When Yazid II died in January 724, after less than four years as caliph, he was succeeded by his half-brother, Hisham b. ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 724–43; see Figure 8.1). Yazid II had nominated Hisham to succeed him before his own son al-Walid b. Yazid (r. 743–4). Hisham's claims on the caliphate had been too strong for Yazid II to ignore: Hisham was a senior son of ‘Abd al-Malik, with powerful allies among his maternal relatives in the Banu Makhzum branch of Quraysh, as well as support from his half-brothers and their sons, all of whom were well connected with the tribes of the Roman–Arabian frontier in northern Syria, eastern Anatolia and the Jazira. As one of the younger sons of ‘Abd al-Malik, born in the 690s, Hisham was in his early thirties when he became caliph. However, unlike his immediate predecessors, who had all died aged about forty, Hisham would live into his mid-fifties and so rule for nineteen years.

The challenges that had confronted ‘Umar II and Yazid II persisted: Rome, Iraq, and economic, religious and social change. Hisham had time to consolidate his grip on the revenues of Egypt and Iraq and to recommit to an existential struggle against the Roman Empire. In so doing, he consciously imitated aspects of the reigns of his father, ‘Abd al-Malik, and his older brothers al-Walid I and Sulayman. Like them, Hisham prioritised military success against Rome, using loyal governors and tax reform to seek more revenue from Egypt and Iraq, and publicly promoting the religious legitimacy of his rule. Hisham's focus on both tax revenues and his own investments in land and commercial infrastructure in the Syrian towns and countryside perhaps led to his image as a ‘miser’ (bakhīl) in more hostile strands of the later tradition. These policies were probably a response to the declining opportunities for tribute and loot to be taken on the frontiers and a recognition that the institutional and economic strength of Umayyad rule needed reinforcement.

The decade between 715 and 724 was a turning point both in the character of the Umayyads’ empire and the fortunes of the dynasty itself. More than three generations away from the time of the Prophet, and two generations from the end of the first wave of conquests, the social structures within the empire were changing fast. These changes are reflected in language, with ‘Muslims’ (muslimūn) increasingly used alongside the ‘Faithful’ (mu’minūn), and with ‘Migrants’ (muhājirūn) disappearing from use. ‘The Arabs’ (Ar. al-‘arab) begins to appear more often in the poetry and in the documentary evidence with a collective sense. At the same time, the incorporation of perhaps tens of thousands of enslaved women into the Muslim population, alongside male non-Arabian captives and migrants, was transforming the character of group identities within the garrisons. From this period and after, anxieties about non-Muslims ruling over Muslims and conflicts about unequal treatment of recent converts become prominent features of the source material, as do pressures on tax revenue. These social and economic tensions coincided with an era of dynastic instability, with four caliphs dying in quick succession within the decade. As the caliphs’ supporters jockeyed for power and influence, a major rebellion broke out in Iraq for the first time in a generation and new kinds of unrest appeared in North Africa and Khurasan. Moreover, these short caliphates came after the disastrous failure in 718 of the Marwanids’ aspirations to conquer the Roman Empire and replace the Romans as the representatives of true monotheist faith. Defeat at the walls of Constantinople shook the ideological foundations which had been established by ‘Abd al-Malik and his son al-Walid.

Sulayman b. ‘Abd al-Malik and the Siege of Constantinople

The new caliph, Sulayman b. ‘Abd al-Malik, installed his Muhallabid allies in Iraq and the eastern frontier provinces of Sind, Sistan and Khurasan. Reprisals against their enemies continued; the former governor of Sind, Muhammad b. al-Qasim, and a number of other relatives of al-Hajjaj are said to have been tortured and killed at Wasit. New frontier warfare also began; Yazid b. al-Muhallab, who was made governor in Iraq and Khurasan, set out with thousands of soldiers from Syria, Iraq and Jibal for Jurjan and Tabaristan, east and south of the Caspian (modern northern Iran).

