Hezbollah is no stranger to takfir

[Originally posted at NOW]

As Sunni jihadists alarm the world, the Party of God seeks to brand itself a bastion of moderate Islam. Nobody should be fooled.

One has to hand it to whoever had the idea for Al-Akhbar’s interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah earlier this month. Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri may have nicknamed Saad Hariri “Santa Claus” after his return to Lebanon bearing a billion-dollar gift from Riyadh, but the Future Movement leader’s goateed grin was no match for the jolly beam of the silver-bearded Sayyid at his avuncular best.

He follows the gossip on Facebook. He likes Maradona, and supported Argentina in the World Cup final, which he watched with his son. His favorite dishes include mulukhiyya. When he has time, he watches TV and reads novels or the poems of Khalil Gibran. Who knew the fearsome, black-robed warrior-sheikh from the podium was really just a regular guy like you and me?

The true knight’s move, though, was his mention that he’s been reading a lot lately on “the phenomenon of takfir;” the doctrine of jihadist groups like Islamic State (IS) that holds Muslim opponents guilty of kufr (disbelief), a charge punishable by death. He wants, he says, to understand its “history, causes, and orientations.” We’re invited to picture the bespectacled scholar frowning in puzzlement at strange tracts detailing the arcane teachings, innocently gasping in horror at the thought of fundamentalists using violence to advance sectarian agenda. The whole act would almost be amusing if it weren’t inevitable that many readers, including not a few Western pundits, will have fallen for it (an English translation was also published).

It’s considered terribly crass and indecorous nowadays to bring up the early years of the Party of God, when Christians were “invited” to convert, Shiite women were forcibly veiled and men couldn’t get a drink even in famously convivial Tyre. That period was an aberration, we’re now told; all the fault of the “horrific” then-leader, Subhi Tufayli, and some “crazy” Iranians, as the otherwise supportive Asaad Abu Khalil recently phrased it. That’s all changed, it’s said, under the civilized stewardship of Nasrallah; the party has matured; been tamed; been ‘Lebanonized’ (and its Khomeinist patrons, presumably, are no longer “crazy”).

Very well; let’s not dwell on the kidnapping and murder of Western journalists in Beirut in the 1980s, or the old black-and-white videos of Nasrallah calling for a regional Islamist empire (why does that sound familiar?) or his claim that “He who rejects the authority of the [Iranian Supreme Leader] rejects God […] and is almost a polytheist” (even though Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, in her highly sympathetic 2002 study, Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion, says that sentence “still provides a fair reflection of the party’s conception of the [ideology] today”). The following two examples from within the past 10 years should suffice to show the Party continues to have rather more in common with takfir, and Islamist extremism generally, than its fellow travelers care to acknowledge, and that such differences as exist tend to be, at most, ones of practice rather than principle.

In 2006, as anti-European riots erupted across the region following the publication of cartoons satirizing Islam in a Danish newspaper, Nasrallah took to the podium not to urge his co-religionists against the resort to violence but to say: “If a Muslim had implemented the fatwa of Imam Khomeini regarding the apostate Salman Rushdie, those despicable people would never have dared insult the Messenger of God” [italics added]. That’s to say, if only someone had murdered a British novelist for a work of fiction, artists the world over would be far too intimidated to ever consider satirizing our beliefs again (rather an odd outlook, incidentally, for someone who told Al-Akhbar he was a literature fan). Calling for a “severe” response to the cartoons (and getting his wish: days later, a mob torched the Danish consulate in Beirut and, for good measure, stoned a nearby church), he then went on to restate his belief that the Holocaust was all “fables” (asateer), as “proven” by 9/11 Truther Roger Garaudy.

Forgiving types would no doubt chalk this all up to mere ‘rhetorical posturing’ or some such formulation (as though calls for the heads of civilians were acceptable political currency). But we learn from Rushdie’s 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, that the Party’s Hussein Musawi took the cause, as it were, very seriously at the time, threatening to kill British hostages if the fatwa weren’t carried out and offering to spare one if Rushdie were delivered to Beirut. What’s more, Rushdie was told by British intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were themselves trying to liquidate him as late in the day as 1998. True or not, in any case, the ‘Affair’ is clearly something Nasrallah is unable to let go (he brought it up yet again in 2012).

