Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a Faculty Fellow and University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.

You’ve started with a travel account from the early 19th century, John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travel in Syria and the Holy Land. Why this book?

Burckhardt really was the original Lawrence of Arabia, the Westerner who goes out to the Middle East, studies Arabic, dresses in the local fashion, and travels right through the Arab world. And he came away with a depth of understanding about the people among whom he travelled that was just unsurpassed in its day. Burckhardt was actually preparing himself not to be an Orientalist and Middle Eastern traveller, but to go and try to find the sources of various African rivers – he was fascinated by the origins of the Niger river. He was preparing himself to go into Central Africa but he never actually made it – he went up the Nile and made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then came back to Cairo, where he got ill and died in 1817. So he never fulfilled the objective for which he was learning the language and travelling through the region. But in the process he left behind a couple of fantastic books. One was his travel book, Travel in Syria and the Holy Land, and the other one was a study of the Wahabis in Arabia, from the time of his pilgrimage to Mecca.

And of all the things he describes, what really sticks in your mind?

He is most famous for being the first Westerner to see the Nabatean ruins in Petra. He had discerned that the lost city of Petra might correspond to some places the Bedouin were talking about, and he finally persuaded some of them to lead him there. The Bedouin were very suspicious of anybody trying to visit ruins and old sites, thinking they were seeking gold or treasure or that they might be necromancers: Burckhardt was often suspected of raising the dead, because of his interest in travelling among ruins. And so his is a very quickly sketched description of Petra, because his guides took him to see it, showed him the place and then quickly frogmarched him out again. But I think that stands as one of the most famous passages in his travels. For me, what’s interesting are the reflections on the Arab societies in which he moved: this is someone who could talk to the people, who really came to grips with the politics of the local society. There’s a sophistication of knowledge and engagement that came from travelling, from living among people for a long time, from speaking their language, which makes him stand out above many of the other Western travellers of his generation.

So your next choice is al-Tahtawi’s An Imam in Paris, which was one of the most influential books in Arabic of the 19th century. What can you tell me about this book?

Al-Tahtawi was sent by the ruler of Egypt as the chaplain of an educational mission to France. The aim of the mission was to train young Egyptians in the languages and the arts and the sciences that had made Europe so strong in that first quarter of the 19th century. And he was a very insightful observer, who presents us with a pretty unique example of an Arab or Muslim traveller describing the manners and customs of an exotic people: in this case the French. He was very curious and he wasn’t particularly judgmental. So he went with an open mind and wide open eyes. He was fascinated by the relations between men and women, by how they dressed, by how they worked, by the way they decorated their homes and even how they set their tables. There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of all these things, which were so different from the way in which society worked in his native Egypt. He was also very interested in the way the politics of French society worked; he was fascinated by constitutional government, the idea that there could be rules that applied on rulers as well as on subjects. And he’s the first person to introduce the idea of a newspaper to the Arab world. At the time, in the 1820s, there were no newspapers in Arabic. He’s the first one to describe how they worked, how they allow accountability, how people’s actions can be put under scrutiny, and how anybody, whatever their standing in life, was able to write for these things called newspapers. The book was a bestseller from the moment it was published in Arabic. It was instantly translated into Turkish, so it reached the Ottoman world at large, and really is more responsible than any other book, in the first half of the 19th century, for setting reformist debates in Ottoman and Arab society. But it’s also just a great read – a fascinating, fantastic book, and there’s a wonderful new translation of it [by Daniel Newman].

On to One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev. What does that mean, One Palestine, Complete?

It was a mock receipt for the handover between high commissioners in Palestine: the one handing on to his successor ‘one Palestine, complete’, in the same way someone handing over a battleship might give it into the hands of the next commander, itemising all aspects of the battleship. So it’s very much a reflection of a British notion of their responsibilities as commanders of this colony or ship. But the irony of it is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. It was a country slated for partition. Arabs and Jews in Palestine were taking Palestine in the direction of a divided land, not ‘one Palestine, complete’. But, actually, Segev doesn’t dwell on that irony at any length. Instead, what he gives us is a very human history about the encounter between British imperial rulers, the indigenous Arab people and the Jewish immigrants in the inter-war years, when Palestine was created as a British mandate. The book is very richly peopled – these vivid characters from all three communities – and Segev tracks the way they didn’t live in isolation from one another, but interacted and were shaped by each other. It’s a book full of startling challenges to assumed wisdoms and borrowed wisdoms.

For example?

My favourite is his description of the Hebron Riots in 1929. This is an instance where growing tension between Arab and Jewish communities led to violence where Arabs attacked Jewish places of worship. They attacked the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and that set off a wave of attacks of other areas where there were Jewish communities in Hebron. As I recall, around 69 people were killed by Arab rioters, and it’s always portrayed as an instance of Arab intolerance towards the Jewish community in their midst, evidence of a genocidal streak. But what you get from reading Segev, is that what saved the Jewish community in Hebron from a much worse massacre was the fact that so many Arabs took in their Jewish neighbours to protect them. And, in this way, what could have been an elimination of the Jewish community in Hebron, led instead to two or three score people being killed rather than hundreds. I’d never read that anywhere else and I just think that this is a great example of how powerful a well-written book can be, for challenging people’s pre-conceptions.

Segev also gives us the very best portrait of Chaim Weizmann who was the Zionist diplomat responsible for the Balfour Declaration. He explains how Weizmann was able to leverage European misconceptions about international Jewry: he really played on their belief that he was the head of a kind of diaspora nation that he was in direct communication with, that they were organised and a force. The reality, as Segev points out, is that Weizmann was a guy in a small flat off Piccadilly, whose office was the suitcase of letters that he kept under his bed. There wasn’t more to him than that. But he was able to present himself and gain access to the very highest levels of British policymakers, and in this way shaped their views, so that they would come around to declaring British policy in favour of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.

So Jewish stereotypes played in Weizmann’s favour?

There was always this notion among anti-Semites in Europe that there was a kind of Jewish International. And for some, this meant Jews were in some way seeking to dominate or control the economy or world politics. And Weizmann never fought that. He let people continue to work on such false assumptions and then presented himself as the head of the world Zionist organisation, as someone who was almost of head of state status; somebody who represented the interests of a lot of powerful, wealthy, influential Jews around the world. And he really wasn’t that. So it’s a book full of very rich and cliché-overturning anecdotes, told in a very lively and engaging way.

Your next book is Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War.

Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.

What insights does it offer into the conflict?

The central dilemma for Fisk is the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in the fall of 1982. He begins the book by going to talk to Holocaust survivors, and he’s trying to come to grips with how it was possible for a Jewish state, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to be party to a massacre that was so exterminationist in its nature. The Israelis did not kill Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, but they surrounded the camps and allowed their Maronite allies into them. The book is not in any sense a gratuitous swipe against the Israelis, because the Israeli public was also deeply appalled by the violence done in the camps, and one-tenth of the population of Israel actually took to the streets to protest, and the Israeli Supreme Court convened a commission of inquiry that was to find a number of government officials responsible to different degrees for that mass murder.

He is also trying to understand how a society divided by its own feuds or – worse than feuds – by genocidal warfare, how the Maronites, the Palestinians and the different militias can get to that point of brutality.

The other story in Fisk’s book is the kidnapping of Westerners, part of the emergence of a new Shiite power called Hezbollah, which fought its war against outside domination with very unconventional means. That started with the advent of suicide bombing and then went through the taking of hostages as a political bargaining chip. His friend Terry Anderson, the AP journalist, was not released by the time this edition came out. That too is one of the big stories that sticks in your mind after you’ve read the book.

Given our broader topic is the Arabs, does Fisk’s book say anything that is relevant when you look at other countries in the region?

Lebanon was not unique in facing civil conflict. There was Algeria in the 1990s where the cancellation of a parliamentary election led to a massive civil war. The longest civil war in the region is in the Sudan, and if we think more recently to what’s been going on in Iraq since its 2003 invasion, there are a number of examples of internecine conflicts that reached the degree of violence that Lebanon knew, and much worse.

I think the other thing about the broader Arab story is how many Arab countries are playing out their inter-Arab rivalries through the Lebanese conflict. You see Syria had a very strong position there; Iraqis opposed Syria’s involvement in Lebanon and didn’t want to compromise, and the Saudis were backing some groups. In some sense Lebanon was going to become a microcosm of broader regional conflicts too. All that is very much captured in Fisk’s book.

A lot of your choices seem to focus on personal narratives – it’s very much about firsthand accounts, what people are going through, rather than broad impersonal histories…

I find that this human interaction in history is what really hooks me, and it makes history much more immediate to readers generally. Though my fifth book is going to be in some ways the most impersonal and broad-sweeping of the lot. There’s an exception to every rule.

This is Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples?

Yes. Though, actually, Hourani begins with a person too: Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab father of sociology, the 14th-century Arab intellectual. Khaldun wrote a very serious history about the rise and fall of empires which saw the driving energy of Arab history as coming from the desert. The power of the tribes from the desert conquers the towns and establishes itself as dominant power, and then, in the course of generations, loses its martial ardour, and becomes shaped by the refinement and culture of city life. So in the end it is no longer strong enough to defend itself against the next wave of ardour coming from the desert that will challenge the political order in the now effete city and impose a new political order. He sees the rise and fall of empires in Arab classical history as in a sense shaped by this cyclical pattern.