At the beginning of the sixth century, the Eastern Roman emperor, more confident of his security on his northern frontiers, began behaving in a more belligerent fashion towards his counterpart in Sasanian Iran. Violent conflict began in 502 and escalated during the rest of the century. Slow-moving siege warfare in the Fertile Crescent alternated with truces, while proxy conflicts continued at each end of the frontier. These hostilities drew both powers deeper into the Arabia Peninsula, with three important consequences. The first was the continued expansion of the Arabian federations in the north of the Peninsula, on the empires’ desert frontiers. The second was further heightening of the political importance of religion, with various forms of Christianity and Judaism being markers of identity and political affiliation. Third, escalating conflict between the two powers led, at the end of the century, to the collapse of the northern federations and contributed to the weakening of Himyar. These events were the context for the expansion of the influence of West Arabian groups and the formation in the early seventh century of a new religious and political community under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad.

Arabia, Rome and Iran in the Sixth Century

In the sixth century, the Romans replaced a balance of alliances on their Syrian Desert frontier with the sponsorship one ruling clan, the Jafnids, and their allies, known collectively as the Banu Ghassan, or ‘Ghassanids’. This change in Roman policy was probably a response to the military effectiveness of the Sasanians’ alliance with the Nasrid kings of al-Hira, in Iraq. In about 530, Emperor Justinian (r. 527–65) promoted the Jafnid al-Harith b. Jabala to ‘the dignity of a king’, in the sense of a local ruler, acknowledged by the Romans. Papyrus documents from Petra, in modern Jordan, show that members of the Jafnid elite were significant figures on the Roman frontier, called upon to arbitrate in local disputes. Greek inscriptions show that the Jafnids participated in the wider political culture of the Roman Empire while asserting their own religious and cultural autonomy.

The three musketeers (recording, iteration, alteration) are actually four, and the system, to be complete, needs a fourth element – interruption, which is the essence of speculation. Teleology, i.e. having an end, is the outcome of interruption: this happens whenever a process stops (typically, a machine breaks down or a living being dies). Interruption equals crisis, i.e. the cessation of a system of recording and iteration, in either a definitive or a transitory form. As such it should not be conceived as mere negativity, because it constitutes the condition of possibility of meaning. We understand what a hammer is when it breaks, and what a human is when they die. It is at this point, at the end (as the final moment), that we recognise the end (as the purpose) of a mechanism or organism, and it is the prediction of this interruption that determines the economic and ethical system of values.

Interruption is the decisive and conclusive element of hysteresis, what stops the machine and at the same time motivates it. The fact that it can be subject to irreversible processes gives meaning to the whole. Teleology sheds light on archaeology. This affair may seem complicated, or like little more than wordplay, but it has a meaning that concerns, precisely, the meaning of history. Who we are as human beings was not written from the beginning – quite the contrary. What we are appears at the moment when we glimpse a direction, the place to which we are going. It is therefore in the future, in becoming, that we recognise the origin. Precisely for this reason it is important to look into the present, into what happens and in the directions it is taking, to recognise the essences of things.

Only that which has an end can have a time endowed with meaning and direction. It is not by chance, therefore, that final causes concern organisms and history, i.e. the two areas in which time and transience are everything. Everything, in nature as well as in technology, has an end, which manifests itself as an interruption. Alles, was ist, endet. If alterations are things that sometimes happen and sometimes don’t, there is one thing that eventually always happens: the interruption, the end.

In this third section, the perspective is broadened to look beyond the dynamics of conflict and competition within networks of military and political power. Interactions between the majority of the empire's population and its new ruling classes and other longer-term processes of social and economic change are the concerns of its three chapters. Chapter Ten begins with the environmental context, surveying the 8,000km-wide band of territory between North Africa and al-Andalus in the west and Sogdia and Sind in the east which the Umayyads’ armies occupied or contested. From there, it turns to the economic foundations of empire – land use and resources, settlement patterns in the towns and countryside, and commerce and exchange. While there are many deep continuities in the economic and social life of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the Umayyad era emerges as a turning point, when new and lasting economic and social formations took shape.

