Sharh Diwan Zikri

شرح ديوان ذكري

Sharh Diwan Zikri

Reading novelist Mustafa Zikri’s new collection of essays, Youssef Rakha follows the example of several canonical works on the great 10th-century poet Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi, all titled Sharh Diwan Al-Mutanabbi or The Elucidation of the Diwan of Mutanabbi

Yawmiyyat (A diary)

At first, this sounds like a misnomer for the numbered pieces making up the latest book by the novelist and screenwriter Mustafa Zikri (b. 1966), Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’: Yawmiyyat (On Tiptoe: A Diary), published by Dar Al-Ain last month. Though initially circulated on Facebook as entries in an ongoing diary of some sort, the pieces comprising Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ read less like the pages of a journal than the occasional work of a cultural columnist. Zikri’s stated formal ambition was to eschew if not actively attack the predominant, established genres, notably the novel-cum-novella that has been his preferred medium (in recent years, as he points out, the novel has increasingly become the alpha and the omega of literary endeavour in Arabic). He also wanted to relax the iron fist with which he maintains the “literary purity” of his work, guarding the gold of true art from possible intrusions by the lead of politics or society (both the metaphor and the subsequent quotes, unless otherwise stated, come from a recent interview by Mohammad Shoair).

Yet the more you think about Zikri’s work, while you read, the more sense the subtitle yawmiyyat makes. By the time you turn the last page you are convinced. This book offers precisely the kind of material you would expect to find in the diary of a writer like Zikri: fragmentary meditations on literature and film, ambiguous encounters only marginally connected with whatever real-life experiences they recount, philosophical formulations of no clear import. Entries are as carefully constructed, often as open to interpretation, as poems. And – most important of all: what sets Zikri apart from almost every other Arab writer, in fact – the texts are truly self-referential, with the movement of a passage tracing an expression or a word, not what that expression or word refers to. Narrative reduces to a sort of semantic aesthetics, the protagonist to an idea suggested by a particular turn of phrase. Ironically this tendency is clearer than ever now that Zikri is no longer consciously exercising control. Could anyone expect anything more tangible or intimate from the yawmiyyat of Mustafa Zikri?

***

I thought I was the kind of writer who, measured against his writings, lives a life of paucity at the level of the body and the soul. I think of Borges and Pesão and Dostoevsky… (1.)

While Zikri regards any link between literature and reality as a threat to the purity of his art, it is in fact references like this one – and the sweeping statements tending to go with them – that take away from his credibility. There is definitely room in the world of Arabic writing for quasi-postmodern theorising, however self-centred or contemplatively indulgent. But surely in the context of a novella like Hura’ Mataha Qoutiyyah (Drivel about a Gothic Labyrinth, 1997), it actually undermines “purity” far more than the hypothetical inclusion of social-political commentary, properly contextualised, when the narrator consciously compares himself to Borges: a celebrated genius from a decidedly different culture and one, it might be added, whose relevance to what that narrator is doing is at best obscure. The problem is not that Zikri may be a lesser writer than Dostoevsky. It is in the directed-ness, the apparent artificiality of the kind of westward looking elitism he endeavours to cultivate – the classicism of his ambition constantly in contradiction with his essentially deconstructionist approach. His slim volumes are invariably fragmentary; insanely reworked and polished, but inconclusive.

They are also practically solipsistic – in their failure to engage with the world (a failure for which the attempt to substitute the world for Great Literature, i.e., in effect, modernism and art-house cinema, does not make up). Only on reading Zikri’s yawmiyyat, in which he condescends to discuss his likes and dislikes, to engage with the politics of culture or mention a fellow Egyptian writer like the dentist and best-selling author Alaa El-Aswany or his own former mentor Edwar El-Kharrat, do you begin to appreciate what kind of writer Zikri is. Others – most, I would say – openly seek context and connection, communication. He claims to seek the least contact possible, the smallest number of readers, the company of gods – like Kafka, like Kawabata – who according to him never mix with the rabble. The irony is that it is the rabble-like qualities of his standpoint as a Third World writer that form the substance of his work, informing even the way he interprets Great Literature. Hence the deconstructionism, hence the aversion to politics (a quality Zikri shares with his generation of literati, who are still reacting to the excessive politicisation of literature all through the 1960s and 1970s); hence also the preemptive despair of ever having a readership of his own beyond “the professional reader, the writer and the half-writer”. (It strikes me now that in his systematic self-assuredness, Zikri does recall Al-Mutanabbi, not only arguably the greatest Arab poet of all time but also, famously or notoriously, the most conceited.)