The second example comes from a year later, when the journalist Thanassis Cambanis was granted permission by Hezbollah to spend a day in the company of their youth branch, the Mahdi Scouts (named, rather suggestively, after the Twelfth Imam, the messianic figure most Shiites believe will one day return from occultation to establish perfect justice worldwide). Describing the guided tour of one of the Scouts’ dozens of camps in his excellent book, A Privilege to Die, he recalls watching children as young as six enjoy activities ranging from puppet reenactments of Nasrallah speeches to Quran memorization to readings from a manual titled “I Obey My Leader.”

“The Mahdi Scouts is charged with building the interior of kids,” as scout chief Bilal Naim told him. Some 60,000 children, Cambanis writes, are thus indoctrinated year-round with Hezbollah’s “unvarnished ideology, beginning with wilayat al-faqih, the concept of absolute clerical rule first implemented by Ayatollah Khomeini.” The program is highly effective, he adds, not just at grooming future generations of fighters, but also at Islamicizing the wider Shiite public from the bottom up: “examples abound” of parents and siblings adopting the ideology acquired by their juniors at the camps.

Of course, Nasrallah’s pose of religious moderation to Al-Akhbar was calculated with Syria in mind; the war next door having at different times dragged the Party in contradictory directions. Early in the conflict, Nasrallah’s speeches could be overtly sectarian, equating Sunnis to the killers of the Imam Hussein at the 680 A.D. Battle of Karbala – the very event that sparked the Sunni-Shiite schism – and, naturally, portraying Shiites as the righteous descendants of the martyr.

But in a landmark February 2013 speech, a new script was born, with Nasrallah suddenly striking an almost neoconservative tone, insisting on the urgency of “confronting terrorism” and warning without a trace of irony that Sunni jihadists in Syria sought “to transform Lebanon into a part of their Islamic state.” This theme, intended to convince the outside world that the pro-Assad camp is the comparatively secular one in Syria, has generally been kept up ever since, though the mask does slip on occasion, like when in a rousing August 2013 appearance Nasrallah thundered, “We are the Shiites of Ali Ibn Abi Talib! […] We are Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic Party of the Twelfth Imam!”

It will no doubt be argued by ‘realists’ and their kind that the brutality of groups like the IS is orders of magnitude greater than anything done by Hezbollah today – that, whatever its transgressions, the Party doesn’t round up and crucify or behead people, or threaten minority sects with extermination. Which is true enough, even if Hezbollah-trained Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq speak of their desire to ethnically cleanse towns of Sunnis, and even if summary executions and other atrocities committed by Hezbollah in Syria have been documented, as have the killings of opponents at home like Hashem Salman. The point is rather that the very debate over which kind of heavily armed Islamists to prefer over another is a debased and degrading one to begin with. The IS may be the worst of a bad bunch, but it would be a strange sort of ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ indeed who would be content with Holocaust-denying totalitarians in their stead.

British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.

24 years after Rushdie, Islamists put Brits once again under police protection

[Originally posted at NOW]

Heresy hunters have a tendency to reserve their most concentrated and toxic venom for precisely those deviants whose doctrinal improprieties are the slightest. When Salman Rushdie, in a moment of delirious desperation after nearly two years of fatwa-induced fear for his life, allowed himself to be persuaded by an Egyptian fraudster into converting to Islam, the effect on his would-be murderers in Tehran was worse than had he done nothing at all. Supreme Leader Khamenei, who alone had the power to revoke the assassination order issued by his predecessor, responded that the fatwa would forever remain valid even “if Rushdie became the most pious man of all time,” while the Iranian state press howled that the novelist’s death was now imminent. So far from earning him leniency, his membership in the club only placed him in redoubled peril.

And so it has proven – on a far broader scale – with Islam’s 21st century holy warriors, who may well despise the Jews and the rest of the kuffar, but with nothing like as much conviction as they loathe their Muslim rivals. Just last week it was reported that yet another Salafist in Gaza had shunned battle with the Zionists, preferring to make his way to Syria via Turkey to fight the true jihad against the “nusayri” regime. And then we learn that Somalia’s al-Shabaab has chosen to mark the festival of Eid al-Adha by threatening several prominent British Muslims, including an imam, whom it said had “mutilated the teachings of Islam” by failing to endorse things like the wanton slaughter of shoppers in Kenya last month. In an eerie symmetry – and a sign of how much progress has been made in 24 years – it transpires that at least three of these men will be placed under Rushdiesque police protection.

I happen to be an atheist, and one of the school that says we’d be better off without faith of any kind, no matter how secularized or ‘moderate’. All the same, to abandon fellow foes of extremism in their hour of need would be no less shameful than the silence of many Muslims (and indeed non-Muslims, for that matter) after 1989 who couldn’t stomach Rushdie’s godlessness. The British government must be urged to put every necessary resource at the assistance of Mohammed Ansar, Usama Hasan and Ajmal Masroor, no less than it must do everything in its power to confront and defeat the abominable thugs who would kill the rest of us the moment after they were done with them.