Chapter Eleven turns to the social significance of religious community and the impact of the conquests and the formation of the empire on the religious groups among the conquered populations. Religious belief and practice had become crucial markers of belonging and political affiliation in Late Antiquity. This was perpetuated and developed by the Arabian conquerors, whose leaders saw themselves as agents of God's rule on earth on the basis of which they made ‘a covenantal pact’ (‘ahd or bay‘a) with military allies and supporters, while tax-paying populations received covenantal ‘guaranteed protection’ (dhimma). With the end of Roman and Sasanian state power, new relationships were negotiated between religious leaders and the Arabian conquerors. In many cases, this led to competition for patronage by the new rulers as well as an expanded role for religious leaders in the context of the transformation of the structures of state power.

Chapter Twelve addresses structures of governance, organisational power and taxation. The military administration established by the conquering armies concentrated power in the hands of the armies’ commanders (umarā’, sing. amīr), among whom the most senior became the leading political figures in the territories they had conquered (whence the other translation of amīr, as ‘governor’).

Sometimes I have a dream, maybe a fantasy, that the New Scottish Cinema becomes the hottest thing in international film culture. The phrase is on everyone's lips in every language on the five continents; there is no reputable film festival or cinémathèque in the world that does not run a retrospective entitled New Scottish Cinema; no film journal that does not carry in-depth analysis of the films constituting this startling new movement and extensive interviews with its writers, directors, producers, actors and camera-people.

Their qualities marked through exposure at film festivals, Scottish actors begin to appear in French, German, Italian, even American movies, and production executives from all over the globe start swarming into Glasgow and Edinburgh, their pockets bulging with co-production contracts. Even Scottish merchant banks sit up and take notice, and make their first tentative investments in an indigenous Scottish film industry.

Finally, the New Scottish Cinema enters the canon, taking its place alongside the great milestones of film history: Hollywood and Scandinavia before World War I; German Expressionist Cinema; Revolutionary Soviet Cinema; British Documentary of the 1930s; Italian Neorealism; French New Wave; Poland, Czechoslovakia, Cuba and Hungary in the 1950s and 1960s, and so on.

Then the dream, or fantasy, turns to reflection. Why is this not so? Why is there not a movement perceived as the New Scottish Cinema, and why is it not being celebrated in the way I have outlined? It is not because there are no films, or because there is a lack of indigenous talent or film activity. In the last decade or so the number of people earning their living from filmmaking in Scotland has risen eight-fold.

Harry Mathews's very short story ‘Franz Kafka in Riga’ from The American Experience (1991) presents a compact example of the complexity of aerial images in fiction. The narrator recalls a time when he ‘decided to climb these steps in order to enjoy the view to which I imagined they would bring me’. The first paragraph of the story briefly describes the castles in Riga, then, in the second paragraph, the first-person narrator describes the tricky (and embarrassing) process of ascending to the top of a tower:

The next paragraph transitions to sometime after the trip, when the narrator has learned that Kafka once took this same trip to Riga and describes it in his notebooks. The fourth paragraph is Kafka's quoted description, a nearly word-for-word reproduction of the second paragraph; Kafka has already written down the experience of the narrator. The narrator concludes: ‘I was angry that Kafka had rendered this experience with such unaccountable inaccuracy.’ This is a punchline, but notably the only difference in the two passages is in the first sentence. Kafka's written account omits ‘I imagined’: ‘I decided to climb these steps in order to enjoy the view to which they would bring me.’ He does not imagine beforehand the view that would be afforded by the climb.

The narrator attempts to create an image of the clear view from the tower before climbing and is disappointed. Kafka's image is deferred until after he climbs and cannot see the city, and so he creates an image of the newspaper-fog in his notebooks.