***

I have always been… subject to the signal to start working… which requires me to be completely devoted and constantly ready to receive [it] whenever it might come… (17.)

Few writers have dedicated as much attention or energy as Zikri to analysing the discontents of their creative process – the nature and magnitude of the emptiness just beneath the surface of their texts. Here as elsewhere in his writing – notably in his last work of fiction, Al-Rasa’il (The Messages, 2006) – Zikri spends time on what might be termed negative productivity: the writing that has not happened, or is yet to happen, but will perhaps never happen. He narrates and describes the state of being idle and homebound in anticipation of (and in deference to) literature.

As piece 34 in Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ demonstrates, Zikri’s negative productivity makes perhaps the most convincing case for an existential perspective on the human condition in contemporary Arabic literature. Contrary to his own, noncommittal claims, it resonates far beyond what he recently described to the journalist Ola El-Saket as “those little things which the other writing,” the engaged, energetic writing that aims to change the world, “assumes to be of no consequence, the small details that recur every day and which some of us take for granted”. Zikri’s dilemma has universal relevance: “34. Preparing and arranging, creating an atmosphere, took me a long time, and though I was unemployed on the pretext of waiting for the appropriate moment, that waiting itself was fuelled only by a long time wasted, which I mostly described, with much effort and work, as an inappropriate moment, or at least an inappropriate moment on the way to becoming an appropriate moment.”

This kind of thinking generates much needed humour in an otherwise cerebral and dry book. It also goes to show that Zikri is not as solipsistic as he might seem. At least he is aware of the irony inherent to his own narcissism, and not too scared to apply it to himself. We write about what we know best, and all that Zikri knows is sitting in his home thinking about writing; that, along with whatever else his literary anxiety happens to latch onto, is what he will write about.

***

At the start of the film The Sacrifice by the director Andrie Tarkovsky, Alexander, the hero of the film, asks his son to help him plant a dead tree on the shore of a lake… (27.)

In piece 27 as in numerous other pieces, Zikri – who, working with the filmmaker Osama Fawzi, wrote two of the best Egyptian films of the 1990s – endeavours to rewrite world cinema. Not that the novel/novella format prevented him from indulging his love of film in the past – his 1998 novella is entitled, after Fassbinder’s celebrated film, Fear Eats the Soul – but the greater opportunities presented by an “absolutely flexible medium” like yawmiyyat gives him more scope for focusing on particular scenes or techniques – in Hitchcock, in the work of the French New Wave directors, in Tarantino, Bergman – not so much to discuss this or that aspect of a film or a director as simply to see a given cinematic moment from a new and one might say literary angle.

The influence of film on fiction is a huge topic beyond the scope of this Elucidation, but Zikri’s screenwriter’s insights and his intensely individualist taste act to highlight the way words on a page can recreate and totally alter a scene already lodged in the reader’s memory. These pieces seem to reverse the tendency, suggesting new writing that can influence the way we see film. It is as if Zikri, by reference to another medium, is actively showing his reader that the strength of literature is no longer about telling a story but rather about a particular way of seeing or engaging the senses, different from but just as effective as the more predominant audiovisual medium.

Later on in the book, in the course of his bitterly sarcastic critique of Aswany’s Yaqoubian Building (2002), piece 45, Zikri says almost as much: “Yet it is enough for the physician Alaa El-Aswany that a reader with no connection to the novel genre can easily read The Yaqoubian Building, relying on his experience of newspaper reading and oral tale-telling that everyone possesses by virtue of birth, community and homeland. It may seem to the reader that watching the novel through the medium of cinema does not deprive him of penetrating to whatever is deepest in Yaqoubian. Since the novel has irrevocably divorced the tradition of style, there is then no need for reading.”

***

While the pastime appeared to have to do with free time, it actually had to do with the meaning of life. (39.)

Zikri is ostensibly speaking of “the satellite and the computer and the telephone”, initially “promises of something else, more serious” which he approaches as pastimes “within the frontiers of the house”. But here as elsewhere in this remarkably diverse book, he is also intimating a holistic world view, an idea of human existence as a totality of experience only usually available through philosophy or poetry. It is in this sense perhaps that Zikri might be compared to Borges, despite the incomparably more articulate demeanour and learned background of the latter. Though unlike Zikri Borges has a healthy awareness of context, he remains one of a handful of modern writers the world over who communicate such a sense of the totality of existence with the utmost economy of means. In many of the pieces in this book, Zikri’s tight, profoundly thought out constructions evoke the connection between the short, quasi-narrative text and the prose poem – another thing Borges manages to do, even though the great Argentine, once again unlike Zikri, wrote poems which he presented as such.