Rushdie's revenge

[Originally posted at NOW]

In confronting the question of the relationship between politics and literature, one tends to run up against two key rejectionist camps. On the one hand sit the no-nonsense utilitarians; the hard-nosed wonks who view the reading of fiction as a frivolous, even vaguely effeminate, waste of a serious thinker’s time. On the other are the ostentatious aesthetes; the artistic puritans for whom political involvement is always and everywhere a vulgarity and barbarism.

Few writers better exhibit the poverty of both these extremes than Salman Rushdie, the political novelist who has, by both choice and circumstance, spent a hefty portion of his career embarking on some eminently literary politics. His new 630-page memoir, titled Joseph Anton after the name he adopted during nine years of hiding, is among other things a testament to the perils but also the necessity, and indeed the virtues, of being fully engaged on both literary and political fronts.

Starting - as Rushdie does - with the literature, one of the joys of Joseph Anton is the insight it gives into the practical process of writing a novel, as well as the more intangible development and maturation of the novelist’s mind itself. The seeds of what would become his most famous work (if not necessarily his most distinguished one,) The Satanic Verses, seem to have been planted during his Bombay childhood by his father Anis, a mostly nasty, cantankerous drunk who nevertheless cultivated a highly rational critique of his discarded Islam; a lesson in skeptical inquiry that evidently impressed itself upon his son. (The very name ‘Rushdie’, invented by Anis to replace ‘Dehlavi’, was taken from Ibn Rushd, the 12th-century Andalusian polymath who was, in the author’s words, “at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time.”)

Equipped with Anis’ intellectual curiosity and irreverence, young Salman took a fancy to an obscure history course on the life of the Prophet Muhammad, whilst at Cambridge University in the 1960s, in which he learned about what were uncontroversially called the ‘Satanic Verses’. These are the heterodox Islamic scriptures that would appear two decades later, only lightly fictionalized, in the supposedly ‘offending’ passages of the novel that bore their name. It’s instructive to reflect, as he does, that the story of the verses is “essentially admiring of the Prophet of Islam and even respectful toward him” – an irony naturally lost on many of the fanatics that didn’t read the novel.

Elsewhere, the search for what he calls “the sweet recess of the mind where fiction lurked” takes him on an "odyssey” to India, where the 20-hour bus rides, vomiting chickens and peculiar Keralan storytelling techniques provide the raw materials for the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children. In retrospect, one wishes there had been rather more of these pages in Joseph Anton, and less of the name-dropping celebrity-basking that populates the closing chapters (“Hugh Grant kissed him;” “The movie star Will Smith told him […].”)

On that note, now seems as good a time as any to get the book’s other shortcomings out the way: the inexcusable writing of the entire text in the third person (barring a single, erroneous sentence); the profligate use of the exclamation mark; the jarring, unnatural Americanisms ('sidewalk', 'freshmen', 'soccer' - presumably the doing of a fiendish editor); and the highly dubious assertions (e.g. the repeated claim – refutable even by the briefest Wikipedia search – that Ayatollah Khomeini started the Iran-Iraq war.)

All these flaws and more, however, can be tolerated thanks to the extraordinary drama of the story itself. This is about much more than the elite protection squad (not just “licensed to kill,” but “licensed to do so on his behalf,”) the armored Jags, the flights to the US on military jets. It is nothing less than a first-hand account of the definitive free speech battle of the 20th century. And Rushdie makes full use of the opportunity to name his allies and, more gratifyingly, shame his antagonists.

It’s never exactly been a secret that when a blood-drenched dictator put a price tag on the head of a novelist on February 14th, 1989, a number of distinguished voices on both the left and right decided the emotions of the former were worth more than the rights of the latter. Nor has it gone unnoticed that those voices grew no quieter when Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, or when his Norwegian publisher was shot, or when three Iranians were found conspiring to kill him in Britain in 1992, or when the Egyptian columnist Farag Fouda and the Algerian writer Tahar Djaout were both murdered by Islamists, or when other writers like the Turkish Aziz Nesin, the Bengali Taslima Nasrin and the Egyptian Alaa Hamed were jailed or otherwise persecuted for “offending” the godly. But not until now has it been definitively established just how shockingly wide and, so to speak, high the capitulation to fascism went.