He also sees the loyalties of Arabs being shaped by a force called asabiya. This is the notion that your loyalties belong to those you know best. So it’ll be me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, us and our cousin against the next family over, us and our neighbours against the next town over, us and our villages against those in another province – this notion of social cohesion that grows more diffuse the larger the unit. Khaldun sees asabiya as being one of the driving forces of Arab history.

And Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples – critically he speaks in the plural. He sees the Arabs as being many peoples and one people at the same time, and his history traces the Arab world from the rise of Islam to modern times, and does so with an elegant conciseness that allows him to cover that huge sweep of 14 centuries in about 500-600 pages.

Hourani is in many ways the most respected modern historian of the Arab world. He made his career here in Oxford – he was the founding father of the Middle East centre where I work – and when I met him as a graduate student, the awe and reverence with which I approached the great man was, I’m sure, pretty funny to him. But he was a delightful man. When I came to take my appointment to Oxford in 1991 I had two years of seeing him before he died. I keep being described as disciple of Hourani, or a student of Hourani, and I was neither of those things. I never got a chance to study under Albert, though I would have loved to. But I always wanted to write a book like Albert Hourani did. I always felt very much in awe of his scholarship and his depth of knowledge and erudition. And, in a sense, all of those great qualities were brought to bear in his last great work, A History of the Arab Peoples.

Given how much has been written about Arabs, why did you decide to write your own book, The Arabs: A History?

After 9/11 there was a feeling that terrorism posed a threat to our way of life. And I wanted to give some insight into the fact that in the Arab world there was also a feeling that we posed a threat to their way of life. There is a long and deep history for that Arab perception of the West. So I wanted, in a way, to balance our understanding of a region which we are ever more engaged with – sending hundreds of thousands of troops and ruling these places.

I also wanted to present a modern history from modern Arab sources. I’m not an Arab, but I can introduce some of those sources that are less well known in the West. Hourani was at his briefest writing about the 19th and 20th centuries; he had only brief coverage of those centuries, whereas I am a modern historian.

Also, I thought a history was needed that integrated the end of the Cold War. Most Arab histories, like Albert’s, were written in the 1980s. But younger readers don’t relate to the Cold War; it’s ancient history to them. When you talk to students now about the Cold War, you might as well be talking about the English Civil War.

Interview conducted by Sophie Roell

Source: The Browser Eugene Rogan on 'The Arabs'

Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia

Few collections of folk tales and folk poetry from medieval Anatolia have been translated into English. Thanks to Professor Talat Halman, a new book has recently been published that provides examples of both. According to Halman, the material came from books, anthologies, and special publications, as well as story-telling sessions in rural areas
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”

Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”

Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.

The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.

Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.

The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.

One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.

In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.

Folk tales in modern times

Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.

Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.

Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.

The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry

In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.

Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia

Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?

The narrator of Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s largely autobiographical second novel moves from the countryside to Cairo in search of basic wages and literary accomplishment, Ursula Lindsay writes.

A Dog with No Tail
Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
American University in Cairo Press
Dh84


Migration from the countryside to the capital – leaving a traditional way of life behind and heading to the big city, lured by the promise of a slightly better life – is a common, fundamental experience for many in today’s Global South. So too is the dislocation and precariousness of life as a new member of the disregarded urban underclass. This is particularly true in Egypt, where in the last half-century rural migrants have helped quadruple Cairo’s population to its current 18 million mark. The city’s new residents jostle for space in its densely packed neighbourhoods, where despite a buzz of opportunity they struggle to find homes and jobs, and to make sense of their journeys.

In his darkly funny, deceptively casual and largely autobiographical second novel, the Egyptian author Hamdi Abu Golayyel writes of coming to the capital from one of the many villages where urban migration is a rite of passage, an expected step “once a man has developed the beginnings of a moustache and a sense of self-worth”. And yet, Abu Golayyel tells us, he and his friends “would walk the streets of Cairo but as sons of another, distant, country, to which we awaited the chance to return”.

The distant country is Abu Tahoun, a Bedouin village in the Fayoum oasis; Abu Golayyel’s ancestors were bribed and coerced into settling there sometime in the early nineteenth century by the ruler Muhammad Ali, who hoped to “bring to an end their peregrinations and interminable raids against the granaries and villages of the peasants”. Men like Abu Golayyel’s grandfather Aula – a brawler and a cattle thief who took an insouciant attitude to the officials and rules of the modern state – were the last of their generation. Today, Abu Golayyel tells us, his relatives are “nonentities almost to a man”, living in a village that is “wounded: poor and tiny, set far from the highway and the market and fresh water, and surrounded on every side by the desert.” And yet this village, he writes “is always on my mind”, “the only place where I move free from fear”.

In his first novel, the social satire Thieves in Retirement (2006), Abu Gollayel painted life in the vast, new Cairo slums as an unpredictable, apolitical, amoral free-for-all, a world of casual violence and consistent hypocrisy. A Dog with No Tail is another chronicle of the author’s double alienation – as a member of a community still at odds with the state, and as a new urban migrant. But it is more introspective than Abu Gollayel’s debut: concerned less with understanding others and more with coming to terms with one’s own origins and aspirations.

Starting when he was a teenager, Abu Golayyel began travelling regularly to Cairo to work with construction crews, tearing down, renovating or expanding the tottering residential buildings of the city’s more populous neighbourhoods. This manual labour was a source of both satisfaction – “a struggle between a man and his strength” – and shame, particularly since Abu Golayyel harboured the improbable ambition of becoming a writer. On his visits home, he writes: “I tried my best to convince people that I was, in fact, a pilot in Cairo. For the entire holiday I would assume the mantle of village intellectual. Rising late, towel slung over my shoulder, I would make my way down to the canal bank, with my toothbrush and toothpaste – the proofs of cultivation, culture, and an upwards social trajectory – borne aloft.”

Yet in the years spent lugging sacks of cement, smashing walls, pouring foundations and sleeping in empty buildings at night – building the residences of others without a home to call his own – Abu Golayyel found both material and metaphor. The novel’s resonant title in Arabic, Al Fa’il, is derived from the verb “to do”. It means “the doer”, “the actor” or, used as an adjective, “the efficacious, efficient”. In a grammatical sense, it means “the subject” – but in common parlance the world simply means “the labourer”. The English title is derived from a quip in the story, and works well enough. But the original Arabic title is particularly fitting for a book about the unstable edifice that is identity and the constant act of construction that is writing.

Abu Golayyel alternates his account of his life as a construction worker with stories from his years as an indifferent and intermittent university student, anecdotes about his friends and colleagues in Cairo, and lore from his grandfather’s seemingly more adventurous times. Along the way, he employs the whole bag of postmodern tricks, which have become widespread among contemporary Arab authors. The short stories are told out of chronological order, interrupted, revisited and retold with new details. They take off, midway, in unexpected directions; sometimes they end abruptly, like conversations cut short. There are unexplained gaps and contradictions; the self-referential narrator asserts in the opening pages that he’s no good with beginnings, interrupts his own story to chide himself for his digressions, and tells us in the end that things haven’t turned out the way he wanted.

Yet the reader doesn’t feel like the victim of a wry experiment. There is humour and action in almost every story. The spring behind Abu Golayyel’s writing, the author told an audience at the book’s recent launch in Cairo, is “amazement at what happens to me”, and arresting details are to be found in all his stories, even those about the mundane details of construction work. We learn that 50 Egyptian Pounds (Dh34, US$10) was a generous payment for a man to single-handedly carry 8,400 kilograms – that’s eight tons – of sand up a seven-storey building in one day; a feat the narrator considers “a miracle to this day”. Elsewhere, Abu Golayyel creates dramatic set pieces – an insurrection led by Islamist students at his university; his grandfather’s raids and tussles with the law – and highlights the bizarre: a college named after the bordello next door; an amateur prostitution ring run out of a parking garage; a landlord who eavesdrops so aggressively he falls into tenants’ rooms when they open their doors.

Continue reading The National: Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?

One and many

The panoramic perspective of Eugene Rogan’s new 500-year history, Elias Muhanna writes, helps us look beyond the the increasingly dated idea of a single, common Arab identity

The Arabs: A History
Eugene Rogan
Allen Lane
Dh152

There is something almost old-fashioned about the idea of a book-length history of the Arabs. Broad, all-encompassing narratives of this kind were popular in the 20th century, when historiography frequently intersected with pan-Arab nationalist projects, and when the sense of a common Arab identity was vividly felt both by the region’s inhabitants and the foreigners who observed and engaged them.

Today, the Arabs are increasingly viewed (and seem to view themselves) either as a small subset of a larger civilisation – the Muslim world – or as a collection of disparate and fractious entities whose differences often overwhelm their commonalities. Indeed, the notion of “Arabness” as a shared and distinguishing element seems to have lost its currency as a prism through which to study the region, just as it has lost its charismatic appeal in the political culture of the contemporary Middle East.

It is therefore suggestive to re-encounter a panoramic perspective in Eugene Rogan’s excellent new book, which, if we are being frank, is not so much a history of the Arabs as it is a political history of the Middle East and North Africa during the last 500 years – with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. The narrative begins with the Mamluk army’s defeat by the Ottomans at the battle of Marj Dabiq (in northern Syria) in 1516, the event that “marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age in the Arab world”, and then flits through the main developments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries before slowing down the pace upon arrival at the period of European colonialism.