The one major difference between Zikri and Borges – between Zikri and most writers of Borges’s – is the latter’s capacity for antagonising his readers, often by overwhelming with unnecessary references. Borges in particular was known to say that, unless one is writing a scholarly monograph or a work of science, a text should always be appealing enough for the reader not to have to exert any effort reading it. More Joycean than Borgesian in this respect, Zikri cares little for the enjoyment of the reader. In fact he sets out to antagonise “the reader with whom I have no connection”, the rabble representative for whom there is no room among the gods, or so he says. And yet in most instances – in spite of himself? – Zikri produces an eminently enjoyable text. Is this yet another intractable contradiction presented by his work?

***

And in this world in which all truths stand against each other on an equal footing, meaning becomes an adventure, an endless game of mix and match. (49.)

Nowhere else is Zikri’s idea of literature more eloquently expressed (literature being an inclusive term that also covers philosophy and film, the two subjects in which he earned degrees, as well as the life of the writer, the writer’s “style” or way of using words, and perhaps also the human condition). It is not as eccentric an idea as he makes it out to be. Romantic and postmodern in equal parts, the notion of writing as a sublime but ultimately meaningless game echoes in the widest variety of contexts, from Wittgenstein to Orientalism. The fact that Zikri refrains from formulating it, never saying more by way of justifying his chosen profession than that it is “a private pleasure”, is hardly surprising.

The disorienting combination of Third World postmodernism and puritanical Great Literature reflects the contradiction between Zikri’s thoroughly fragmentary, deconstructionist method and his all but classical outlook. Far from undermining the credibility of his work, it is perhaps this very contradiction, negative productivity – and the incumbent rejection of any possibility of popular recognition or “success” – that makes Zikri, all things considered, among the most important writers working in Arabic today.

Cairo, culture, conquer

Letter on status

mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the halting-place of feeble and mighty… — Ibn Battuta (Gibb)

Cairo means ‘conqueror’; it is female. Every night she dreams of being herself, every morning she wakes up alienated. Pondering over the city’s fate I am reminded of canonical Arab and Arabized scholar-writers (examples I’m thinking of range from the 10th to the 15th century), for whom the words for ‘essay’ and ‘epistle’ — also ‘book’— were one and the same. The role of Cairo, a central destination on their frequently Maghreb-to-Mecca itinerary, strikes me as the kind of notion that might interest them. She seems the right subject for a letter, anyway: rather than the inevitably false claim to impartiality, the city elicits a subjectivity both particular and prescribed. An epistolary subjectivity: involuntary postmodernism. A letter is intimate and specific, and yet those writers were encyclopedists and synthesizers: generalists in the most efficacious sense. Aside from their occasionally confessional tone, their object was never private. They saw the world whole, and it was the wholeness of that vision, not the integrity of their texts, that excited them. They were spokesmen for the unity of reality, but they wrote rather like pen pals addressing their patrons, sometimes each other, never unduly concerned with standpoint, seldom self-consciously artistic. They conveyed knowledge geographically, which means that they spread it individually over a collective surface: the Arabic tongue, the Koranic rhetoric that underpinned it and an unyielding commitment to truth. It also means that, while they sustained a classificatory compulsion, their sense of detail remained paramount.
Rather than a temporal, linear arrangement, they assayed a spatial, non-sequential scattering: precisely the mode of progress I am proposing here—a medieval-style ‘letter’ on the status of the City (no longer so) Victorious.

*

For Arabs everywhere Cairo is geographically central—as much in the physical as in that wider, conceptual sense, posited in contrast to the historical, which is not only temporal and linear but makes a more persuasive case for the city’s name—yet since the 20th century, and I take this rightly or wrongly to be the principal historical framework of the present, her significance has derived largely from numbers. (I maintain the affectation of personifying Cairo as a woman; let it evoke a wrinkled whore!) Egypt is significantly smaller than its cartographic representation, due to both the positioning and the density of its human habitation, and within that smallness—since AD 639, at least—seethes the greater smallness of its unequivocal and tyrannical hub. (So much so that, in Arabic, all through post-Arab Conquest history, Egypt and Cairo have often been confused in the reference to masr (misr in standard Arabic), with the more predominant occurrences denoting the city.) Outside of Cairo, Egyptians complain of being marginalized, something that has come to be known in government-supported cultural circles as ‘the predicament of the provinces’; but in perpetuating the conviction that nothing happens anywhere else, in feeling deprived and seeking fortune in her ‘bounty’, it is the alleged victims who contribute more than anyone to the centralism and arrogance of the city.
In this connection it should be stressed that Cairo has been subject to an unrelenting process of de-urbanization since 1956, when the migratory waves began to converge on her following the greater freedom of movement imparted to the fellahin—in a spirit of both ‘nationalism’ (later, and more importantly, nonalignment-style ‘socialism’) and ‘nationalization’—abandoning agriculture, deserting civic fronts: the postcolonial fate which the Arab states, themselves colonial inventions, have one way or another shared with the rest of the so called Third World. It was in those times, paradoxically, that Cairo’s role as Arab capital was fervently emphasized. At one point, with the declaration of the United Arab Republic in 1958, the notion might even have sounded viable; for, of course, it is totally absurd to speak of a capital—however ‘cultural’ its designation, the concept of a capital city is political in essence—when the larger demographic entity in which it occupies a position of prominence is but a loose conglomerate of nations of dubious sovereignty, with very emphatic (and, for the vast majority, largely impenetrable) borders separating one from the other. (Note the ease, the sheer legitimacy with which an Israeli citizen passes into Egypt, compared to the Arab holder of Palestinian papers—for example.) Cairo looks down, muttering cliches about the Palestinians being selfish and unreliable.