Informed readers will already have known about the sinister fatuity of characters like Germaine Greer, John le Carré, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Cat Stevens, and of course the entire Islamic, Christian and Jewish religious establishments when it came to the Rushdie “affair”. But I for one hadn’t realized the list also included Prince Charles, Rupert Murdoch, Roald Dahl, Louis de Bernières, Naguib Mahfouz (who initially defended him) and even (how could you!) Kingsley Amis. Tariq Ali lied, for presumably self-promoting reasons, about going to dinner with him. Alexander Cockburn attacked him hysterically in print. The Oxford University Press refused to publish an extract of his (from Midnight’s Children, for Christ’s sake). And Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady' herself, ignored and essentially disowned him, perpetually afraid of upsetting an Iranian government whose proxy guns in Lebanon were holding Britons hostage.

Indeed, Lebanon is more involved – and implicated – in Rushdie’s ordeal than most Lebanese probably realize. Hussein Musawi, founder of the Islamic Amal militia that would later merge with other Islamist factions to form Hezbollah, took something of a personal interest in the 'cause', threatening to kill the British hostages if the fatwa wasn’t carried out and even proposing sparing one of their lives if Rushdie were delivered to Beirut. In London, Rushdie was told by British intelligence that Hezbollah was trying to cut out the middleman and kill him themselves as late as 1998. This seems far-fetched, although wilayat al-faqih doesn’t leave much room for disobeying the Supreme Leader’s orders, and as recently as 2006 an irate Hassan Nasrallah could be found articulating his disgust that the 'apostate' was never liquidated.

With that said, there were also Lebanese fighting on his behalf. The novelist Hanan al-Shaykh seems to have never wavered in her many years of friendship with him, and another novelist, Elias Khoury, wrote in 1993 that “[Rushdie] personifies our solitude [and] his story is our own,” sentiments also echoed in print by Amin Maalouf. Indeed, this was the position of Arab and Muslim writers and intellectuals generally: Edward Said, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi and literally dozens more of the finest pens in the region put their craven Western counterparts to shame by squarely and unambiguously fighting for Rushdie’s freedom of speech – a liberty they had reason to know could never be taken for granted.

As it still cannot. Though Rushdie now lives a considerably freer existence, the “affair” refuses to die. Just this Monday, a group of Indian Muslim clerics demanded the exclusion from this year’s Jaipur literary festival of speakers who had read passages of the Verses last year – an act that was itself a protest against death threats that had prevented Rushdie himself from appearing at the festival.

More generally, not a day goes by anymore that an artist or journalist or publisher isn’t being menaced by religious fanatics – in Tunis, or Gaza, or Riyadh, but equally in Amsterdam or Copenhagen – and yet we continue to be told, every time, that taking care not to 'offend' the thugs is the priority. Incredibly, proposals for a worldwide ban on 'blasphemy' are being taken seriously by the United Nations, with secretary-general Ban Ki-moon among the many enthusiasts. When Hamid al-Thani, the Qatari theocrat and Muslim Brotherhood patron told the General Assembly that “freedom should not […] become a tool to hurt and insult the dignity of […] sacred beliefs,” he was saying what almost no world leader would dare dispute nowadays, least of all the US President, who condemned “all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others” while the body of his ambassador to Benghazi, murdered in a frenzy of piety, was still warm.

Fortunately, books like Joseph Anton offer us another option – the humorous instead of the stern; the ironic instead of the fanatical; the literary instead of the philistine. And they also offer a welcome deterrent to future fatwa sympathizers and would-be censorship-enablers: the prospect of one day having one’s name disgraced, in cold print, for all of posterity to see.

Why no boycott of Cat Stevens?

If recent weeks have reminded us of anything about the Lebanese left, it is that they are hardly boycott-shy. The practice, which has a history in the country going back at least as far as the Israel Boycott Law of 1955, has aimed at some high profile targets in contemporary music, including concerts held by the DJs Tiesto and Armin van Buuren and the rock band Placebo (where the campaign was so successful that the event organiser has filed a lawsuit for damages). The ink has still yet to dry in the local papers about the latest one against the singer Lara Fabian, which resulted in the cancellation of her concert and a consequent spate of bad press for the boycotters, who have been decried as "cultural terrorists", "fanatics" and even agents of "Iran's elite Al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards Corp [seeking to establish] a state of Islamic jurisprudence". (It happens that I know the man behind the Fabian campaign. As a self-described atheist of Christian birth, he will undoubtedly have been fascinated to learn this.)