Telescoping deftly between bird’s-eye-view narratives of large spans of history and the curious little footnotes that make for fabulous storytelling, Rogan weaves together the tales of an enormous, riotous cast of characters. We learn, for example, about the Algerian dey Husayn Pasha’s attack on the French consul Pierre Deval with a fly whisk in 1827, and about the affair of Colonel Husni al-Za’im, the leader of a short-lived military government in Syria who offered Israel full normalisation of relations in 1949 (an offer that was rejected by David Ben-Gurion). Rogan’s use of contemporary Arab sources (newspapers, magazines, memoirs, novels, first-hand reports) allows him to bring the reader close to the action at pivotal scenes, lending the work a very different flavour from its twentieth-century predecessors, including that of Rogan’s mentor, the great Albert Hourani.

Conitnue reading: The National: One and many

The Loves of others

Kaelen Wilson- Goldie reviews Arabic fiction’s latest succès de scandale.

The Others
Siba al Harez
Telegram Books
Dh68

“What is so frightening, from the start, about our being different?” asks the unnamed narrator of Siba al Harez’s debut novel, The Others. “Is it because we form a storm of question marks, moving fiercely through an undistinguished and previously unnoticed space in this nation, that never before experienced the essence or function of questioning, or of being in a state of difference? Is it because we release an intensity of presence that remains unacknowledged on the map of the world, or between the thighs of a recognised tribe?”

According to her publishers, Siba al Harez is the pseudonym of a 26-year-old woman from Al Qatif in Saudi Arabia. The Others was originally published in Arabic in 2006 and – thanks in part to its transgressive subject matter, including lesbian relationships and sadistic behaviour – quickly rode waves of controversy onto the bestseller lists. The English translation, published this month by Telegram Books in London, comes after a spate of similarly explicit novels, from the first two instalments of Turki al Hamad’s coming-of-age trilogy (also set in Saudi Arabia) to Nedjma’s The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman (another pseudonymous effort by a writer living in the Maghreb) and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. But while some of those books suffer self-congratulatory prurience or simply bad writing, The Others signals the arrival of a serious prose stylist.

The otherness announced in the novel’s name, and the difference about which the narrator speaks, has little to do with sexual orientation. The real condition of otherness and difference at stake is religious. Like the author, the narrator comes from Al Qatif, a coastal oasis in Saudi Arabia’s predominantly Shiite Eastern Province. In 1979, a violent rebellion broke out there, inspired in part by the revolution in Iran. Tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets, and the ensuing confrontation with the security services left close to 20 demonstrators dead, many of them young activists who had been demanding an end to their political and economic marginalisation.

The conflict in Al Qatif cuts across The Others like a scar. Among other things, it resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the narrator’s father, who had already been absent most of her life. She seeks refuge in the Hussainiyya, where she organises activities for Ramadan and Ashura. She writes for a religious magazine that is distributed in secret, her meetings with editors murmured, her articles coded on compact discs.

Siba al Harez writes of the body, and its architecture of desire, in a manner that recalls the work of the American novelist Nicole Krauss. The Others opens in the narrator’s voice: “And so there was a long line of them, and I admitted them all. I let them come in through my front door. It was the front door of me, and I, for my part, was about to become something new: an occasion for entertainment, a spectacle.” What follows is a vivid account of the narrator’s affair with her classmate Dai, beautiful, cryptic, violent.

But the relationship cracks under the weight of jealousy, betrayal and the narrator’s inexperience, combined with her mounting curiosity about other women, and men. Turning her back on Dai, she moves on to Dareen, and Rayyan, a young man with whom she pursues a virtual, online-only affair, and Umar, who provides the novel’s unexpectedly conventional endpoint.

In between these dalliances, the narrator peels back the many layers of her otherness: her identity, her age (those toxic teenage years), her illness (epilepsy, which drastically reduces her prospects for marriage and employment), the absence of her father, the mysterious death of her brother, the things mark her as a maskh, “this freak, this deformed creature, this monster”.

In Harez’s rumination on the theme, otherness runs deeper than membership of a social or political minority. It is the experience of being alienated from another, even from the intimacy of one’s partner, to the extent that one becomes a stranger to oneself.

The Others will inevitably be packaged and sold as a novel about sex, particularly in the West. But it should be read as more than that, for it is at its most radical not when the plot dives under the sheets but rather when the author calls attention to the delineation of difference, in the physical body, but moreover, in the body politic.


Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer at The Review.

Reproduced from The National: The loves of others

Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

Book Review: Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

By Samer Abboud

The premise of this collection of essays edited by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg is a simple one: indigenous Gulf[1] culture remains peripheralized in the broader study of popular culture in the Arab World. Indeed, this is not merely an academic bias, but one that is reflected in the relative lack of Gulf cultural penetration of the region. This marginalization of Gulf culture tends to be reinforced by two contradictory stereotypes of the region. First, that it is a backwards region defined by tribalism, and second, that cosmopolitanism has undermined traditional culture (9-10). This collection of essays aims at confronting these stereotypes and engaging key questions of identity and culture in the contemporary Gulf. To do so, the contributions are framed by four overarching themes: the historicization of contemporary Gulf identity that links the region with its pre-oil past; how states foster collective memories of shared pasts; contemporary cultural expressions; and, finally, the implications of a dynamic regional popular culture on political cohesion, identity and authority.

Lawson and Naboodah begin the collection with an engaging chapter on the attempts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government to preserve and display its cultural heritage. The authors detail a series of exhibits, symposiums and historical projects that they claim reflects a nascent nationalism in the UAE. Nadia Rahman discusses an oral history project, which is a part of these government efforts. Her contribution offers personal stories of elderly citizens of the UAE. The narratives of this older generation suggest both nostalgia for the simplicity of the past, and a pride in contemporary realities, including rapid economic development, growth and modernization.

Similarly, Khalaf’s contribution on Kuwait’s pearl diving heritage details Kuwaiti government attempts to (re)construct and (re)invent Kuwaiti identity through the annual Festival for the Commemoration of Pearl Diving and the celebration of the Kuwaiti Seaman’s Day. Through illustrations and personal narratives, Khalaf argues for the importance of these events in constructing a contemporary Kuwaiti identity. Mohammed Alkhozai provides another example of government led efforts at fostering collective identity. His chapter focuses on the cultural restoration efforts of the Bahraini government. Alkhozai uses before and after images to describe the restoration projects of five monuments: the Portugese Fort, Arad Faort, Riffa’ Forty, Sheikh Isa’s House and Aljasra House. These projects, he argues, have been central to Bahraini cultural development. Rich with visual aids, these three contributions are highly successful in demonstrating how government sponsored projects attempt to wed past and present, and in turn, how these are used to construct a contemporary national identity.

While the previous chapters stress the importance of the past in the construction of modern Gulf identities, the next grouping of essays deal with indigenous Gulf cultural expressions. An attempt is made by the authors to ground these expressions in a specific Gulf vernacular and identity. We find here excellent contributions on the centrality of football to forging cultural identities, and on the role of media in projecting a uniquely Gulf identity and culture to the rest of the world. These two chapters are slightly overshadowed by the excellent chapter on Gulf poetry by Nimah Ismail Nawwah. In this chapter, Nawwah introduces readers to a series of personal poems that deal with major social, political and cultural issues, including Palestine, the role of women, marriage and divorce, and freedom. These poems are used to convey to the reader the array of issues that shape contemporary Gulf poetry. Nawwah’s poems are powerful, insightful, and a wonderful addition to the book.

Source: Arab Media & Society, Book Review: Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

Author of 'Cartoons That Shook the World' Grudgingly Agreed With Yale Press Decision

Jytte Klausen, the Brandeis political scientist whose book about the violence that followed a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad will be published this fall -- minus the cartoons -- by Yale University Press, told The Boston Globe that she understood Yale's decision to cut the illustrations. The book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, will be published in November with an author's note from Ms. Klausen, who told the Globe, "If I was an administrator at the university, I would have pulled the cartoons." The press feared inciting more violence; the removal of the cartoons was condemned by the American Association of University Professors.

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Author-of-Cartoons-That-Shook/7775/

Her revolutions

After Iraq’s Communist Party gave up its opposition to Baath rule, Haifa Zangana joined a splinter group bent on violent revolution. Robert Eshelman reads her new memoir.

Dreaming of Baghdad
Haifa Zangana
Feminist Press
Dh84

The history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) has vacillated dramatically between periods of great influence and hope and periods of brutal repression. The party was founded in 1934 – a time when the ICP’s demands for independence and broad social transformation touched a nerve among Iraqis seething under British occupation and stark inequities between the rural and urban poor and landowning elites. In the late 1940s, the ICP mobilised thousands of workers in protests against the government and landowners – and, more influentially, organised strikes against British-controlled industrial sectors, including railways and oil, helping to escalate Iraqi opposition to British rule.

The 1958 coup that overthrew Iraq’s British-backed monarchy was led by Brigadier General Abdul Karim Qassim and his Free Officers. It was the ICP rank and file, however, that gave the revolution its massive base of support. The ICP served as a junior partner (at best) in Qasim’s government, but his programme of land reform, hospital and school construction, and nationalisation of several industries was certainly designed to win support from Communists.