*

Most will now claim that Arabness is a myth, shunning it in favor Islam or some other form of pragmatic globalism—whether dominant (like Bushism) or submissive (like Ladenism), so to speak—which will be invariably bound by the atavistic and universalist imperatives of the millennium’s incredibly narrow political spectrum. Certainly, some degree of fragility remains inherent to the concept in the light of political experience; the terms ‘pan-Arabism’ and ‘Arab unity’, at least, are always on the verge of implosion, as if by merely uttering them one is instantly replaying the Lebanese Civil War, recalling the 1967 War, underlining the Gulf nations’ wholesale defection to a mode of pan-Americanism.
Arabness as a cultural condition remains profoundly geographic—as opposed to historical—a trait complicated further by the fact that it is quite simply interesting, especially in the first decade of the millennium, for something to be called Arab. ‘Interesting’ implies, above all, plurality: it means more things to be Arab than it does to be communist, for example, or even modern.
One thing it does not mean is that the subject should consider Cairo her cultural capital. In fact inter-Arab chauvinism—Bedouin vs. Hadar, Mashreq vs. Maghreb, Umawite-Levantine vs. Abbasid-Gulfie: all are as much intellectual as psychological divides—may well be at the root of inter-Arab strife; and in this context the imperialist divide-and-rule volley can travel incredibly far, as has been demonstrated time and again over the decades. (Witness, once more by way of example, the recent history of Sunni-Shia strife in Iraq, the effect of the US ‘liberation’ of the country on the escalation of that strife, and the ideological—for which read, in effect, tribal—substance of its drive.) The fact that, through cinema, then radio and eventually television, Egypt had for a long time dominated the audiovisual media—it is this, and the country’s location, that explain the currency of Egyptian Arabic, compared to other dialects, in both Mashreq and Maghreb—has often made other urban Arabs (Beirutis, for example) deeply resentful of Cairo, eager to point up both contradictions and disappointments as they claim a position of leadership for their cities. Cairo shrugs, laughing shrilly as she thrusts forward her cleavage: she knows that no other girl on the market has been around for longer, none will ever have as many clients.

*

Still, Egyptian chauvinism is arguably the worst of all; after the blatant fact of political segregation, it is the complacency and corruption of the Cairenes’ own sense of identity that forms the first obstacle in the way of the city actualizing her potential as Arab cultural median. (Nasser, the first truly Egyptian head of state and Egypt’s only true champion of Arabness, delivered his speeches in a combination of broken standard Arabic and dialect, breaking with a tradition that had maintained a level of linguistic proficiency in formal contexts in the wake of the 19th-century battle against the official imposition of Turkish on Egyptian—also, by general consensus, Arab—life, especially in the military, where Nasser was a corporal.) This chauvinism manifests in an infinity of registers, many of which have only the most contingent connection with other Arabs, some of which have to do with postcolonial self-hatred a la Frantz Fanon, and a few, a very few of which hark back to pre-Conquest times.
One of the latter, I believe, is conservatism, colored by both inflexibility and stasis. Much has been made of the rise of religiosity in Egypt in terms of both (potentially militant) political dissent and (middle-class) social attitudes. The truth is that, while their Wahhabi and consumerist registers may indeed be recent developments, ritual piety, sartorial modesty, ageism, nepotism and classism—the mainstays of Egyptian public life—are as old as the Pharaohs; they do not occur with the same incidence in other Arab states; and they have negative implications for the theory and practice of culture. It is possible to see 20th-century sociopolitical phenomena that have a bearing on cultural life as expressions of this ancient trait.
Nasser’s Soviet influence, for example, has made for a legacy of both police-state security and inefficient bureaucracy. This means that, among many implications for culture, outdoor gatherings are outlawed; it means that writers and artists are often also civil servants, with their loyalty to the establishment, the only available source of money and kudos, overruling the creative impulse. But outdoor gatherings are hardly sanctioned by city-dwellers themselves, unless they have to do with religion; and a place in the official hierarchy, to a far greater extent than artistic accomplishment outside the popular media, is the gauge by which the vast majority—including police personnel—will judge a person they do not know. It also means that, when a young blogger receives a prison sentence for speaking his mind about Islam, his parents are the first to support the move and disown him. State, religion and family suddenly put aside their differences and become one, alienating the individual beyond any hope: this is Egyptian. Together with xenophobia—a condition less of history per se than of cumulative lack of access to information—it makes for an unsafe and inhospitable cultural space. Cairo smiles sheepishly, concerned and slightly ashamed: she gathers her bundle of tatters, adjusts her makeup, and leaves…