However, in such a high-voltage environment of activist enthusiasm, it seems peculiar that nothing is being said or done about the Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam (apparently he now prefers simply 'Yusuf') concert being held at the Beiteddine Art Festival next Saturday. Stevens/Yusuf, you may recall, was the man who repeatedly and publicly endorsed the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini for the murder of Salman Rushdie. He now greasily denies ever having done this on his website, but as always in our Internet age, the evidence is only a click away. We may now all watch with our own eyes as the following exchanges take place on British television between Stevens/Yusuf and the renowned human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC:

Robertson: You don't think that this man deserves to die?

Yusuf: Who, Salman Rushdie?

Robertson: Yes.

Yusuf: Yes, yes.

Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?

Yusuf: No, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered, let's say, by the judge or by the authority to carry out such an act, perhaps, yes.

Robertson: Would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burnt?

Yusuf: I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing.

As Rushdie himself noted in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph titled 'Cat Stevens wanted me dead':

He added that "if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, 'I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I'd try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is'.''

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr [Craig] Whitney added, Stevens/Islam, who had seen a preview of the programme, said that he "stood by his comments".

Surely every leftist worth the name revolts at this call for the murder of a novelist for 'blasphemy'? Could anything be more viciously puritanical, more theocratic, more fascistic? What does it say about the state of our world when such a despicable thug not only retains his place in polite society, but thrives? One somehow suspects that were a Jewish singer to call for the murder of a Muslim novelist, citing the authority of the Torah, he would not be invited by Jon Stewart to play a song called 'Peace Train' at a rally attended by tens of thousands of American liberals. Nor would such a character likely be welcomed at one of Lebanon's preeminent cultural festivals. Yet the left in that country, which barks itself hoarse when a woman says "I love you Israel", is apparently unperturbed by a man who says that an atheist writer of fiction "deserves to die", and claims his preparedness to take the life himself if given the nod from the right "authority".

The point is not, of course, that boycotting Israel is wrong. Boycotts are an indispensable method of democratic and nonviolent protest, and the Israeli government is a deserving target if ever there was one (an observation underscored by the law passed in the Knesset last year banning the boycotting of West Bank settlements). But to boycott Lara Fabian while staying silent on Cat Stevens/Yusuf invites the accusation of Israeli exceptionalism, and undermines the supposed universalism of the radical cause.

The left can do, and has done, better. At a PEN rally in New York in the aftermath of the fatwa, it was pointed out (by the late Christopher Hitchens, in fact¹) that the text of the death sentence covered not only Rushdie himself but "all those involved in [The Satanic Verses'] publication". A petition was thus circulated in which the signatories declared themselves "co-responsible for publication". As the subsequent murder of the book's Japanese translator and the attempts on the lives of its Italian translator and Norwegian publisher demonstrated, this was not a declaration that came without risk. Nor has the threat to Rushdie's life entirely disappeared, as he discovered at the Jaipur Literary Festival only last month. There again, courageous individuals were on hand to defend him, as when the novelist Hari Kunzru decided to use his slot to read passages from the Verses in protest of the alleged plot to assassinate Rushdie if he made his scheduled appearance. I will not be in Lebanon on the day of Stevens'/Yusuf's performance, but I will be reading from my favourite pages of the novel, and I invite all my Lebanese friends - as well as anyone else who thinks it worthwhile to protect the fragile buds of free expression, literature and humour from the marching jackboots of clerical fascism - to spend their evening doing the same.

¹Hitchens, C., Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000), p. 126

A Novel Solution: The intellectual necessity of fiction

Picture the scene: you’re in the company of a new acquaintance whose intelligence and humour have been made evident to you, but whom you do not yet know well. Navigating the climbs and declensions of conversation in the hope of expanding on established common ground, you hazard to bring up the subject of novels. Nothing pretentious – no need here for page-length recitations of Proust or Pride and Prejudice – but perhaps “Did you happen to catch Martin Amis’ latest?” or whatever it might be. And then that sinking sensation as your mystified companion shakes their head and politely asks who that is, explaining that they “only really read non-fiction”. If he’s a man, this statement might even be made with a hint of pride, as though to imply that reading anything less would be a frivolous, infantile and basically effeminate waste of time. I hope at least some of you will know what I’m talking about.

The belief that non-fiction is the terrain of the serious thinker, whilst fiction is little but fairytales for adults is an all-too-common one, I fear, and one which is long overdue repudiation. This is not just because of its essential philistinism, or for any sentimental notion of the ‘transcendence’ of art. On the contrary, the assiduous study of literature offers a practical and tangible education to even the most hard-headed utilitarian. In no sphere is this truer than in politics. 

