THE INTERLAND
The West sees itself as a frontier, progressing in time and space. The Interland doesn’t see itself as a mirror image of this. But as a bridge (mediator, translator and synthesizer) in-between East and West, heritage and modernism. A land of “and” (not either-or).
If you look at ancient sea traffic, the Mediterranean emerges as the obvious centre of world history… an organizing force, drawing diverse people into one another’s narratives and weaving their destinies together to form the germ of a world history, and out of this came Western Civilization… If you look at overland traffic however, the Grand Central Station of the world was the nexus of roads and routes connecting the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Iranian highlands, Mesopotamia and Egypt. This eventually became the Islamic World… A portion of it is called the Middle East, but that phrase assumes one is standing in Western Europe. Therefore, I prefer to call this whole area from the Indus to Istanbul, the Middle World.
Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted11
The West, despite its name, is clearly more than a geography. As an idea to work with (and against), let’s start with a hypothesis. The West is a set of cultures governed by a single common myth, that of progress over a line:
The Frontier.
It is simplest to explain this myth in its American context. And there is some justification for centring our exploration of the West here. America is not just the place where the most global brands have come from. It is also the latest and most “advanced” version of the Western ideal, for better and worse. And the place that most people outside the West seem to mean when they refer to “The West”.
And America is the society of The Frontier, par excellence.
The Frontier is a line. A line between here, us, now – and “the beyond”. It could be spatial – as in the line charting the leading edge of the settling (or conquering?) of America. It could be temporal – marking the leading edge of scientific and technological progress from the Enlightenment. It could be aspirational – as in Star Trek, projecting beyond the moon mission into “Space, the Final Frontier”.
The Frontier is an invitation, a finishing line for those competing for prominence.
The structure of the Frontier myth is profoundly either-or, us and them. It is a discontinuity; a break with the past and present, a leap into the unknown. And it is the line that defines progress. Inside this line of progress is order, achievement, merit. Outside is pure potential – chaotic, primitive, unsettled and almost nothing. Or seen as nothing of value. Or shrouded in the fog of uncertainty that hangs over the future.
The Frontier idea shapes how we see history, with the present being that line of progress. The past is established territory; the future is a place yet to be conquered or explored.
The Frontier idea shapes how we see knowledge, as a moving Frontier of discovery and adjacent possibility. Stretching to limitless horizons.
The Frontier idea shapes how people in this culture see themselves. As self-made, self-reliant, the makers of their own destiny, true frontiersmen – individuals seeking to surpass limits, go further.
Mixed in with this idea of an ever-moving line of progress is the idea of a break with the past. Old ideas, artefacts, traditions can have nostalgic or cultural value. But they are seen as less advanced. And of less value. The pilgrims and settlers of North America were out to make a New World, not a new Europe. Their descendants are a society of pioneers, always restless, always onto the new thing.
It was just after the Wild West frontier stage of American history that the modern brand was born. The earliest modern brand was Coca-Cola, invented in 1892. At that time the literal (Wild West) Frontier was disappearing as a reality, but was growing as a myth. Wild West Shows toured the USA (and Europe) recounting this heroic recent past, mixing history with a wily blend of exaggeration, embellishment, spectacles and showmanship. They gave rise to a prototype of modern celebrities; real-life frontier heroes like Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill, complete with dramatic backstories and sharpshooter skills. They were the Hollywood idols of their time, with 10 million attending shows. And as the Wild West Shows faded, the Hollywood Western was born, a popular genre in the silent movie era, right through to the 1960s. This is still the subject of recent remakes such as No Country for Old Men, Blackthorn and Django Unchained.
George Lucas borrowed extensively from the Western genre in creating Star Wars, along with The Heroes Journey, a supposedly common format to all epic hero stories, as mapped out by Joseph Campbell. Soon this storytelling format was the staple of Hollywood screenwriter courses and books. These theories became widely transmitted and influenced subsequent films such as The Lion King and The Matrix. Although, you could argue it was just formalizing a pattern that went back to those Wild West Shows.
