A ‘frontier’ is a place where one society meets another. A place of risk and encounter, where one wilderness sees itself change into something ever wilder. The historic American West might be the archetype of this idea of a frontier; the most famous of belts between the known and unknown where opportunity, change, exploration and exploitation coexist beyond sightlines. And so, it might define others we know. My book The Muslim Cowboy, a Middle Eastern Western about an Iraqi man entranced by old Western movies, who dresses in double denim and roams a lawless landscape in search of his own Western story, draws parallels between the American West and post-war Iraq, casting that setting as a frontier in turn. As two frontiers together, the Wild West shares many uncanny equivalences with post-war Iraq. Of course they are superficially similar, both having vast, desert landscapes where freedom and isolation are bound together, but beyond that there’s also the sense of established laws and societal structures being either absent or in flux, creating a place where individuals have to rely on their wits and a personal moral code in order to survive. Perhaps because of that, there are other incredible and almost […]
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