As an example, I have just finished Palace Walk, the first instalment in the famous ‘Cairo Trilogy’ by the brilliant Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz. I couldn’t have known when I started the book that its author would make a posthumous appearance in the three-way contest between secularists, Islamists and the military that is defining the quagmire of post-Mubarak politics, but I’m very glad that he has, for it’s given me the chance to build on a loathing for religious extremism that I never thought could get any greater. For those who missed the news from last week’s parliamentary elections in Alexandria, the candidate representing the Salafi coalition – that is, the ultra-orthodox Islamists who denounce even the Muslim Brotherhood as infidels, and yearn to replicate the system of government of 7^th century Medina – decried the works of the Nobel Laureate as “inciting promiscuity, prostitution and atheism”. (Well yes, one wants to reply, but what of the books’ faults?) Happily, the sexless fanatic was defeated – albeit by a Brotherhood man...

Palace Walk itself is an irreverent yet humane satire on piety from start to finish. When Mahfouz writes of Amina, the luckless mother of the tyrannically patriarchal al-Jawad household, that “[s]he knew far more about the world of the jinn than that of mankind”, he manages in fourteen words to summarise the entirety of the pity of Islamic fundamentalism. And when the father, al-Sayyid Ahmad, is confronted by a cleric on his notorious extra-marital indulgences, his reply is an unimprovable indictment of religious double standards: “Don’t forget, Shaykh Mutawalli, that the professional women entertainers of today are the slave girls of yesterday, whose purchase and sale God made legal. More than anything else, God is forgiving and merciful.”

It was for these and other moral victories over the faithful that Mahfouz was eventually stabbed in the neck at the age of eighty-two; left debilitated but not dead by a knife belonging to just the sort of person who might vote for a Salafi today. Thus to the ignorant question – ‘why read fiction?’ – one of many possible answers is that fiction and politics are inseparable, and an understanding of one without the other is impossible¹. For who could fully grasp the danger and derangement of the Salafis without first understanding Mahfouz’s novels? Equally, who, without having read The Satanic Verses, could know how insane it was for Ayatollah Khomeini to demand the murder of its author? Incidentally, those who saw the 1989 fatwa as the first shot fired by a newly militant Islamism are overlooking the banning in 1959 of Mahfouz’s Children of Gebelawi, which, like the Verses, included the Prophet Muhammad and his contemporaries amongst its dramatis personae. (It was no coincidence that Mahfouz joined dozens of distinguished Middle Eastern men of letters such as the poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish and the intellectuals Edward Said and Amin Maalouf in expressing unconditional solidarity with Salman Rushdie in a dedicated collection of essays published in 1994, in which Mahfouz wrote, “The veritable terrorism of which he is a target is unjustifiable, indefensible [...] One idea can only be opposed by other ideas. Even if the punishment is carried out, the idea as well as the book will remain.” Contrast this with the condemnation Rushdie faced in the Anglophone world from people like Jimmy Carter, Roald Dahl and John le Carré, and you arrive at one of the bleaker ironies of the term ‘Western civilisation’.)

Speaking of Edward Said – that Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature, who, like Palace Walk’s Kamal, also grew up in inter-war Cairo in the shadow of a disciplinarian father – did he not make his name in 1978 by saying that it was the fiction of ‘Occidental’ writers, from Homer through Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe and Flaubert to Conrad and Kipling, that reinforced the notion of an untamed ‘Orient’, and thus paved the path for European imperialism? That book, along with its 1993 sequel, Culture and Imperialism, would be a locked door to the strict non-fictioner. 

There are more additional examples than I would care to list or you would care to hear about, but I will mention just three if I may. One probably doesn’t have to have read Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to understand dictatorship and totalitarianism, but his concepts of ‘Big Brother’, ‘doublethink’, ‘thoughtcrime’ and ‘Newspeak’ have acquired so universal and versatile a currency that it would save one a lot of time and effort to do so (responding to le Carré’s philistine reduction of the Verses to an “insult” of a “great religion”, the expression Rushdie chose in his letter to the Guardian was that he had been “accused of thought crimes”). Orwell’s almost preternatural instinct for the relationship between language and politics (cf. his 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’) enabled him, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, to conclude that the 1938 Moscow trials were fraudulent “on internal literary evidence”² alone, at a time when many more intellectuals than it is polite to remember were celebrating the justice served on the enemies of the Party. And even – if not especially – to those for whom English was not a first language, Orwell’s novels commanded respect among the dissident and endangered: here is the Polish anti-Stalinist Czesław Miłosz in his 1953 classic, The Captive Mind:

A few [of us] have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.³

All that remains to be said here is that if oppositionists living under the Stalin regime thought it worth their while to read the fiction of Orwell (and Swift), then very few of us indeed have valid reason not to.