In this view, every story must have a lone hero, someone who the audience identifies with, who goes through trials, who struggles and overcomes dark forces. In Campbell’s version, the hero is someone willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good – a point less emphasized by the Hollywood happy ending. America didn’t invent the hero, but it did take it to new extremes; Captain America, Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones.
This heroic individual of American Frontier history found direct expression in brands like Marlboro and their iconic Marlboro Man, featured in advertising from 1955 to 1999. And less literally in the sporting heroes employed by Nike. These were not just sports stars, but iconic rebels – many of them African American. Nike hence stood for a fusion of “cool” (rebellious individualism) with godlike heroic competitive success. Today we see the same myth played out in examples like the Red Bull Stratos project, taking extreme sports to new heights of human endurance, with an Austrian skydiver taking a record-breaking 39-km leap from the very edge of the atmosphere.
Historian Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the Frontier was America’s foundational experience; turning European settlers into egalitarian, rugged, individualist Americans – a breed apart. By the end of Turner’s lifetime in the 1930s, his Frontier Thesis had become official American history, as taught in the majority of its universities, at which time Franklin Roosevelt appealed to his electorate to reclaim a “nationwide frontier of human want and fear”12. And later, John F. Kennedy developed the New Frontier as his trademark political brand, as set out in his inauguration acceptance speech of 1960:
We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier of 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled dreams… Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.13
A few years later, Gene Roddenberry pitched a new TV show called Star Trek to the Hollywood studios as “a Wagon Train to the skies”. A thought carried over into that famous voiceover at the start of the show: “Space, the Final Frontier”.
Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is a deeply good read and is inspired by James Joyce, Carl Jung and others. It should perhaps be separated from the formulaic Hollywood uses to which it has been put. Neil Gaimon, whose work contains many mythic themes, points out that if this is the decisive form that authentic stories take, then you don’t need a manual, they will just come out that way:
I got about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true – I don’t want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it’s true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is.14
Some have claimed that far from being an essentialized universal myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces is in fact just the founding myth of America itself writ large. As Lawrence and Jewett put it (in 1977 – decades before George W. Bush declared a “War Against Terror” and seemed to cast himself in this role):
A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.15
Modern brands like Coca-Cola, Nike and Facebook were born out of this kind of American Dream and the rugged individual that came with it. It perhaps seemed natural in this culture to equate brand value with standing apart from the crowd. And it was the America of 1950s Madison Avenue that handed down most current theories of brand – like the idea of “brand personality” (from Martineau, Ogilvy and others).
The energy, freedom and scope of the Western Frontier myth is dizzying, exhilarating. It promises an eternal blaze of glory and discovery. Perhaps (techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil tells us) we are accelerating towards a singularity; a tipping point event when our technology will take on a kind of life, intelligence and destiny all of its own?
Just as this myth is intoxicating, like any drug it had to have its comedown. There is a real sense today of having reached limits, or running out of anywhere to progress to. The pure Western endless progress myth has given way since its heights to a darker self-doubt. The first shadow was cast by mechanized World Wars. Then came the atom bomb. Then climate change and limits to growth. And now the West has an internal crisis of economic confidence. It seems like a gambler that has run out of luck. And the current slump is perhaps made all the more stark by the manic depressive media combining global bad news with spurts of fresh hyperbole.
The West found its Wild West frontier in America – the line between the “civilizers” and the “savages”. The older boundary (what the West lies westwards of) was that between Europe and “The Orient” of the European imagination. A Europe whose unshakeable sense of superiority led them to assume that West is Best! – even when meeting empires more advanced with longer histories and richer cultures, like the Ottomans and Chinese.
