed one obstacle to that goal has been Turkish resistance to enforced secularization (for example, legal restrictions in France against Muslim women wearing the head scarf [hijab] in public places) and other anti-Muslim/immigrant policies in some EU countries in which Turks and Muslims live as migrant and guest workers. Another point of contention has been Western disapproval of Turkey’s treatment of its substantial Kurdish minority in the east. As in Iran and Iraq, nationalist ideology, sometimes rationalized in the name of pan-Islamism, has precluded acknowledging Kurdish claims to autonomy and led to the violent suppression of struggles for political independence, including a 2019 intervention into Syria that created a buffer zone in the north of that country, along the Turkish border, free of Kurdish influence. Interestingly, one of Turkey’s best-known actors and, later, directors, Yılmaz Güney, was a Kurd, although this went unacknowledged for much of his career. So indeed was the historical Saladin, a fact not recognized in Chahine’s pro-Nasserist celebration of his pan-Islamic values. Iranian Kurd Bahman Qobadi and Iraqi-born Hiner Saleem both emphasize their Kurdishness in recent cinematic works and identify themselves with their non-nation rather than with Iran or Iraq.
The situation of Palestinians has been compared, not without controversy, to that of the Kurds, although with a much stronger film history, reflected in the title of Hamid Dabashi’s edited collection