Moving closer to the present, the conflict in Israel and Occupied Palestine has tended to produce more poetry than prose, though there are a few fine novels to be found. The Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani had already published his masterpiece, Men in the Sun, by the time he was assassinated in 1972, while his contemporary Emile Habibi was even to win an Israeli literary prize in 1992. David Grossman’s has probably been the most powerful Jewish Israeli voice, while Philip Roth’s 1987 tour de force, The Counterlife, captured in just five words the terrifying absolutism of the West Bank settlers: “The Bible is their bible.” Perhaps the most striking scene I’ve yet read, however, appears in the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun. The book centres around Yunis, an aged former Palestinian fida’i, as he lies comatose in an improvised hospital in Shatila, the refugee camp south of Beirut, while the equally improvised ‘Doctor’ Khaleel regales him with an epic repertory of stories of the villages, valleys and violence that make up the collective Palestinian memory (Khoury was himself a member of Fatah in Jordan in the 1960s, before siding with them against the Israelis – and most of his Christian co-religionists – in the Lebanese civil war. He’s been involved with the refugees one way or another ever since). 

To the scene, then: we know in advance to expect something eventful, because Umm Hassan, a Shatila refugee, has managed to get herself back to El Kweikat, the Galilean village of her youth, where after 1948 the Jews “demolished every single house [...] and built the settlement of Beyt ha-Emek – all except for what had been new houses on the hill”, of which Umm Hassan’s had been one. Finally summoning the courage to knock on the door, a Jewish woman answers in surprisingly fluent Arabic, and ushers Umm Hassan and her brother inside. They follow her in and have a seat as the woman fetches them a drink.

The Israeli woman left her in front of the water jug and returned with a pot of Turkish coffee. She poured three cups and sat calmly watching these strangers whose hands shook as they held their coffees. Before Umm Hassan could open her mouth, the Israeli woman asked, “It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“How did you know?” asked Umm Hassan.

“I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Welcome.”

Umm Hassan took a sip from her cup, the aroma of the coffee overwhelmed her, and she burst into tears.

The women talk about a jug of Umm Hassan’s that’s still on the kitchen counter, decades later. They walk into the garden and discuss the orange orchards, or ‘groves’, as the Jewish woman calls them. Umm Hassan eventually explores the entire house. And then she’s telling her about her life today; how she now lives in a camp on the outskirts of Beirut:

When the Jewish woman heard the word Beirut, she jumped up and changed completely.

“You’re from Beirut?” she cried, the words tumbling out of her mouth and her eyes filling with tears.

“Listen, sister,” the Jewish woman said. “I’m from Beirut too, from Wadi Abu Jmeel. You know Wadi Abu Jmeel, the Jewish district in the centre? They brought me from there when I was twelve years old. I left Beirut and came to this dreary, bleak land. Do you know the Ecole de l’Alliance Israélite? To the right of the school there’s a three-storey building that used to be owned by a Polish Jew called Elie Baron. I’m from there.”

“You’re from Beirut?” Umm Hassan asked in amazement.

“Yes, from Beirut.”

“How did that happen?”

“What do you mean, how did that happen? I’ve no idea. You’re living in Beirut and you’ve come here to cry? I’m the one who should be crying. Get up and go. Get up, sister, and go. Send me to Beirut and take this wretched land back."

Now, a history book can tell you that there were once as many as 20,000 Lebanese Jews, all but a couple of hundred of whom are now in Israel. It can also tell you that perhaps 100,000 Palestinians took refuge in Lebanon after the nakba of ’48. But no historian can tell you what would happen if two such exiles were actually to meet: that task is left to the novelist alone.

Of course, this symbiosis between letters and politics ceases to work the moment one trespasses on the other’s domain. A review of Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Hamid Dabashi provides a cautionary tale. The book tells the story of how Nafisi – a Professor at the University of Tehran until her expulsion for refusing to veil herself, after which she moved to America – would invite her brightest female students to her home in Tehran once a week for informal discussions on four staples of the modern Anglophone canon: Lolita, naturally enough, along with The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller and Pride and Prejudice. These symposia, which were intended as relief from the alternating tedium and terror of life under Khomeini as much as anything else, eventually cultivated rich and entirely original interpretations of the works, with whose heroines the girls identified far more personally than Nafisi had imagined they could have. 