In 1963, Qasim was overthrown (and murdered) by his rival ‘Abd al Salam ‘Arif, who was supported by the Baath and their contacts in the Iraqi army. That spring and summer, a well-co-ordinated campaign saw the arrest or killing of scores of leftists across the country. By 1968, the Baath had – with help from America’s Central Intelligence Agency – definitively seized power through yet another coup that crushed virtually all political opposition. By 1973, things had changed so much that some ICP leaders acquiesced to the Baath’s dominance and formed a “Progressive National Front”, which the Communists viewed as an opportunity to avoid further persecution. In hindsight, of course, it was a suicide pact.

Many within the party had long warned against the dangers of any concession to the Baath. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, an armed underground movement of disillusioned ICP members called the Central Leadership sought to violently overthrow the Baath. This small band of revolutionaries operated out of clandestine bases that stretched from the marshes of southern Iraq, through the intellectual circles of Baghdad, and into the rugged hills of Kurdistan, where they trained and fought alongside Kurdish peshmerga.

In Dreaming of Baghdad, the Iraqi author Haifa Zangana – who has written several novels, works of non-fiction, and columns for the Guardian and Al Ahram – recounts her participation in this fascinating and largely overlooked movement, her imprisonment and torture under Saddam, and her deeply alienating exile in London, where she has lived since 1976. It is a brutal story that not only sheds light on an elided history but also indicates a mastery of the memoir as an art form.

Born in 1950, Zangana came of age during the “Golden Sixties”, when – with Baath influence not yet completely consolidated – Iraqi art and politics were imbued with the verve of pan-Arab and anti-colonialist sentiments common in the Middle East and the Third World. She first ventured into politics early in that decade, joining a solidarity campaign in support of Djamila Bouhired, a young female member of the Algerian resistance who was arrested and tortured by the French. “For us teenagers,” Zangana recalls in her 2007 book City of Widows, “it was Djamila, not a pop singer or a supermodel, who served as our role model.”

Following the June 1967 war, she applied her training as a pharmacist to the Palestinian cause by managing the Palestinian Red Crescent’s nascent pharmaceutical unit outside of Damascus. Despite financial constraints, Zangana’s facility provided essential medications to refugees living in Syria and Lebanon. “Our sense of achievement was great, as was our daily preoccupation with the future.”

That optimism, however, was soon shattered by the realities of the Baath Party’s political repression. It was around this time that Zangana joined the Central Leadership. Much of the party’s ranks had been jailed, killed or forced into exile as a result of the Baathist clampdown. But while the aboveground apparatus of the ICP grew increasingly complacent, the Central Leadership sought to orchestrate revolution. Just weeks before the Baath’s 1968 coup, the group launched an attack on a police post in the ‘Ammuqah marshland in the south. It was meant to be the opening salvo of an armed people’s revolution that would inspire Iraqis to rise up across the country. The small group was routed – an ominous beginning for the revolutionary movement.

Zangana became an underground courier for what little remained of the Central Leadership, donning traditional dress and heading into the southern marshes and Kurdish mountains to pass messages between groups there and in Baghdad. In 1971, while returning to the capital from Nasiriya, she was arrested for her participation in the Communist Party. “I was kept in a cell next door to the main torture room,” she writes in City of Widows. “There I heard screams that I could barely distinguish as human.” Awake night and day in the women’s wing of Abu Ghraib prison, she tried to figure out who her fellow prisoners were by deciphering their cries. After six months she was released, thanks in part to family connections, but also because of the Baath’s awkward position vis-à-vis the Communists: it was difficult to negotiate (however disingenuously) for a unity government while jailing and torturing members of the opposition party with impunity.

Dreaming of Baghdad delves deeper than Zangana’s previous work into the shadowy world of the Central Leadership underground and the trauma of her torturous imprisonment. She takes us to the movement’s base in Kurdistan, to a secret meeting with a colleague on a public bus in Baghdad, and into her torture cell. This section is particularly wrenching: “[a fellow prisoner] was no more than a mound of flesh encrusted with dried blood”; “my underwear was wet with blood and urine. Then someone kicked me in the head.” From close descriptions like these, Zangana often steps back to describe the eventual fate of her companions: one succumbs to torture and turns informant, another is gunned down in a Baghdad alley. Many others are lost to time and distance.

At its core, Zangana’s is a story of feminist struggle, which she engages whatever the setting, whether within her family, in prison, or within the revolutionary movement. This is certainly the book’s strongest and most critical contribution. In City of Widows and elsewhere, Zangana has argued that during the ‘60s and even throughout Saddam’s rule, Iraq was among the most liberal societies in the Middle East regarding women’s rights, with women playing a significant role in resisting Baath repression. Dreaming of Baghdad continues this project – linking socialism’s emphasis on self-determination and economic justice to feminism – in a more personal vein. In Kurdistan, Zangana argues her right and ability to perform guard duty with her male comrades. In Abu Ghraib, she learns the story of her cellmate Um Wahid, serving life for killing her husband, who had planned to force her into prostitution. Other female inmates are serving long, harsh sentences for petty crimes.

In a section on the first decade of her exile in grey, bustling London, Zangana notes that “the city’s doors are open wide. And yet, after 10 years, I am still hesitant to enter.” The feeling of alienation she struggled with after leaving her homeland with the movement that defined her life in tatters is conveyed by the book’s stylistic variation. Reflections on her life in the ICP underground and her imprisonment are intermingled with impressionistic vignettes of her childhood in Iraq and her life in London over the last three decades. There are letters – or are they diary entries? – and there are dream sequences, and as the book progresses the narration shifts from first person to third, reflecting Zangana’s disconnection from her sense of self, then her home, then her adopted home. Her experience was harsh, fragmented and confusing: Dreaming of Baghdad articulates these features without being overpowered by them.

Readers unfamiliar with the era or with revolutionary Communism more generally may feel left out by Zangana’s frequent omissions of contextual information, but this is partially remedied by a moving forward by Hamid Dabashi and an afterword by Ferial Ghazoul. Instead of a detailed chronology or historical gloss, Zangana presents a raw personal account, providing readers with an earnest, self-critical work on the search for meaning through writing.

While reflecting on her time in Abu Ghraib, Zangana asks: “Can the soul be separated from its shell and leave it behind to wander the open fields?” This question lingers throughout the book, wrapping itself around Zangana’s examinations of her childhood, her dashed hopes for a radical transformation of Iraqi society, her torture and her exile. How, if at all, can one overcome extreme trauma and loss? How, with a painful past perhaps forever impressed upon her sense of the present and future, can one celebrate life? This is the tension that defines Zangana’s beautiful, haunting memoir – and the material from which her readers will reap the greatest rewards.


Robert S Eshelman is an independent journalist. His articles have appeared in Salon, In These Times, The Nation and elsewhere.

Darkness and light

Syria, more than most, is a land of stories and storytellers. The farmers and shopkeepers describe early Islamic battles or episodes from the Crusades as if they'd attended them in person. A gathering of friends is quickly elevated into a group performance of jokes, laments, myths and conspiracies. Even Syrian surnames suggest stories: there are families called The-Milk's-Boiled, Sip-The-Yoghurt and Undone-Belt. "The deeper you swim into our stories," a village rhetorician once told me, "the more you understand that they have no floor."

Yet Syria is better known for its poets, and its TV dramas, than for its novelists. Egypt, with its unending metropolis, is the home of the Arabic novel, and Egypt produced the Arabs' master of fiction, Naguib Mahfouz. But a flame equally bright now burns from Damascus, via Germany, as shown by what may turn out to be the first Great Syrian Novel.

In The Dark Side of Love, Rafik Schami exploits all the resources of the classic realist novel and then goes a little further, forging a new form out of Syrian orality. His basic unit is not chapter or paragraph, but story; a thousand bejewelled anecdotes and tales are buried here, ready to spring, but each is melded with such dazzling surety into the whole that reading the book is always compulsive. In its final, self-exposing passage, Schami compares his method to mosaic work, in which every shiny object is a beauty in itself, yet which in combination, at a distance, reveals a still greater beauty. The novel is even Tolstoyan in its marrying of the personal, social and political spheres, of private with national life.

It starts with an unsolved murder. "Knowledge is a lock," says a policeman, "and the key to it is a question, but we're not allowed to ask questions in this country ... which is why there isn't a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions."

Commissioner Barudi dares to ask. The answer is an epic of violent enmity between families, and between clashing ideas of love. The first idea is easily stated: "Love in Arabia depends more on what your identity card says than the feelings of your heart."

"Identity card" means religion and sect and, more fundamentally, the all-powerful clan - that haven of solidarity and comfort which "saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them". In the mountain village of Mala, the Catholic Mushtaks and the Orthodox Shahins feud and kill for honour and revenge. In nearby Damascus, Farid Mushtak and Rana Shahin prefer the approach of Syria's greatest Sufi saint, Ibn Arabi, who cried: "Love is my religion!" As with Romeo and Juliet, or Layla and Majnun, Farid and Rana's romance shines secretly, ill-fatedly. It is a compelling and complete love story.

Schami's Mala is on a par with Márquez's Macondo for colour and resonance, although nothing more magical than real life happens here - only seductions and insanities, a visit by a dangerously drunk president, a peasant uprising, a bandit siege.

