Reconceptualizing Tourism in the Middle East: Place, Heritage, Mobility and Competitiveness

RAMI FAROUK DAHER

Introduction

Tourism is becoming an increasingly global and complex phenomenon, with political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and educational dimensions. Robinson (1998: 31) considers tourism to be the 'largest of multi-national activities.' When Lanfant (1995b: 26) explains about the omnipresence of tourism, she added that tourism on a world scale makes itself felt at geographical, ecological, and technological levels – as well as in the less visible and symbolic processes. Sheller and Urry (2004: 3) added that '"Travel and tourism" is the largest industry in the world, accounting for 11.7 per cent of world GDP, 8 per cent of world export earnings, and 8 per cent of employment.' They emphasized that the mobility produced by tourism affects almost everyone everywhere. 'Internationally there are over 700 million legal passengers' arrivals each year (compared with 25 million in 1950) with a predicted 1 billion by 2010' (Sheller & Urry, 2004: 3). AlSayyad (2001b: 1) considers the twentieth century to have

been the century of travel and tourism. Indeed, the inhabitants of the world in the last two decades have met more other people than at any time in known history. As travel around the world has risen to unprecedented levels, the number of tourists visiting certain countries and cities in a given year often exceeds the numbers of those places' native populations. Global travel has encouraged the phenomenal growth of the tourism industry.

The Middle East, regardless of how it is defined, has been identified as the geographic arena for this edited volume on tourism. Tourism in the Middle East, within a global culture and competitive world economy, is faced with many challenges such as the leakage of tourism revenues and benefits into First World multi-national agencies and enterprises. Yet, tourism in the Middle East could also be the driving force for valuable opportunities leading to 'progress' and 'development.' The term 'Middle East,' which is politically charged and is considered a post-colonial construct by many intellectuals, has been chosen on purpose to elicit and evoke discontinuities and transformations within this significant region of the world.

Tourism is a multi-industry sector involving transportation, accommodations, attractions, cultural production, representation, distribution and many other sectors as well. Tourism research engages scholars and researchers from diverse fields such as anthropology, economy, geography, architecture, cultural studies, and tourism, which is evolving into a discourse of its own. Yet tourism-related research had mostly addressed tourism processes at the macro scale creating a vacuum and a need for more research that tackles local processes of transformation and change at the micro scale. Tourism is a vibrant vehicle of change that continues to influence the production and nature of 'cultural capital' manifested in heritage sites, cultural landscapes, folklore, and arts and crafts. Since tourism development takes place in real situations and places and affects real people, issues of place representation, authenticity, interpretation, socio-economic and spatial transformation therefore become significant areas for research and contemplation.

This edited volume on tourism in the Middle East embodies a multi-discursive approach to the study of tourism in the region offering not only different perspectives but also qualifying local knowledge and realities. The book reexamines the discourse of tourism within geopolitical contemporary regional realities. It reexamines tourism as a discourse linked to heritage and identity construction, national and global economies, and development of local communities. Alternatively, a new discursive approach to the understanding of tourism emerges out of invigorating and stimulating latent regional realities and the social histories of various towns, villages, and cultural landscapes within the contested and politically charged region of the Middle East. The book investigates issues of national identity, authenticity, definition of heritage, representation of cultures and regions, and tourism-related investments throughout a new vision for the region that transcends current geopolitics or national and formal historiographies.

Place, Heritage, Tourism, and Geographic Categories

Defining and choosing a geographic area for research and comparative analysis can sometimes be a complex and difficult task due to continuously shifting geographic and geopolitical categories and their associated meanings and perceptions. As critical political geographers have shown, it is important to move beyond the acceptance of geopolitics as a reality of world politics and to examine critically the ways in which geopolitical terms are defined and the significant social meanings they hold (Marston & Rouhani, 2001: 101–2). Nevertheless, the following three geopolitical and geo-cultural categories of 'Bilad al Sham,' the 'Mashreq,' or the 'Levant' (though different in meaning, genealogy, and connotations based on the privileged standpoint and the discursive practices that facilitated the inscription of such categories) refer to generally the same physically geographic region that encompasses the countries of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. While all of these geopolitical and geo-cultural categories are constructed and can be contested and become subject of scrutiny, some have emerged from within the region (such as Bilad al Sham or Al Mashreq al Arabi) and others have been part of colonial or neo-imperial imagineering of the region such as the Middle East or even the Levant. The Middle East as a geographical term, and according to Dalby (2003: 8), suggests the historical legacy of imperial specifications of the region. The term comes from 'earlier British designations of the world, which have been maintained on the maps and in the geopolitical imaginations of policy makers.'

In order to understand the genealogy of such geopolitical and geographic categories, one needs to understand and research the moments of transformation and rarity that the region of the Middle East witnessed over the past couple of centuries such as the destruction and replacement of the dynastic religious realm (represented by the Ottoman Empire) with the various post-mandate nation-states of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, and several other nation-states during the first half of the 20th century, and the consequences of such moments and transformations on the definition and practice of nationhood, heritage, and tourism.

When studying the formative influence of colonial encounters in the shaping of national cultures and nation-states, one ought to observe how the various political systems of the newly constructed Middle East, in an attempt to legitimize their new existence (represented in monarchies and republics) consequently constructed several official representations and narrations of national pasts at the expense of regional realities (Kandiyoti, 2002: 282). Such constructed pasts were grounded in a search for distant and ancient origins linked to a disassociation from and varying levels of rejection of the recent past (mainly Ottoman). Due to such ideological, territorial, and cultural transformations, the process of image building and heritage identification and definition became highly contested and problematic especially when it was limited by the physical and political boundaries of the various nation-states and the restrictive and exclusive dogma of nationalism.