For this modest but perhaps symbolic achievement, Nafisi receives a tirade of venomous, hysterical abuse from Dabashi, who calls her a “native informer”, a “colonial agent”, a “comprador intellectual” (his most irritating phrase, used twelve times in the review), a “servant of a white-identified, imperial design” and even an “ideologue in George W Bush’s empire-building project”. Her thoughtcrime – sorry, crime, it appears, was to have Betrayed The Cause by disseminating works of doctrinal impropriety:

[The book] promotes the cause of “Western Classics” at a time when decades of struggle by postcolonial, black and Third World feminists, scholars and activists has [sic] finally succeeded to introduce a modicum of attention to world literatures [...]

Decades into a sustained struggle against the domination of Eurocentric curriculum [sic] in the US academy, fighting to restore democratic dignity to the world literary scene, Nafisi once again pushes the clock back for about half a century by a singular and exclusive praise for the Eurocentricity of the literary imagination.

This sheer Stalinism – appraising books solely on the basis of their ideological purity – seems to form the core of Dabashi’s critical approach. The primary achievement of Nafisi’s book, he says, is to have:

[S]ystematically and unfailingly denigrat[ed] an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism

Apparently, then, literature is not about things like art or beauty or language: it’s actually about revolutionary resistance. Oh sure, Nabokov might have written good novels, but what the hell did he ever do for the struggle? 

In fact, Dabashi’s spittle-flecked and bloated review gets a great deal worse, to the point of telling outright lies⁴ (that the man is a Professor of Literature at Columbia is surely a disgrace to the institution). But his most laughably philistine moment is this:

[O]ne reads this book in vain in search of even a single conversation with any relevant literary theory amassed for generations about and around the works of the [four] authors

Of course – because one may not simply enjoy literature: one has to anaesthetise and sterilise and dissect and analyse it, in “conversation” with “relevant literary theory”! Never mind what the readers think - what do the literary theorists have to say? I shall leave the last word on this sorry subject to Kingsley Amis, who once reproached some comparable mediocrity for his suggestion that a certain novel of somebody else’s was not “important” enough to have merited inclusion in some now-forgotten literary shortlist:

Important! Fearful contemporary word, smacking of the textbook, the lecture-hall, the ‘balanced appraisal’. So-and-so may be readable, interesting, entertaining, but is he important? Ezra Pound may be pretentious and dull, but you’ve got to admit he’s ever so important. What? You haven’t read Primo Levi (in translation, of course)? But he’s important. As the philosopher J. L. Austin remarked in another context, importance isn’t important. Good writing is.⁵

And there it is. Literature is not to be conscripted into the service of academia, or any other ‘sphere’ or ‘discourse’, least of all politics. While it might make contributions in each of these respects, to read it solely as a means to these ends would be like gulping down a glass of wine just for the cardiovascular benefit: it can be done, but it would rather miss the point... Instead, both fiction and wine ought to be enjoyed for their own sake, and to forgo the former is every bit as joyless and puritanical as abstaining from the latter. Ultimately we should all be with that Persian genius, Omar Khayyam, who warned us a thousand years ago that:

Since neither truth nor certainty is granted

You cannot sit in doubtful hope all your life;

Let us be careful not to set the wine-cup aside,

Since a man is in ignorance, drunk or sober.⁶

¹ The same answer can be given, of course, to the no-less-ignorant question, ‘why read politics?’ 
² See Hitchens, C., Why Orwell Matters (2002), pp. 59-62 
³ As quoted in Ibid., pp. 54-55 
⁴ “No one will ever know, reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, that Iranians, like all other nations, have a literature of their own”, writes Dabashi. I cite the following quotes from the 2008 Harper Perennial paperback edition (this list is by no means exhaustive): “We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights” (p. 4); “Like a group of conspirators, we would gather around the dining room table and ready poetry and prose from Rumi, Hafez, Sa’adi, Khayyam, Nezami, Ferdowsi, Attar, Beyhaghi” (p. 172); “Our great epic poet Ferdowsi had rewritten the confiscated myths of Persian kings and heroes in a pure and sacred language. My father, who all through my childhood would read me Ferdowsi and Rumi, sometimes used to say to me that our true home, our true history, was in our poetry” (p. 172). 
⁵ Amis, K., Memoirs (1991), p. 297
⁶ Avery, P. & Heath-Stubbs, J., The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (1979), p. 89