*

There are now in Egypt three means to the production of culture: a nepotism-ridden ministry suffering all the symptoms of a formerly socialist dictatorship and inextricably linked with similarly afflicted government and pro-government bodies; a commercial sector prone not only to profit-making constraints but, more importantly, to censorial intervention from the official, the religious and the family establishment—as in the case of the blogger; and an ‘independent’ sector with roots in the NGO scene, frequently subject to the same patterns of conservatism as the other two. Of the three only the latter, however, is eager to maintain links with the rest of the Arab world. But there are indications of the meaning of Arabness in all of them, whether positive or negative. Rather than showing that Cairo is or isn’t cultural capital, two examples of these should give an idea of what is involved in saying that she is:
Ellimbi. Star comedian Mohammad Saad’s cult figure Ellimbi, who first appeared in his late peer Alaa Waleyeddin’s 2000 film vehicle Al-Nazir (Salaheddin) but found fuller expression in Saad’s subsequent, eponymous vehicle of 2002, is among the most eloquent metaphors for urban dispossession in recent Arab culture. Ellimbi is illiterate, a drunk-druggie and a thug—all of which, as well as reflecting socioeconomic deprivation, are occasions for comic interest and laughter: a powerful statement about the contemporary inner-city Arab living in a country of relative stability and struggling with unemployment and official oppression—but his most compelling attribute is the way he speaks. Together with Waleyeddin, Mohammad Heneidi, Ahmad Helmi and, to a lesser extent, Hani Ramzi, Saad is part of the cinematic phenomenon I have tentatively named ‘new-wave comedy’, which, though it remains a wholly commercial development and in the process perpetuates rather than questions sociopolitical norms, has evidenced a comic sensibility distinct from that of the previous generation of Egyptian comedians, like the superstar Adel Imam, whose verbal antics expressed emotional responses to meaningful dramatic situations. In new-wave comedy, by contrast, laughter derives directly from such verbal antics, which in reflecting the development of the vernacular—the latest slang, the influence of satellite TV, the results of urban-rural and inter-Arab interactions—capitalize, rather, on the breakdown of language as a the principal container of meaning.
In Ellimbi such breakdown reaches an apex; though Saad has made a sequel, Elli Bali Balak (2003) and attempted a series of variations since, nothing compares to the power of the original, suggesting that, in Ellibmi, Saad had already exhausted the possibilities of this late-in-the-day figure of fun. In Ellimbi’s mouth, all the major components of the vernacular, both standard and dialect—love poetry, including the lyrics of classic Om Kolthoum songs; everyday sayings, proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase; exclamations and interrogative constructions; the platitudes and comforts of an entire society—are semantically and phonetically distorted, mispronounced, misappropriated, muddled and confused to the point of being meaningless; the situation is understood, and the characters’ position within it, but never through the ordinary (normative) operation of language; and the result, though funny—largely because laughable—can be profoundly unsettling. It is as though, in Ellimbi, the linguistic frailty of Nasser’s speeches reaches its ultimate conclusion, reflecting a parallel process of disintegration that afflicted society in the half century separating the two popular figures (however incompatible they look at first glance): the suicide of the spoken word; the death of collective meaning insofar as it can be verbally communicated.
Amkenah. The flowering of the nineteen sixties, quickly cut short by 1967 and the return of both conservatism and unchecked capitalism under Sadat, gave way to a deep rift in reader-writer relations. Since then serious poetry and fiction have not had the benefit of a readership to speak of, partly because they were increasingly inaccessible, partly because fewer people were interested in books. It wasn’t until the mid nineteen nineties that a new current in prose poetry—subsequently igniting more novel(ette)s than diwans, but also informing a much wider range of scriveners from less self-consciously ‘professional’ novelists to journalists, diarists, humorists and political analysts—opened up the parameters of literature somewhat. In this regard nonfiction seems to promise rather more than ‘literature’ as it is currently understood by the vast majority of creative writers: fiction and poetry; and it is Amkenah (Places), the occasional magazine published from Alexandria since 1999, that demonstrates this. An initiative of Alaa Khaled — himself not only a nineties prose poet but, since he is based in Alexandria, technically also ‘a writer of the provinces’ —the magazine showcases the widest variety of nonfiction texts, sometimes interspersed with or accompanied by monochromatic photographs or archival extracts.
In so doing Amkenah has managed to become financially self-sufficient—a genuinely unprecedented feat; Khaled, refusing to align himself with the so called independent scene, the only funding option available to him, has had to produce the magazine from his own pocket, overseeing its Cairo sales in person. Amkenah—openly defiant of Cairo’s centralism, and thus a modest precursor to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—must be Cairo’s best-selling literary publication—paradoxically enough—which says an amazingly great deal for the appeal of nonfiction in Arabic. Nonfiction, arguably the most lasting consequence of the nineteen nineties’, as it were, breath of fresh air—seems to be freeing literature from the tentacles of obscurantism and ‘sophistication’, finally. It is a slow process, but it is ongoing and gathers advocates by the day. The influence of Amkenah has certainly been felt throughout the literary scene, and it is gradually reaching other Arab countries by way of Cairo…