Edward Said made it his life’s work to deconstruct this Western idea of the East. In Orientalism, Said described how the Western colonial fantasy needed an “Orient” which was (as figured in art, history and culture) irrational, weak, untrustworthy, feminized, eroticized; in contrast to the rational, masculine, civilizing West. Said was a Palestinian Arab, born in Jerusalem, educated in Cairo before heading to America, where he settled for the rest of his life. Said did not write about the actual East. Rather he wrote about the West’s idea of the East. A long time before 9/11 (in 1980), Said described the West’s view of “Islam” in terms that seem almost prophetic now:
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.16
Across the interviews I conducted in researching this book, I’ve come to agree with Said that the “East” is itself a Western construction. The people I met with have a different mental model of their geography. One that sees their world not in terms of a line or frontier separating two divided zones, but rather a circle, a zone of inclusion, being in the middle of things. I call this alternative mental geography:
The Interland
The Interland could be described as a literal geographic region – Tamim Ansary’s Middle World. A region stretching from Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon all the way to Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
But it’s not just geographical. Rather, it’s that anywhere in this region people seem to position themselves at the centre of things; as a “bridge”.
In other words, they saw themselves not as “East” at all – but rather as in-between:
Between East and West
Between Tradition and Modernity
The refusal of choosing between such polarities, and the preferences for bridging, seemed to extend to many other ways in which they saw themselves as “and-” cultures (rather than either-or cultures). For instance:
Between Individual and Collective
Between Art and Technology
Between Economics and Society
In Turkey, I was told that they are the bridge between East and West. That you can cross from Europe to Asia just by crossing a bridge. That the two sides meet here. And hence the culture reflects this, making new combinations from these components.
But Mehmet Demiray, an anthropologist and author of reports called The Mind of Turkey, told me that this idea was actually common across a huge region, with each country teaching its primary school children they were unique in this same bridging way: in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, East Europe and also further East.
Slow food activist Kamal Mouzawak told me Lebanon was a microcosm; like a model, prototype or blueprint for the rest of the world. And he illustrated this by saying that almost every climate on Earth existed there, from mountains to beaches, from lush plains to deserts. He also described Beirut as “the bellybutton” of the Mediterranean, an image used since ancient times to describe the centre of the world.
Interviewees from Dubai and Turkey told me about the East-West fusions resulting from a “reverse brain drain”. This, I was told, brought an open-minded generation, educated in Western ways back to the region. And that while these returnees had kept a connection with their culture, families and communities, they also brought not only new ideas, but a more dynamic and open approach to business.
I read that Malaysia (an Islamic state, but also a peaceful democracy with a history of pluralism) was unique in being “like a mixed salad” – mixing ingredients and ideas from Chinese, Indian as well as indigenous and Malay Muslim sources. Creating hybrids, but with clearly distinguishable ingredients.
But it can’t be that unique when they even use the same analogy in Lebanon (which is hardly known for its peaceful pluralism). Except here they described it as “like Tabbouleh” (an Arabic salad); while you can taste each ingredient, you could never remove one and have it still be a proper Tabbouleh. Also because it’s chopped so finely you could never separate them anyway in practical terms. Just as Lebanon minus any one minority would not be Lebanon.
The impulse to create new cultural hybrids can be found in every city in the world. But it may mean something more to be living and working in a culture that shares a collective myth and self-identity of bridging and being in-between (rather than of going beyond). A land of “and-” rather than either-or.
This idea of being in-between and absorbing influences from all around is not new to this region. It has long been something of an Interland, criss-crossed by trade routes that also brought trade in ideas, craft techniques, languages and customs. This was the historical position of the Islamic world. The genius of its golden ages was down to its ability to trade – from China to Spain, along the great Silk Roads – not only in goods, but also in ideas. For the first time, under the patronage of the Abbasid caliphs, all the intellectual advances of the world were translated into one language and combined by the same minds. Islamic mathematicians, for instance, were the first to combine Greek geometry with innovations from India, such as the invention of the number zero, and from China such as their algebra used for astronomy.