This project started with the purely fortuitous discovery I made of a photograph dated 1912, representing an Arab man in his traditional costume, posing in the corner of a Moresque-style room or courtyard. I owe this discovery to a friend and colleague, Esra Gençtürk, who had shown me this image, handed down by her family, hoping that I might be able to tell her something about it. Thanks to the inscription on the back, I had no difficulty identifying the subject and recipient of the photograph. The man was Khalīl Djawād al-Khālidī (1864–1941), a member of the famous Jerusalemite Palestinian Khālidī family, posing, as noted in his handwritten inscription, ‘in an apartment of the palace of the Alhambra, located in the city of Granada, in al-Andalus’. The photograph was addressed to one Hasan Tahsin Bey, ‘prosecutor at the Beirut court of appeal’, my friend's great-grandfather. Khālidī identified himself as ‘former judge of Diyarbekir’ (Figures I.1 and I.2).

There was nothing exceptional to such an exchange between two colleagues, who were probably also friends. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, photography had made remarkable progress in the Ottoman Empire and had spread considerably throughout society. Signed portraits had thus become a popular and efficient tool of sociability among the middle class and elite. However, Khālidī's memento was not as common as the photographs his contemporaries frequently exchanged. First, this was a full-length and ‘contextualised’ portrait, much rarer than the conventional studio headshots or bust-size portraits produced by most professional photographers.

Moreover, the image was taken away from home, which is all the more surprising when one considers that Ottoman subjects – particularly Muslims – hardly had a reputation as globetrotters. In fact, when they did happen to travel outside the empire, or even in the provinces, postcards turned out to be a much more accessible and affordable way of sending greetings to parents and friends while at the same time offering them a peek of the place(s) they were visiting. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the setting Khālidī had chosen for his portrait was certainly not ordinary. The sight of a Muslim Arab posing in front – or rather, in – one of the most celebrated monuments of Arab and Islamic culture was quite meaningful, as suggested by the inscription on the back, which included a short poem, which Khālidī claimed to have also inscribed in the ‘visitors’ book of the Alhambra’.

In diplomatic circles it is said that a newly independent nation's first acquisition is an airline and its second, a film festival. The popular idea of a film festival is that of a glittering period of two to three weeks of important films, important people in evening dress, and important awards – a magical time when the cinema and its denizens come within hem-touching distance of ordinary mortals. A film playing to near-empty houses as part of a season on Yugoslav cinema can become, within a film festival, a focus of adulation or condemnation, a source of journalistic copy, an event.

There are today in excess of 250 film festivals throughout the world, and the number is rising. Most function mainly or exclusively within the popular idea of a film festival and it is becoming more difficult, from year to year, entirely to eschew this idea. More arguably, it may not be desirable for any given festival to hold itself apart from the popular idea, but embracing it exacts a heavy price.

This has not always been so, as the history of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) demonstrates. The impetus for its being set up in 1947 – only Venice and Cannes predate it – was not, as the tendency is nowadays, to confer prestige on the Festival's locality and to attract tourists. The thrust behind Edinburgh's creation was a passion for cinema, and more, a politics of cinema, the wish to advance the collective interest in certain cinematic forms and institutions, and to create knowledge and debate about them. The key figures in the group which set Edinburgh up were Norman Wilson (1906–87) and Forsyth Hardy (1910–94), both of whom had been active in Scottish film culture in the decade and a half prior to 1947 as film journalists, members of the Edinburgh Film Guild and, in Hardy's case, as a wartime civil servant in charge of documentary film production in Scotland. Hardy's film column in The Scotsman newspaper, the journal Cinema Quarterly, edited by Wilson, and the exhibition activities of the Edinburgh Film Guild were important in raising film consciousness in quite diverse ways in 1930s Scotland.