*

Mixing her (non-alcoholic) cocktail, the old whore listens in silence. She is consumed by a passion of remembrance but will not divulge her grief. At the street corner she gazes at the billboard of Mohammad Saad’s latest film, ignoring a book stall where Amkenah is stacked to one side, dusty and obscured. It is sunset and she must find work: she sniffs after expensive eau de toilet; she listens hard for non-Egyptian cadences of speech. Then she crosses the streets in hurry, paying no attention to traffic lights, strutting her tired stuff.

this piece published two years ago in Magaz, the design magazine

Retroactive History: 622-2001

The Ally at the Gate: Muslims, Christians and Jews

An 11th-century Mozarab (i.e. Arabic-speaking Spaniard) Antiphonary folio from Léon Cathedral

Reading recent books on the history of the encounter between Islam and the West, both Christian and post-Christian, Youssef Rakha posits a single civilisation adjusting its constituent elements through the centuries
“My fellow Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arabs’ theologians and philosophers, not to refute them, but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets, or apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For everyone who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in their language than the Arabs themselves.”
Thus Paul Alvarus of Córdoba, writing in Latin in the mid-ninth century: a Jewish convert, Alvarus was nonetheless a zealot whose approach to creed and identity is evocative of Bin Laden. After the monk Eulogius, Alvarus was the principal chronicler of the Martyrs Movement which, from 851 to 859, involved both clergy and laypeople individually declaring Islam evil and Muhammad a false prophet, thereby incurring capital punishment on themselves. Had such statements not legally required death unless recanted – and the Martyrs delighted in refusing to recant them – the Ummayyids under Abdur Rahman II and Muhammad I, it is often said, would have happily spared the utterers. It is something of a post-9/11 cliché to point to Muslim Iberia as a hodgepodge of identities where Christians and Jews enjoyed almost as much freedom as Muslims: a model for the kind of medieval multiculturalism Stephen O’Shea, author of Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World (St Martin’s Press, 2006), calls convivencia. What is interesting in this quote – one of the most popular on the period – is the light it sheds on the Spanish Arabs’ comparative modernity.
In bewailing the decline of grassroots Visigothic tradition, among other proto-European manifestations of Christian identity, Alvarus ironically says more about the rival culture: among other things, that it is more advanced, more interesting, more appealing to the young regardless of ethnicity. That this culture happens to be Muslim and therefore by definition unholy merely facilitates his tirade. Dogma is apparently a prerequisite for the existence of any institution of thought; limiting or negative as it can be, dogma nonetheless remains simple. Where it fits and how it is brought to bear on social and political change, however, is complicated. As dialogue- rather than clash-of-civilisations historians never tire of pointing out, since the emergence of Islam at the threshold of Europe in the mid-seventh century, there have been just as many wars (and alliances) between Muslims and non-Muslims as there have been between Muslims and Muslims, or non-Muslims and non-Muslims. Conflict was seldom over creed or culture, though creed and culture were often used as pretexts for starting a conflict.
Much like “fundamentalist” Muslims today – to a far greater extent than defending the faith or even, necessarily, revolting against injustice – Alvarus was horrified of difference and change. It was the Arabs’ more sophisticated and decadent ways, not what they believed, that threatened him: magnificent architecture, effective medicine, and advanced philosophy-cum-science, not to mention powerful armies. He decried not the Quran’s denial of the divinity of Christ, for example, but the influence of the Baghdadi musician and dandy Ziryab, who not long after arriving in Al Andalus (much like Western pop icons today) was already dictating taste across cultures, not only in music and dress but, even more frighteningly, in language and literature as well. Once again, this is not so different from the way present-day extremists on the Muslim side of the supposed divide regard Western tastes in art and attire, not to mention the fear, far more widespread in the Muslim world, of Western morality and science. Eulogius was one of the last Martyrs and Alvarus duly wrote him a hagiography, but he did not die for Jesus, justice, or even the glory of Rome – Alvarus died for insularity.
In a seemingly unprecedented departure from so called Orientalist norms, non-academic history books written in English have for a decade now sought not simply to “understand”, reconcile with or tolerate Islam. Instead, they are finally claiming it as part of their own heritage; one shudders to think what it actually took for Westerners to pay enough attention to Islam to rethink it: 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo… how many more Palestinians dead? Yet worked through backwards, Islam re-emerges not as a threat to Western civilisation but as a worthy contestant (rival or ally), necessary for the ongoing process of generating it. These historians’ interest in Islam is in many ways diametrically opposed to the interest that “enlightened” Muslims have taken in Europe since the 19th century. Rationalists like Sheikh Mohammad Abduh or Ali Pasha Mubarak were driven by a linear view of progress and impressed by the technological and humane achievements of the West; they saw the Enlightenment as a universal legacy to be adopted and emulated. This involved the humbling admission that the West was now clearly at the forefront of modernity (to some minds, a concession to imperialism), but it also involved the assumption that Muslims and Westerners were made of the same substance, separated not so much by some essential or irrevocable breach as by variable political, economic and social circumstances, capable of being in harmony.