Damascus, "a lost luggage office" refined and trampled by 40 civilisations over 8,000 years, is experienced through its cafés, hammams and homes, its puppet shows, Eid festivals and hunger riots, via the underground press, a boxing match and a brothel. The canvas is vast and closely painted. It feels encyclopedic, in psychological observation as well as social breadth.

There are no faux-magical pyrotechnics in the telling, but richly detailed characters working through real situations, characters whose inherited wounds the reader comes to care deeply about. Each is vividly drawn, with quiet and acute intelligence. The patriarch George Mushtak is an elemental force; so, too, is his philandering, repenting son, Elias. Farid, who we know best of all, grows by enduring a tyrannical father, Israeli bombs and a "political" prison camp.

The Dark Side of Love is a fiction that accurately (if selectively) documents Syrian social history. Its sweep reaches from 1907 to 1970, through the French occupation, the chaotic coup years, the rise of the Ba'ath and the disastrous June war. Farid and Rana swim on the great currents of 20th-century Syrian thought - communism, feminism, nationalism, Islamism - and witness the poisoning of the waters. Farid's torture scenes are painfully, brilliantly narrated. Relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims, between the countryside and the city, between men and women, and between political factions, are explored with subtlety and honesty.

It is translated very well from the German, although annoying Germanic orthography remains - so that Yusuf is written "Jusuf" and the Damascus quarter Muhajireen becomes "Muhayirin". And perhaps a glossary of dictators' names would have been useful. Schami disguises the actual characters with names whose comic impact will be lost on those who don't speak Arabic: Abdul Nasser, for instance, is called Satlan, which means "stoned".

The weakest part of the book is its title. The Dark Side of Love illumines almost every side of love, as well as fear, longing, cruelty and lust. Darkness and light alternate like the basalt and marble stripes on Damascene walls, and the novel's structure is just as strong. A book like this requires a less limiting title. I suggest something as expansive, as comprehensive, as War and Peace.

• Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin

Empty feeling

The Egyptian writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s cast a long shadow over decades of Arabic fiction. Youssef Rakha considers the vexed legacy of a generation.

Hunger: A Modern Arabic Novel
Mohamed el Bisatie, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
American University in Cairo Press
Dh90


In July 2007, I met the novelist Gamal al Ghitani in Cairo to discuss the Egyptian State Merit Award, which he had just received (too late, he felt). We agreed that the group of writers known in Egypt as the Generation of the Sixties – a politically engaged, predominantly working-class group of poetically-inclined writers who made their names in the late 1960s and early 1970s – remain the principle reference point for much contemporary Arabic literature. Al Ghitani said that the Sixties’ achievement comprises only two kinds of writing. “One draws on the news and other immediate manifestations of history to take realism to its logical conclusion; it is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim. The other, which is inspired by old books and uses the old storytelling to comment on the present, is my own.”

It seemed unnecessary to disagree at the time, but I thought to myself that there was a third Sixties contingent, one typified by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie. Their work is even more typical of “the movement” than either Ibrahim’s brand of hyper-realism or al Ghitani’s heritage-orientated approach. It embodies all the qualities that come to mind when you think of the Generation of the Sixties: it focuses on collective rather than individual experience. It works through evocation and insinuation, is often almost too subtle to understand, and prioritises style over storytelling. It asserts the importance of the lower-middle and working classes, which were more visible under the Nasser regime than they had ever been before.

What sets Aslan and el Bisatie – the former a postman-turned-editor, the latter (like Naguib Mahfouz) a lifelong civil servant – apart from their generational cohort is their almost exclusive emphasis on the experience of marginalised groups, rather than all of society or the ebb and flow of history. Their short stories – always short, sometimes rambling – are Faulkneresque in their focus on small communities and their vernaculars. Aslan has the Nile-side Cairo slum of Kitkat, el Bisatie an unnamed small town overlooking Lake Manzalah in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Like Ibrahim, both authors engage broad themes like sex, religion and politics, but only indirectly, only to the extent that they play out in the lives of the disinherited, and generally in a more personal register. Like al Ghitani, they situate their narratives in an explicitly historical context, but only on behalf of the small, poor communities in question.

In addition to his numerous short stories, Aslan has only produced two novels – Malik al Hazin (Heron, 1983) and Asafir al Nil (Nile Sparrows, 2000). Recently, in an unprecedented move for a Sixties Generation writer, he has branched out into literary non-fiction. El Bisatie, on the other hand, has spent the last three decades steadily producing short novels of starkly uneven quality. To a greater extent than Aslan, he has failed to remedy the shortcoming inherent in much of the new writing celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s: a lack of strong characters or gripping storylines. The power of language to convey an intimately observed environment – particularly one where common people live – was thought to be enough for literature. But it rarely is; now that the Sixties’ political points are no longer fresh, their style frequently seems stale as well.

“Hunger” is the idiomatic translation of both Al Ju’ and Ju’: the definite and indefinite forms of the word, respectively. El Bisatie’s choice of the latter as the title of his latest book (since published as Hunger by the American University in Cairo press) reflects a particular humility of the Sixties: the belief that, when the title of a book is a one-word abstraction, the definite article is too presumptuous to include. To call the book Al Ju’ (so goes this absurd argument, advanced by a whole range of Sixties critics) would imply that the author is laying exclusive claim to the concept of hunger (this is the rough opposite of how it works in English).


Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – another recent book about poverty in the third world, one that recognises the age-old literary virtues of character and storyline – I was reminded of many such Sixties hang-ups (all of which Adiga transcends). They include a paradoxical combination of commitment to “the people” and a lack of concern for accessibility, a tendency to prioritise flashy language over storytelling, and commitment to the unwritten commandment “Thou shalt not make context clear or state the facts”. These qualities occasionally combined to produce an exquisite short story or novella (and are much less pronounced in al Ghitani and Ibrahim than in Aslan or el Bisatie), but they restricted the scope of much talent, alienated many readers and effected a huge drop in novel sales, which had reached a peak in the mid-1960s with the works of journalist-novelists like Ihsan abdul Quddous and Fathi Ghanem; contemporary Arabic literature has had serious trouble building a readership ever since.

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El Bisatie devised his technique of a collective narrative voice in two 1978 novellas, Al Maqha az Zujaji (The Glass Cafe) and Al Ayyam as Sa’bah (Hard Days): simple, sad evocations of the lives of geographically isolated town-dwellers. In these books, as in the bulk of el Bisatie’s subsequent work, the narration is either delivered by an amorphous “we” or by a rapidly shifting blend of individual voices – in both cases, it as if el Bisatie’s small town itself is telling its own tale.

It is a technically impressive mode of writing, one el Bisatie employed to brilliant effect as recently as 1994, in Sakhab al Buhairah (Clamour of the Lake), a prose poem-cum-foundation myth of life in the rural space between the lake and the sea in the governorate of Domyat. But none of the collective voice’s potential poetic power (often squandered by sloppiness and repetition) makes up for a lack of absorbing drama or vivid individual characters. This helps explain why Ju’ is such a slow and dreary read.

The book opens with a woman named Sakina sitting by the doorstep of her rough-and-tumble, mostly mud-brick family house, her headscarf in a bundle between her legs. Her perpetually unemployed husband, Zaghloul, uses a piece of straw to clean his teeth – his way of telling her that she had better borrow a reghif or two of bread from the neighbour who baked that morning. Inside the house, their sons (Zaher, 12, and Ragab, 10), barely awake, caress their tummies. Dialogue between husband and wife is intermingled with their respective internal monologues, all rendered in a language somewhere between dialect and standard Arabic. El Bisatie’s usual poetic intensity is replaced by a more true-to-life, mundane idiom that is neither absorbing nor (as the intention sometimes seems to be) comic.

From the start, it is hard not to recall far more powerful depictions of the subjective experience of hunger (in Mohammad Choukri or Knut Hamsen, for example). You race through the next few pages, hoping for some more compelling situation or scene. But having taken in that first image, it turns out you have taken in the whole book: paper-thin characters on the lookout for food, only food, and not thinking much at all.

Ju’ is built around four anecdotes recalled without any indication of when they occur or how (or if) they relate. First, Zaghloul takes to eavesdropping on a group of young men from the town who are studying at university in Cairo. Home for the holiday, they are meeting at the cafe around which Zaghloul hovers (hoping against hope for a free drink, perhaps?). “Oh Sakina,” he later recalls to his wife, “education is so sweet... Sitting on the mastaba by the wall, I hear them talking. And, oh, what talk! I understand bit, I don’t understand a bit... They say that one shouldn’t work everyday like a water buffalo tied to a water wheel, one has to have time to think. But, people, think about what? They did not say. I wanted to ask them but I was silent.”

The encounter, far from influencing Zaghloul one way or the other, acts only to dehumanise him for the reader, to solidify him as a caricature of the sub-proletariat. Likewise, in the second anecdote he blasphemes: “God in His glory created the world and the people and everything, and ordered them to worship Him. I say to myself, if He created all this, what does He need their worshipping for ... If He in His glory wants them to worship him, why doesn’t He appear in whatever form He likes and say ‘I created you, worship Me!’ Then nobody will say no.” This is a silly caricature of shallow atheism – neither interesting in its own right nor useful in developing Zaghloul’s character, which remains opaque and stereotyped: the poor man with poor thoughts who invariably ends up being beaten by the imam.