Scottish moving image culture has produced three masterpieces of ludic modernism: John McGrath (1935–2002) and John Mackenzie (1928– 2011)'s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974), Ian Pattison and Colin Gilbert's BBC Television series Rab C. Nesbitt (1988–2014) and Murray Grigor's Scotch Myths (1982), funded by Channel 4. Having celebrated the two former, I now wish to remedy the scandalous lack of critical attention accorded to the latter. That lack is itself symptomatic of the effective suppression of Scotch Myths and of modernism (ludic or otherwise) within Scottish film culture. Indeed, to address Scotch Myths is to wade knee-deep into the debates which traversed Scottish film culture in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet until now a film constituting one of the key reference points in these debates has had no adequate description, far less analysis, of its subject matter and style. But first, what is meant by ‘ludic modernism’? The phrase recalls, and perhaps lies silently within, the increasingly prevalent concept of ludic postmodernism. The assertion underlying the latter is that once there was this monolithic phenomenon, modernism, which was austere, all-embracing, elitist, lacking the common touch and, above all, humourless. Ludic postmodernism, the argument runs, has swept all this away. Unable to say anything useful about the real world – if indeed, as postmodernism has it, the latter even exists at all – postmodern discourse has recourse only to the complex glissandi of its own operations. The only appropriate stance is one of ludic irony. We may be going to hell in a handcart, but let's have fun on the way! (Ludic) postmodernism, unaware of the structuralist binarism of its own position, sets itself in opposition to its self-projected grim-faced predecessor, modernism, and in the process travesties the latter. Justus Nieland, in his editorial introduction (appropriately entitled ‘Modernism's Laughter’) to a 2006 issue of Modernist Cultures, writes:

What?

Not one moment

Not one moment

I don’t care! I don’t mind!

How handsome he is!

How good he is! How handsome he is!

How much he stands in need of . . .! How urgently he needs . . .!

Oh, how sweet is . . ., oh, how sweet he is!

Oh, how sweet is . . ., oh, how sweet he is!

What a light burden it is!

Before long I saw him, it did not take very long before

I saw him

I can’t do that

He didn’t bat an eye

To be of no use, be of no avail to s.o.

How excellent Omar is!

To find no sleep

What’s to be done?

What’s to be done now? What can you do?

Not (negation)

No sooner had he . . . than, he had hardly . . . when

What’s that to you? What has that to do with you? What do you know about that?

Futile, vain, preposterous (lit. God has given it no power)

I shall never forget

How small, how worthless it is!

There is not a soul in the house

How about you? What do you think?

Why is it that he . . .?

He is still rich

He is still in

The essentials

I can do nothing, I can get nowhere

Mesopotamia

What . . . are before us or present themselves to us

What it contains, comprises, its contents

Their hearts

Overnight, all of a sudden

To admit of no doubt

He was not out to insult her, he had no intention of offending her

What people say, what is generally rumoured

He couldn’t help (doing s.th.), he couldn’t refrain from

What the night brought, what happened in the night

The crime that he has committed

What’s it all about?

What’s happened to you? What’s the trouble? What’s the matter with you?

What concern of his is . . .? What has he to do with . . .?

Except, with the exception

As long as I live

To have no objections

The books that I have seen

Whatever books I have seen

What made things even worse . . .

To be unchanged, be as always

There is still time

You are still the same!

What have you got to do with this?

What business of yours is this?

What’s the matter with you? What do you want?

What has he got to do with the matter?

What have I got to do with that?

What business of mine is that?

Cinema audiences would sense that the description of the Western as ‘Le cinéma américain par excellence’ is apt, but the quintessentially American qualities of the genre have never been defined in a manner satisfactory to historians, sociologists and film critics. Doubtless it reflects, as sociologists say, American admiration for rugged individualism and yearning for primitive innocence. To say so, however, takes no account of developments within the genre and the degree to which the sub-structure of ideas becomes part of the fabric of one Western while remaining on the level of plot in another. To sort out such complexities is the job of the film critic and the first part of that task, at least, has been competently done, less in the standard work in English, The Western: From Silents to Cinerama by Fenin and Everson, than in two French works, ‘The Evolution of the Western’ by André Bazin (1918–58) and La grande aventure du western by Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout (1923–92). However, Bazin is quite perfunctory in the way he relates the Western to American society, suggesting casually that the increased stature of the genre in the period 1937–40 might have been due to increased awareness of national identity in the pre-WWII Roosevelt era. Even Rieupeyrout, having traced the origins of the genre to dime novels, rodeos and Wild West shows, does not deal with the main social ideas in the Western and, more especially, to what degree they have become part of the respective statements made by some films while remaining dormant in others. This essay is an attempt to confront these questions. Its method is to take two closely interrelated factors, American responses to the West and American responses to Industrialism, and to relate these to several Western films. In doing so, this essay attempts to define, firstly, how the main social ideas of the Western are implicit within the two factors and, secondly, to indicate illustrative instances where one or other of them seems particularly integral to this or that individual Western film.