The Arab-Muslim contribution to the earliest pangs of Enlightenment, notably through the transmission back into Europe of ancient Greek learning from Baghdad via Al Andalus, is widely acknowledged anyway. By reassessing the past directly and specifically in light of a seemingly more troubled present, this new genre of retroactive history has only served to emphasise it. Books like The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation by Jonathan Lyons (Bloomsbury, 2008), Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World by John Freely (Knopf, 2009), or The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In by Hugh Kennedy (Da Capo Press, 2007) all detail aspects of how Arabs, Arabised Persians, Berbers and later Turks frequently had the scientific or humane edge over eastern and/or Catholic Christendom. But only David Levering Lewis, author of God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (W W Norton & Co, 2008), clearly argues that, if not for the existence of Muslim Spain, the many disparate proto-European cultural elements then in existence would never have merged into the West as a cultural entity or a seemingly whole civilisation – an astounding admission.
Sea of Faith beautifully portrays many of the major the interactions that took place between Islam and the West in the last 1,500 years starting with the Companion Khalid Ibnul Walid’s triumph over the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 636. But its author, in common with almost all the others, falls short of Levering’s lucidity – or the promise God’s Crucible seems to hold. O’Shea clearly has no wish to emphasise conflict or difference, in the end, but Sea of Faith presents the Mediterranean not as the alchemical crucible in which the substance of the modern world was brewing over the centuries, consuming offerings from Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but as a sort of arena pitting two sets of players against each other – which periodically metamorphoses from stadium to battlefront and back again. As Zachary Karabell writes in People of the Book: The Forgotten History of Islam and the West (John Murray, 2007), war in the middle Ages was a far more physical, acceptable, everyday presence – and holy war aka Jihad was regarded as the best kind. That is why almost every armed conflict was touted as holy war, even when it pitted Sunnis against Sunnis or Catholics against Catholics.
But O’Shea does not sufficiently separate these two facts from what he terms “confessional competition” – the them-against-us assumption of some essential difference, however understated, subtly conveyed or cloaked in erudition and high morals – a quality that tends to confine his perspective to the religious dimension of the interchange and thereby limit it largely to conflict: Ideas, practises, even people like Leo Africanus (also known as Hassan Al Wazzan) could move fluidly between faiths; but however much they agreed or indeed coalesced culturally or politically, neither Muslims nor Christians could accept one faith without giving up the other. O’Shea’s outline of the conflict is extremely useful in itself, but it does not significantly undermine the perennial notion (espoused in very different contexts and in very different ways by Sayyid Qutb, Samuel Huntington and, well, Paul Alvarus) that there exists, eternally or fundamentally separated on the opposite shores of some Mediterranean of the mind, a Them and an Us; and that the one must seek to eliminate the other if it is to thrive or prosper.
Likewise Andrew Wheatcroft: his two books – Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Random House, 2004) and The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe (Basic Books, 2009) – are constructed around the respective themes of enmity and fear. Each demonstrates everything the author would need to establish that all three religions belong to the same universe of thought, however dogmatic or racial a form they take, and that their adherents – whether debating the finer points of their respective theologies, engaging each other in profitable commerce, or roaring a blood-spattered “Infidel” – have on the whole had more in common than not. Yet in both cases – once again, with the best of intentions, no doubt – Wheatcroft sustains the age-old mental construction that places Muslims and Christians on the opposite sides of some impenetrable rampart. Sad but perhaps inevitable that, in such potentially explosive times, the emphasis should be on the mental space where a large-scale, media-oriented, appropriately globalised explosion can still occur, not on the possibility of transcending the baser human drive to be at the other’s throat.
Of all Alvarus’s possible heirs, Karabell is perhaps the most renegade – in the sense that he is the least like that fundamentalist Christian ancestor of the retrograde historians’ – though Karabell too fails to conceive of Islam and the West as a single civilisation adjusting its constituent elements through the centuries. But somehow, in his unique formulation of a Muslim-Western comity, this shortcoming does not seem to matter. Karabell is also the author of Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation (Vintage, 2008) as well as the compelling book Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (Knopf, 2003); but it is in People of the Book that he combines universal compassion with the down-to-earth urgency required by the times: “In a world where technology will make it easier for the angry few to do great harm, the perpetuation of a model of conflict is dangerous. Remembering that each of the three traditions carries the seeds of peace will not by itself heal the world… But if these stories” of conflict and alliance, especially of alliance “are integrated into our sense of the past and the present, it will be more difficult to treat religion as destiny.”