The intellectual and economic strength of these periods came from being in the middle. Being able to combine, trade and multiply. To do this well requires confidence and openness. The old Middle World had these in abundance. But then it became insular for a while when overrun by the Mongol invaders. Later came another syncretic flowering in the Ottoman (Turkic), Mughal (Indian) and Safavid (Persian) Empires from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Before these too were overrun, this time by the colonizing countries of the West. Leading to the insular attitude that today we call “fundamentalism”. The suspicion is that all over the region, the confidence is returning now. That the awe or hostility the West once inspired is fading. That countries like Turkey are finding their mojo again, and that the old self-confident mixing of their own heritage with imported ideas from all over is back on the agenda.
Along with this plural culture of mixing and trading with other cultures comes a much greater emphasis on collective values. Not being a heroic lone stranger like the cowboy who rides into town, but being part of a greater whole and continuous community of hospitality, peace and acceptance. What the Islamic tradition calls the Ummah; a single global brother-and sisterhood. The dream of the Islamic cultures is based on unity, and a widespread cultural harmony and collectivity is a part of this.
This is, in most of the countries we will be exploring, a civilized and ornate culture – far from puritanical – and hugely fond of worldly goods. Yet there are very few statues, portraits and icons in this culture historically. As we will explore in the next chapter – given that Western brands start and end with the heroic individual icon – this is almost bound to give rise to a different approach to creating brands.
The communal spirit of the Interland countries has been given a new impetus today by the internet. The generation I interviewed were some of the first to go digital (some by virtue of working in Silicon Valley or studying at MIT, rather than the local boom which came later). The direct influence of these possibilities is seen in this book, in the formation of e-nabled clusters. The internet has seen a return to the ideal of cosmopolitanism (being a citizen of the world). And this seems to represent a view that is closer (for instance, in being plural and mixing cultures) to that of the Interland.
And this – take note – opens up huge potential. If the global internet generation is moving on from the Frontier myth to something more like the Interland position, this would have huge implications for the character of future global brands, and for the potential acceptance and adoption of new brands emerging from the Interland.
What we will meet in this book is a group of cultural creatives and entrepreneurs, who embody this open, remixing, expansive, synthesizing Interland mentality. This is not the only trend in this region. But it is the one that describes their emerging-ness (as opposed to the old binaries of accepting or rejecting the West).
If I wanted to write a book about Islamic brands, I would have to select a smaller proportion of the examples I had met, and even these might not thank me. Few of them set their store out as being “Islamic”, even if they incorporate some of the implicit or explicit heritages into their work. Most, whether they are Muslim or not, are drawing on broader influences from the West and elsewhere. As I spoke to more people, I realized that labelling them as Islamic designers, (or -entrepreneurs etc) was too narrow. It suggested that religious beliefs directly and linearly shaped their work (as if we could label America’s retailers as “Christian”, and its cinema as “Jewish”).
There are undoubtedly subtle connections – for creatives above all – between the culture they come from, their ethos and mythos, and their creative productions. But it is not a connection to be made too simply, nor to the exclusion of all other influences.
I do see (most of) the cases and creatives as profoundly influenced by the legacy of 1000 years of one of the most developed, integrated, nuanced and beautiful cultures the world has ever known. Even if not influenced directly by the traditions, then by the atmosphere and milieu; by a certain subtlety of language, poetry, arts and crafts. And even if not by those heritages, then working within one great productive mental model – of seeing yourself as working in an Interland, and being open to the bridging possibilities of AND, rather than the restrictions of EITHER-OR.
One influence that did come up a fair bit was Sufi – the mystical side of Islam. But saying that some creatives in this region are inspired by Sufism is a bit like saying some of their equivalents in California have been influenced by Buddhism.
Firstly, it is true (Steve Jobs being a notable example).
But secondly, it does a disservice to both the religious spirit and also the creative output to describe them as essentially connected, as if one simply “caused” the other.
Sufi thinking itself is quite subtle about where religion stops and human agency starts. In a Sufi story, a sage complains to God that there are beggars and cripples on the street and yet God has done nothing for them. “I did do something,” God replies. “I sent you!”