The work of Edward Said in general, and Orientalism in particular, helps us understand such processes of construction or inscription of a specific Orient in the minds of Europeans, local nationals, and the world (Said, 1979). Inscription mechanisms (surveys, documentation, military surveys, travel literature, and others) work to create the 'Other,' the 'Opposite' to Europe, which legitimized and led to, through direct modes of imperialism, control, exploitation, and hegemony. Europe was made to be rational, scientific, virtuous, mature, and 'normal' while the Orient (the opposite) was imagined and made to be irrational, depraved, childlike, non-scientific but exotic and 'different.'

This had considerable ramifications on how the past and tradition were viewed by the community and by institutions of the state, and also on how heritage was defined or marginalized. Furthermore, this also affected how the image of each of the nations in the region was weaved and constructed to fit a particular desired reality through discursive practices such as heritage definition by institutions of the state or academia, education and schooling, archaeology, museums, and tourism. One is intrigued to ask questions such as: How do these inscription mechanisms work to create a certain image for the region? How are the images of each of the nation-states constructed and how is heritage defined accordingly? How does this geopolitical construction and inscription process affect tourism to the region and the choice of sites to be incorporated for tourism purposes and why?

The company Thomas Cook and Son contributed to the development of mass tourism to the Levant in the second half of the 19th century. Hunter (2003: 157) stated that

starting in 1869, Thomas Cook and Son created the tourist trade of Egypt by developing the Nile transit service while simultaneously opening up Syria/Palestine to travelers. The Cook enterprise quickly expanded to other parts of the region. The establishment of tourist offices in Cairo (1872), Jaffa (1874), and Jerusalem (1881) was followed by the opening of Cook agencies in Constantinople (1883), Algiers (1887), Tunis (1901), and Khartum (1901).

Primarily, ancient ruins (e.g. Egypt's ancient Phaeronic sites) and biblical sites of Palestine or Syria were the highlights of such tourism. A typical journey from Europe covered Egypt's ancient monuments, the Nile, the holy sites in Palestine and prime locations in major cities such as Beirut, Jerusalem, and Damascus. Sites such as Temple of Jupiter in Ba'albeck, Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the ruins of Palmyra, and the rose-cut city of Petra were popular sites amongst tourists.

The definition of the region's heritage and the sites that were incorporated into tourism brochures or posters were confined to the classical, religious, and ancient monuments during mandate and early statehood period in the first half of the 20th century. Meanwhile, and according to Maffi (2002: 210–11), Daher (2002), and Schriwer (2002), the heritage of the recent past (manifested by its rural, urban traditions) was marginalized by official state discourses that attempted to disassociate from the recent Ottoman past and local realities and instead to construct legitimacy for the different, newly emerging state systems (Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon) by constructing inks with distant origins (e.g. Phaeronic in Egypt, Nabatean in Jordan, Phoenician in Lebanon). Philipp (1992: ix) had stated that each of the newly emerging nation-states of the Middle East were 'looking too frequently for a definite past for each of the new states within its own limited territory. For the sake of consistency and the desire to find causal connections we are inclined to search for local patterns in the past which will explain the local state of the present.' In the Middle East, the European 'discovery' of the Orient through tourism to the ancient and Biblical 'Levant' in the 19th century also contributed to the definition of a specific and imagined 'Levant' and worked to define heritage in the region in a manner that excluded the recent past and regional realties of this region that we now call the Middle East.

According to Said (1979: 2–3), Orientalism

is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on.

Orientalism for Said was a 'corporate institution' for dealing with the Orient and making statements about it, describing it, and ruling over it (Said, 1979: 3). The following quotation by Said illustrates how Orientalism is a whole discourse that worked to distribute a whole geographical awareness about the Orient into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philosophical texts and into a whole series of interests about the region. It is only by examining Orientalism as a discourse that one can understand the complexity of this 'systematic discipline' by which Europe was able to manage and even 'produce' the Orient in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold down the 'Oriental' world. It is rather a distribution of geographical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of 'interests' which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world. (Said, 1979: 12)

This exercise of power over the Orient could not have been made possible without the production of knowledge about the Orient. According to Foucault (1980), no power is exercised without the extraction, appropriation, distribution, or retention of knowledge. The network and web of power/knowledge are evident in many of his writings (Foucault, 1980). A classical example that might illustrate the relationships between the production of knowledge and the exercise of power is to consider the production of diverse knowledge by the European travelers, scientists, and geographers of the 18th and 19th centuries to North Africa (the Maghreb) and the ancient Levant (the Mashreq) in the form of maps, narratives, investigative reports, art, demographic studies, archaeology, social narratives and studies, military surveys, photography, postcards, and other forms of productions. That knowledge, which was produced in the light of discovery and subordination of the Orient, was used to manipulate and exploit such regions and to rationalize domination and colonization. Colonization was rationalized on the basis of the European man transforming the citizens of these territories into modern and rationale individuals. One of Thomas Cook's newsletters from the 19th century, the Traveller's Gazette of November 1928, features an article entitled 'France in Algeria: The Romance of Algeria' that developed the colonial theme of an ancient Roman land in Algiers rescued from barbarism and transformed into a 'happy country by the French' (Hunter, 2003: 164).