The third anecdote involves Hagg Abdur Rahim – a man who “returned home from foreign countries” to the village with as much new money as new weight, which renders him immobile. Zaghloul works for Hagg Abdur for two months, bringing his family a rare stretch of financial stability. In the fourth – and perhaps the most interesting – anecdote, Sakina is similarly subcontracted as a servant by the two female teenage servants of Hagg Hashem, another affluent member of the community. When she moves into Hashem’s house, she brings along her husband and children, who feast on the household’s supplies. But once again, the protagonists reveal no individuality, enacting their destiny (acquiring what food they can) like shadow puppets, two-dimensional and skin deep.

Ju’ ends with Zaher being beaten up by the father of his relatively affluent friend Abdalla, who has been providing him with much-needed snacks. “His father,” who does not want him to mix with such rabble, “was a teacher at the primary school and he had not one but four galabeyas, he wore an undershirt and had three meals a day.” Zaghloul accepts a few meters of fabric as compensation, but when Abdalla’s father hands Zaher a galabeya to replace the one that was torn during the beating, Zaher throws the garment on the ground and walks away. In The White Tiger, Adiga has his poor man protagonist, Balram, rebel – and transform himself with a brutal murder. In Ju’, el Bisatie has Zaher make a feeble, hackneyed gesture, without the slightest indication of whether or how the rebellion will improve (or worsen) his lot. Perhaps a gesture of this type is in character for Zaher; we never know him well enough to say.

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Perhaps what al Ghitani was getting at (consciously or unconsciously) in our conversation was not that the Sixties produced only two kinds of writing but rather that only two kinds of writing have survived since. Aslan and el Bisatie’s mode, arguably the most characteristic of the Generation, is fast dying out, just like the predominantly deferential, ineffectual characters it depicts. Today, the Zaghlouls of Egyptian fiction are more like Adiga’s Balram: upwardly mobile heroes who at least try to change their lives. The heirs of the Generation of the Sixties (prose poets-turned-novelists some three decades younger, often referred to quite aptly as the Generation of the Nineties) have turned the principles of their forebears upside down. Writers like Mustafa Zikri and Ibrahim Farghali – however else you evaluate their achievement – have traded the collective for the individual, the musical swirl of the “we” for the developed narratives of the “I”. As a vehicle for conveying modern reality, el Bisatie’s collective voice sounds less and less convincing – like the echo of an echo, no longer beautiful twice removed. It is doubtful that the poetic style he perfected in Shakhab al Buhairah will live on much longer.

Early on, partly in response to the Sixties Generation’s obsession with “the people”, the Nineties writers avoided social and political engagement altogether, and edged away from the vernacular towards a dynamic, thoroughly contemporary standard Arabic designed for finding the magic in the quotidien. As a result, they are realists only insofar as they use everyday contemporary life as their starting point. They write about foreigners and rich people with fully developed and convincing personalities – and about ghosts, psychotic breaks, unrealistic and fantastical turns of events. Their styles borrow from across high and low culture. Most importantly, they show at least as much interest in plot and character development as style. They tell stories of love, death, hunger and the full range of specimens who experience them. In doing so, they offer the reader so much more than the Sixties version of reality which, through relentless, obstinate insistence on being true to the grassroots vernacular of its time (and nothing more), already appears unreal.



Youssef Rakha, a regular contributor to the Review, is the author of Beirut shi mahal (Beirut Some Place) and Borguiba ’ala madad (Borguiba Reluctantly). He lives in Cairo.

Atonement

Wendell Steavenson went looking for remorse among the men who served Saddam Hussein. Her fruitless search, George Packer writes, has produced one of the few lasting works to come out of the Iraq war.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny
Wendell Steavenson
Collins
Dh80

Wendell Steavenson is the kind of writer whose work occupies the margins of ordinary journalism and outlasts it. An Anglo-American woman in her thirties, she spent the early part of the Iraq War in Baghdad, living in a cheap hotel room with a malfunctioning oven. She was a notable presence – tall, blonde, warm, but distracted by some inner intensity, and apparently not frightened, crossing a busy Baghdad street for the whole world to see at a time when foreigners were beginning to get kidnapped. While most of the press corps focused on the occupation and the growing insurgency, she pursued her own investigations into the lives of a handful of Iraqis she met by happenstance – psychiatrists, housewives, cashiered Baathists.

Steavenson’s sensibility is literary, not journalistic, and in another age she might have collected experiences for a novel, but – such is the state of writing and reading today – the major books written about the post-September 11 world have been works of narrative non-fiction, which is also Steavenson’s genre (her first book, called Stories I Stole, was about the two years she spent living in the Republic of Georgia). The Weight of a Mustard Seed has no notes or index. You will have heard of none of its characters, and Steavenson’s project suffers to some extent from the elusiveness of her subject. But the choice of material brings something new to the literature of the war: an inquiry into the life of an Iraqi man that is, at the same time, an inquiry into the nature of complicity with an evil regime. It’s about the complexity of the recent Iraqi past, not the headlines of its tormented present.

The title comes from a sura in the Quran about the scrupulousness of the justice meted out on Judgment Day, and Steavenson’s passionate obsession, pursued across five years and several world capitals, is to draw out “flickers of conscience” from members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. To push her interview subjects beyond their defensive habit of answering, “Yes, but.” To understand the motives of “the human cogs of the torture machine”, and hear one of them express a seed’s worth of remorse. Her guides are Solzhenitsyn, Arendt, Gitta Sereny (the biographer of the Nazi architect Albert Speer) and the social scientists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, whose experiments revealed the willingness of normal human beings to inflict pain. Her assumption is that most Iraqis behaved as most human beings would have in circumstances of systematic terror, that psychology is universal and so is morality. And her investigations confirm what we’ve learnt from the 20th century’s many other nightmares: conscience is even more rare than justice. In the end, Steavenson found so little reflection and regret among her living subjects that she had to turn for redemption to a man who died over a decade ago – a cog of the torture regime who is no longer around to confirm or deny that “he was full of something that he would not have known how to call remorse”.

Kamel Sachet was a military officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant general in Saddam’s army. He showed great heroism in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War, and was favoured and rapidly promoted by Saddam. He commanded a division in Kirkuk in 1987, where he had several officers shot after a failed attack, served in the vicinity of Kurdish villages that were being destroyed in what amounted to a campaign of genocide (and was briefly hospitalised for mysterious chest pains), led the Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait City during the Gulf War, was so disenchanted by the retreat from Kuwait in 1991 that he retired from the military, became a farmer on a piece of land south of Baghdad, was recalled to serve as the civilian governor of the southern province where the habitat and livelihood of the Marsh Arabs was being destroyed (by the army, not by him), retired again, turned to conservative Islam (some called him a Wahhabi), and devoted himself to building mosques. In December 1998, during the American bombing of Baghdad, he was arrested and executed on Saddam’s orders.

Lieutenant General Kamel Sachet was the ill-educated son of rural parents with a strong sense of tribal identity; he was a brave and conscientious soldier who came to hate what Saddam did to the army; he was also an austere, silent, loving patriarch. In every way, down to the moustache and dishdasha, his story places him as a characteristic product of the Sunni officer class during the Saddam years.

Steavenson tells this story as something more, too: the account of a man who served Saddam well until he came to regret it, and then who “tried, I believe, in his own way, to atone”. Those chest pains in 1987 might have been like the collapse from exhaustion that sent Albert Speer into the hospital in 1944 – “some kind of subconscious reaction to the stress of realising the horror”. In the southern town of Amara, Steavenson meets a man who recalls Kamel Sachet as a benevolent governor during the destruction of the marshes. His turn to an extreme form of Islam might have represented a desire to settle his accounts with God. All of this is speculation, because the book’s central character wasn’t an expressive man or important enough to leave a documentary trail, and his family became inaccessible to Steavenson halfway through her research, when the violence in Iraq made journalism there almost impossible. So The Weight of a Mustard Seed balances a large moral hope on a necessarily slight foundation of evidence.

In the end, the portrait of Kamel Sachet as a man on a moral quest for atonement is not quite convincing. The decision he took after the disastrous occupation of Kuwait, to try to extricate himself from Saddam’s menacing embrace, was at least an honourable act of refusal by a soldier who had seen the army he loved turned into the personal instrument of a tyrant’s will. But there’s no reason to believe that Sachet felt anything like the personal remorse that Steavenson pursues so doggedly in her surviving sources, who now bide their time in Abu Dhabi, Damascus, Amman and England. If Sachet had not been killed, and Steavenson had managed to sit him down for the story of his life, he may not have sounded very different from the old Baathist General Raad Hamdani, who wards off every hard question about his own conduct with the retort, “You cannot understand what it is like to live under such a regime!”

Sachet tried to withdraw from the regime, but not from the code of honour that required summary battlefield executions, a life of crushing isolation for two daughters and a religious belief that amounted to another kind of extremism. His conscience as a soldier, which everyone who knew him recognised and admired, existed within very narrow limits, and it’s unlikely that these included any sense of culpability for the towering crimes of Saddam’s regime. Dishonour and guilt are far from the same thing, and in some circumstances the first is an obstacle to the second.

I interviewed many former Baathists and military officers in Iraq, and not a single one of them ever acknowledged any personal moral responsibility. Denunciations of Saddam came easily, but so did the kind of rationalisations that Steavenson heard again and again: they did what they did because they had to, out of fear, to protect their family, to eat and survive. When I asked about the gassing of Kurdish villagers, it was common to hear flat denials that it had ever happened.