Alongside the feature films, short films, and feature-length documentaries that uphold the officially historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide is a large group of related documentary films belonging to what could be referred to as the reconciliation documentary. Around sixty short and feature-length documentary films have been produced in this subgenre, starting with Anne Aghion's nominal film Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda? (2002) and then continuing with a steady stream of releases, with surges in connection to the tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth commemorations of the genocide against the Tutsi.

The reconciliation documentary is characterized by an international interest in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. In short, how is it possible for a society to transition from genocide to become a society where mutual respect and a sense of security can prevail? The reconciliation documentary generally includes a short historicization of the genocide, often with the aid of graphic emblematic images such as “Corpses by the Road” as a short-cut, seen for example in American films Back Home (2006), Rising from Ashes (2012), and From Trauma to Peace (2014). However, history is not at the center of these documentaries and notably the most commonly used emblematic image is “Skeletons and Clothes,” often filmed contemporarily at the different genocide memorials in Rwanda. Lisa Fruchtman, director of Sweet Dreams (2012), for instance is very explicit in this use of “Skeleton and Clothes” images as a way for Western audiences “to get a grasp of the reality of what it was […] We wanted people to know enough to understand the degree of trauma that exists in the country. But we didn't want to go deeply into the history.” Otherwise, the horrors of the genocide are retold via short information texts at the beginning of the reconciliation documentary and/or through survivor testimonies, and to a lesser degree via confessions made by the perpetrators.

Instead of history, the reconciliation documentary focuses on the different forms of reconciliation present in Rwanda after the genocide, mainly consisting of a range of communal and cultural projects that bring together Hutus and Tutsis, for example in Eyes on Rwanda (2010, a school for the deaf), Rwanda, Take Two (2010, filmmaking), One Drop (2010, clean water), Poetry of Resilience (2011, surviving poets), Sweet Dreams (the first ice-cream store in Rwanda), Rising from Ashes (cycling), Finding Hillywood (2013, filmmaking), A Place for Everyone (2014, love between young Rwandans), and Rwanda & Juliet (2016, the staging of Shakespeare's play in Kigali).

In its 1991 Annual Report, the Scottish Film Production Fund (1982–97) trumpeted its institutional mission as being:

The quotation above is, of course, a fantasy which has beguiled the SFPF and its parent body, the Scottish Film Council (1934–97), since the Fund's inception in 1982. As, in these post-Marxist days, babies are being thrown out with the bathwater all over Europe, many indispensable concepts are being jettisoned. One such concept, that of uneven development, describes perfectly Scotland's relationship with diverse sectors of the UK economy, not least film production. To put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third-world country, but this is tragically misrecognised by those holding the purse strings north of the border. There have always been signs that the SFPF and SFC were on a collision course with reality. One of the earliest officers of the Fund talked about discovering the next generation of Bill Forsyths and senior officers of the SFC, at their most delirious, have been heard to speak of ‘Hollywood on the Clyde’.

When the stated policy is compared with the reality of the Fund's most recent investment, Prague (Ian Sellar, 1992), the gulf is stark. Apart from the fact that producer Christopher Young, producer/director Ian Sellar and one of the principal actors, Alan Cumming, are Scots, Prague has nothing to do with Scotland and could not be remotely construed to fulfil what might be assumed to be a central impulse of a new national cinema – the exploration of the contradictions of the society from which it comes.

Individual filmmakers should not be blamed for using whatever production mechanisms are available to them, but the Scots involved in Prague were the fig leaf which allowed the project to absorb a massive proportion of the SFPF's available funds over an extended period and decorated the Europudding the film was to become. During the period when Prague was in development and production, the SFPF stood at about £250,000 per annum.