This mental atmosphere of evasion and excuse was made worse by the fact that these same former officials and officers were now living under American power, which gave them an easy way to change the subject from committing old crimes to having new ones committed against them. They had been victims under Saddam, and now they were victims under the Americans: this was the extent of moral consciousness among most of the former ruling class in post-Saddam Iraq. The occupation and insurgency forestalled any chance for Iraqis to begin to reckon with their individual and collective roles as accomplices, as well as victims, during Saddam’s reign of terror. This is why the writer Kanan Makiya’s project for a memorial museum and archive in the centre of Baghdad, where the crossed swords of Saddam’s Victory Monument stand, had little chance of being established so soon after the fall of the regime, and indeed seemed to infuriate most Iraqis who knew about it.

“There were varying shades of hypocrisy and after a while the faces and the excuses and the old war stories blurred into each other, the former general became a type,” Steavenson writes. “I liked them, I joked with them, I sympathised with them. But not one ever looked me straight in the eye and admitted responsibility for the crimes of the government which they had served.” Her search for Kamel Sachet led her to Iraqis the reader might find more interesting and more revealing: Dr. Hassan al Qadhani, an army psychiatrist who briefly shared a prison cell with Sachet in the late eighties, who accurately diagnosed the regime’s effects on himself and others, and who introduced Steavenson to Sachet’s family; the general’s favourite daughter, Shadwan, living in the darkness of her father’s shadow, and his sons, trying to live up to his example by joining the insurgency without seeing that they were destroying their country; a former sergeant named Mohammed, who held onto his humanity during the Iraqi pillage of Kuwait and later said of Kamel Sachet, “He was just like the others”; and Adnan al Janabi, the reluctant sheikh of Sachet’s tribe, who became Steavenson’s wisest interlocutor. These last two bear the least guilt and, not coincidentally, see the clearest.

There’s nothing very surprising about this. How many German officers were prepared to admit their own responsibility when the contents of the death camps were revealed at the end of the Second World War? How many Soviet or East German officials have written self-incriminating memoirs? Which former Khmer Rouge killer has expressed remorse at the current Cambodian genocide trials? Steavenson quotes the question that Albert Speer’s daughter posed to Gitta Sereny: “How can he admit more and go on living?” Perhaps it will take another generation or two before Iraqis can begin to face the past without justification or fear – and even that will depend in part on the quality of Iraq’s new leadership.

The missing flicker of conscience at the core of Kamel Sachet’s story does not represent a failure on Steavenson’s part. On the contrary, her exploration of his life will be one of the few lasting works to come out of the war. Her descriptive skills beautifully evoke the world of Saddam’s officers, formerly so ambitious and hard and cowed, now living out their trivial days smoking and making cellphone calls in the coffee shops of the Arab world. And her moral seriousness has transformed their story into the latest instalment in the literature of modern evil. Steavenson saw the first year after the American invasion as intimately as any other foreigner in Iraq, but in the chaos of the present her writerly instinct guided her to look for deeper truths in the already forgotten past.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq. His next book, Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade, will be published in the fall.

Beyond the book

The demure young woman with her charming manners and friendly smile was something of a shock. Dressed from head to toe in abaya and hijab, surely this could not be Rajaa Alsanea, whose debut novel was banned by her government, denounced in Friday prayers and who received death threats from outraged countrymen for bringing her nation’s women into disrepute.

Surely the author of the 2005 publishing sensation Girls of Riyadh would be some sort of rebel cocking a snook at Saudi Arabia for forcing its women into living a submissive and repressed lifestyle in a male-dominated society.

It is quite the reverse, actually. In a quiet corner of a Dubai hotel, the 27-year-old explained that she loves her country and intends to settle down and live there after she completes her specialist studies in endodontics in America. Another shock. How could the author of a bestseller that is now likely to be made into a movie, not want to be a writer? Why would she want to fix people’s teeth for a living?

“I may be a good writer, but I’m also a very good dentist and that’s what I am going to be. It’s a part of my life that the public don’t know about,” she says, laughing. “I’m getting the highest results in my specialisation, root canals. Dentistry balances my life. Going to work knowing that you’re not famous puts your feet on the ground. Dentistry is my job and writing will always be my passion,” she says firmly, insisting that in her world it is perfectly possible to do both.

Alsanea, whose three older brothers are doctors and whose sister and another brother are orthodontists, studied for her Bachelor of Dentistry at King Saud University in Riyadh before moving to Chicago to do her masters at the University of Illinois. She gained her MSc last year and is now studying for her specialist American Boards degree in endodontics.

“It’s a big thing to get onto the course. I went to Chicago because it’s an excellent dental school and one of my brothers and my sister studied there,” she says with some pride.

She is also working on her second novel and starting to think about a screenplay which she intends to write herself. She is currently considering offers from several film companies and is reluctant simply to turn the project over to somebody else. The prospect of a fat cheque from a big Hollywood studio doesn’t appear to be a factor in her decision-making process. “If I do the movie, I will be writing the screenplay. I am in love with that work. It’s my baby and I don’t want it to be misinterpreted. I haven’t signed anything but it will probably be an American film. It’s a very difficult thing because we don’t have a movie industry in Saudi.”

Writing the screenplay will postpone publication of her second novel, as yet untitled. She says it is a more mature work than her first, which she started writing at the age of 18. “People will definitely have the feeling that I have grown up and matured. I have lived outside my country and experienced a different culture and all of this reflects on the person that I am today. Hopefully, it will be published next year or maybe in two years. Over there [in Chicago], my book has a ‘local author’ sticker on it. People are very proud of me there. They even asked me to do Girls of Chicago,” she says.

As the author of a controversial bestselling first novel, she is much in demand as a speaker at international literary festivals and book fairs all over the world and will speak at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which starts on Saturday. She also spoke at the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai last month. Girls of Riyadh tells the stories of four young Saudi women from wealthy families growing up in a closed society.

The book chronicles the love lives of the girls, Gamrah, Lamees, Michelle – who is half Saudi and half American – and Sadeem. It is told in the form of a series of e-mails from an unnamed narrator and describes relationships between young men and women in the conservative Saudi Arabian Islamic culture in a way that had never been dealt with before, touching on tricky subjects such as infidelity, homosexuality and domestic violence.

When it was first published in Beirut in Arabic four years ago, it was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia because of what was seen as inflammatory content. Black-market copies were smuggled into the country and soon the internet was abuzz with excited chatter about the new literary sensation. Alsanea was eventually given permission to publish it in Saudi Arabia and it became a bestseller there. It was translated into English in January 2008.

Safely ensconced in the classrooms of her Chicago dental college, Alsanea was largely but not altogether cushioned from the storm her novel caused back home. “I lost friends over the book. It was sad. The book was banned for six months. My scholarship was threatened. I was mentioned in Friday prayers and you can guess what they were saying. It was not pleasant. I received life-threatening e-mails and letters and it affected my life,” she says.

At the height of the controversy she was receiving more than 1,000 emails a day, which she attempted to answer personally, many supportive but many angry and threatening. A group of furious citizens filed a lawsuit with the Court of Grievances in Riyadh against the Ministry of Information for giving the author permission to distribute the novel and demanding that Alsanea be punished for tarnishing the image of Saudi girls. The court rejected their claims.

Alsanea’s close-knit family backed her fully and she says she would never have dared publish without their support. “You can’t publish in a very conservative country without a circle of protection. One of my brothers suggested that I published under an assumed name but I refused. The good thing was that after the book was published in Lebanon, it was allowed to be sold in my country. With the internet you can’t control censorship. The internet has challenged the myth of censorship,” she says.

She grew up as the youngest of six children in considerable comfort in an upper-middle-class Riyadh family. Her father, a journalist and editor, died when she was eight and her mother encouraged all her children to gain a university education and broaden their horizons. “Ours was a very liberal family and I have always known that I would become a writer. I won my first writing competition in a children’s magazine when I was seven. I don’t remember the subject but I remember the Mickey Mouse watch that I won. At school I was always writing and performing plays, so it wasn’t a huge shock for people when I released the book because they have always known that I had this passion and talent for writing.”

Growing up in a family of doctors and dentists, however, she developed a keen interest in medicine and dentistry. “I grew up thinking that I don’t want to make a living in writing. I thought it would kill it for me and make me less creative. This will put pressure on me when I’m writing and I’m happy with this decision. It’s not the same in the Arab world as it is in the West. In the Arab world writers don’t make a lot of money out of their books.”

An avid reader, Alsanea was always aware that in Saudi Arabia there was very little in the way of novels for young women of her generation.

“There was always a gap between intellectuals and readers, whether it was due to the very sophisticated language used in the books or the fact that young people in Saudi preferred to read blogs. The more sophisticated you sound, the more intellectual you were. That was the attitude. Also novels written in Saudi were mostly written by older male authors.

“I was criticised for using Saudi dialect in the novel but I did that on purpose as I didn’t have that urge to be distant from my readers. I wanted to write a novel that I saw myself in as a young girl in Saudi Arabia. I was also criticised for the title that was very general, but I wanted something that describes many of the different types of women I see on a daily basis in my country.”

People often ask her which one of the four girls, five if you count the narrator, represents herself. They also want to know if she is still friends with the others.

“Actually, there were no girlfriends in real life. It’s all fiction. The stories do happen. These were more than four characters. The stories were gathered from 50 or 100 girls in Saudi. I did put parts of my personality in each one of them and I do relate with the stories that I wrote about. Most girls in Saudi relate to one or other of them. The book is not about a personal experience – it’s about a generation’s experiences.”

Before she was published, Alsanea sent her manuscript to Dr Ghazi al Gosaibi, a prominent liberal author and politician, whose writing she admires. It reached him via a chain of about seven people and one day Alsanea received a phone call from him. “I nearly had a heart attack. He was a very humble and funny kind of a guy. He said he usually has a 40-page test for a book. He called me in 30 minutes saying that I passed the test and he was on page 100. That phone call changed my life for ever. It was a magical moment, a dream come true that your mentor and the writer that you grew up reading read something that you wrote. He got the book exactly the way I wanted people to get it.”

Knowing that she was unlikely to receive permission if she were to submit her manuscript to the Ministry of Information, she contacted a publisher in Beirut. The novel came out in September 2005, three months after Alsanea graduated from dental college. “The day after it was published in Lebanon, I did my first Saudi newspaper interview which tells you how quickly the book reached Saudi. Many others followed and there were days when you could read 10 articles in one newspaper because there was such a debate.”

Despite the controversy her book caused for shining a light on the seamier side of the lives of young Saudis, Alsanea is passionately attached to her culture. She always wears a hijab in public even at university in Chicago, although she doesn’t wear an abaya in the States. In the clinic, she will wear a long-sleeved shirt under her medical scrubs.

“It was an entirely personal decision. It reflects a generation or part of a generation of Muslim girls who are religious but at the same time open-minded and open to other cultures and experiences without losing their religious and Islamic identity.”

When she first went to Chicago, she lived with her brother and sister. This year, for the first time, she has been living on her own in a small studio apartment. Looking after herself took a little getting used to. “I had to get used to doing my own laundry, driving a car, buying my own groceries, cooking and all those things that I hadn’t done before.

“It took me two and a half years to start cooking. I will cook the traditional kapsa: rice and chicken with raisins and caramelised onions. Sometimes I cook for friends, but I have noticed that American people are less open-minded towards food. They like traditional eggs and bacon, bagels and cheese. I tried to convince them to eat a few Saudi dishes but I wasn’t successful, so I ended up eating everything that I cooked and I gained 15kg since I went to the USA.”

Alsanea has a wide circle of friends, she says, dissolving into a fit of giggles when asked if she had ever been in love. She’s clearly not unlike her fictional characters in some respects. Although she insists that she will marry for love, she is adamant that she will only marry a Muslim and it will be somebody of whom her family approves.

“I don’t have a boyfriend. I do have friends but I haven’t had someone who I would consider closer than a friend. But my family would support me if I ever fall in love.

“A non-Muslim would not be an option because I would not be allowed religiously to marry him. We don’t have civil marriage and I’m not the kind of person that would want to live totally away from my culture and religion. There are plenty of nice Muslim men, although you can’t control your heart. I would like to be married and have children but I don’t stress about it. I want to fall in love and I want things to happen naturally. I totally want to take this decision for myself and I want to blame myself if it goes bad.”

She sees her future back in Riyadh, still writing novels but working as an orthodontist and staying close to her family.

“I am very attached to my culture and my language; even though I sometimes write in English I think in Arabic. I know for a fact that I am not going to live outside Saudi unless something changes in the future. I love my country and being around my family. That’s the most important thing for me.”

Ararat, by Frank Westerman trans. Sam Garrett

Up the mystic mountain in a flight from faith

In their unceasing efforts to convince the rest of us that every single line of the Good Book is literally true, Bible fundamentalists have long been fond of undertaking treks to "prove" that some landmark events of the Old Testament did take place. So Mount Ararat, in present-day Turkey, has been trawled for signs that Noah's Ark did end up, as Genesis 8:4 claims, beached on its peak once the flood receded. Fragments of old wood have been claimed as sections of the rudder of the ark, and rock formations highlighted as evidence of the skid marks where the prow of the zoo ship came to rest.

Frank Westerman touches briefly on several such escapades in Ararat, but his approach to scaling this iconic mountain is altogether different – and more intriguing. His climb is an assault on his own loss of belief in God and an exploration of the current abyss that exists between religion and science. As he circles the foothills of Ararat, Westerman also travels back to his high school and university teachers in search of ballast as the rational explanations of science that seemed so watertight to him begin to spring leaks.

His questioning throws him back on childhood memories – not just of being spoon-fed a traditional Christianity, but of a brush, through his father's involvement with the oil industry in his native Netherlands, with the destruction of a drilling rig in Drenthe in 1965. Unexplained events ultimately caused the earth to erupt and swallow the rig whole. Nature apparently defeated scientific progress.

Part memoir, part philosophical tome, part travelogue, Ararat is an ambitious and attractive book. Its tone is learned, thoughtful and usually intimate, for which part of the credit must go to the translator, Sam Garrett.

Fundamentalists are fond of finding answers to every earthly dilemma, but those expecting either trite platitudes or the dodgy archaeological theories that make for headline-grabbing bestsellers will be disappointed. Westerman's pilgrimage doesn't have a happy or neat ending.

Once he has negotiated the politics that surround Ararat – standing on disputed land between Armenia, Turkey and Iran – his climb becomes an ordeal. Cold, sore and forced to make his ascent with less than congenial Czech companions, he finds himself wondering if he has set out with the wrong idea.

At one point he describes his whole project as "Job in reverse". Just as Job is made to test his faith by Satan, acting as the chief prosecutor in God's heavenly court, Westerman is testing his own unbelief. It is a finely balanced and well-told experiment that will echo with many readers.

Peter Stanford's latest book is 'Teach Yourself Catholicism'

Chicago: Ala Al Aswany

Alaa Al Aswany's Chicago
Translated from the Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab
HarperCollins, 2008

Reviewed by Stefanie Sobelle

Since the publication of his successful debut The Yacoubian Building (2004), Alaa Al Aswany has become one of Egypt's most celebrated writers, a vocal opponent to the corruption and nepotism that have characterized President Mubarek's regime. Yet his new novel, Chicago (translated from Arabic by Farouk Abdel Wahab), is set not in Egypt but in the United States, tracking a brief period in the lives of several doctors (students and faculty) in post-9/11 Chicago. Their storylines are connected through the Department of Histology at the University of Illinois, and histology—the microscopic study of cross-sections of biological tissues—offers a fitting analogy for Al Aswany's narrative technique: a poetic examination of the delicate anatomy of ordinary life. Al Aswany overlaps slices of the daily acts of his myriad characters who are linked to one another through a shared place. In The Yacoubian Building, that place is an apartment complex in Cairo, a microcosm of post-1952 Egypt. An academic department, however, is a site that brings together individuals from a variety of national and cultural backgrounds. In both novels, Al Aswany illustrates that the cruelties of domesticity (marital infidelities, self-destructive children) are inextricable from the brutalities of larger political forces—domestic and international.

Nagi Abd al-Samad, an Egyptian student at Illinois, engages in both histology and poetry. He is the only first-person narrator in the novel and therefore takes on roles of author and activist, mirroring the multitasking of Al Aswany, who is himself also a practicing dentist in Cairo. Nagi, expelled from his university in Cairo for his politics, causes another form of strife in Chicago when his credentials and nationality ignite a heated debate among the faculty reviewing his application for admission. Al Aswany navigates not only the mistreatment of Cairenes in the U.S. but also the racism between Whites and Blacks, Muslims and Copts, Arabs and Jews. He offers vivid histories for these various conflicts, beginning with the Algonquins who lived as farmers in Chicago until settlers arrived in the late seventeenth-century and massacred them in the name of God: a massacre that reminds readers that racism and religious persecution were intrinsic to the founding of the U.S. The city saw tragedy again with the fire of 1871, and the subsequent ability of the "Second City" to reinvent itself mirrors the experience of many Americans who first arrive from elsewhere. "The history of cities, like the lives of humans," the novel reminds us, "suffers vicissitudes of happiness and pain."

Al Aswany was a student in Chicago in the eighties, and there are times when his descriptions are somewhat dated. A white professor is involved with a young black woman who cannot get herself hired and falls into the hands of an exploitative photographer. Her job-seeking efforts are conducted exclusively through newspaper classifieds, and both her plight and her methods seem anachronistic and over-simplified. But Chicago is written for an Egyptian audience first, and any inconsistencies that consequently arise do not detract from its author's empathy for even his most unpleasant characters. The clarity and humor with which Al Aswany treats the intricacies of the characters' relationships make Chicago a poignant and captivating read. Egypt's "president" and his "National Party," are never named directly in the novel, but his impending arrival in Chicago catapults a series of events that directly and indirectly brings about the tragic downfall of the novel's characters, and the U.S. is not innocent. Ultimately, Chicago is a truly brave work, and its translation offers Americans a provocative, vital perspective on the U.S. through Egyptian eyes.

Stefanie Sobelle writes about contemporary fiction for Words Without Borders, Bookforum, and a variety of other publications. She is a contributor at WWB and teaches twentieth-century literature at Sarah Lawrence College.