All about our mothers

Watching TV at home, Youssef Rakha considers an Egyptian holiday’s message to society’s child-bearing half.

“Happy Mother’s Day! Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” the woman spewed forth, her face taking up far too much of my TV screen. “Thanks so much for breast-feeding me for so long.”

The woman was too emphatically ordinary to be convincing as a representative of the Egyptian middle-class, and she stood in the middle of a supermarket which, like most stores on Egyptian TV, was far more spacious and better stocked than anywhere average Egyptians shop. She held the hand of a child named something like Ruba. “Ruba is with me here, ya Mama,” she added excitedly. “She too says Happy Mother’s Day and thank you.”
All I could do from switching off the TV was remind myself – this is only the commercial break. As I listened, I somehow did not soften to the thought of rapturous tears trickling down Mama’s cheeks (though you could almost hear her sputtering: “Ruba and her mother are on TV!”). Instead, I wondered what to make of the slogan in this all-Egyptian Mother’s day-special Pril detergent ad: “The sweetest Pril, for the sweetest mother.”
It has been eight weeks now since I moved back in with my mother. Pril or no Pril, I have been all but smothered by the bouts of irrational attention and excessive concern that now punctuate my life. It was natural that on March 21, the day when paeans to Egyptian matriarchy seep through public life more than usual, far-reaching thoughts on the subject would course through my head. Watching detergent commercials at home didn’t help.

Nearly five decades after the appearance on the silver screen of Egypt’s archetypal mother, Amina, the heroine of Naguib Mahfouza’s Cairo Trilogy, this is what we have come to: commercials that identify Egypt’s most valued cultural institution, motherhood, with a totally uninteresting imported product for sale, Pril.

I mention Amina because she is so often referenced and so seldom analysed. A recent post by Mohammad al Azraqi, a regular contributor to the online discussion forum ahewar.org, typified the way Amina is nostalgically celebrated as a model of the perfect mother and wife, unparalleled in her patience, “big heart” and “spotless morals”. Azraqi describes her as “a wife the way she should be” and “a true picture of woman in early 20th-century Egyptian society”. Such accounts are common.
For some reason, few people remember or admit (at least publicly) what Mahfouz’s Amina is really like: docile, ignorant, practically asexual, feverishly devoted to her children but incapable of understanding them. She is a prisoner of her household, where she does hard labour day in, day out, unaware even of the possibility of a different life. She is so obsequious and weak-willed that the one time she goes out without asking her husband’s permission – only because he happens to be away on business – she can barely stand up. “She had an oppressive feeling of doing something wrong,” Mahfouz writes. “Her gait seemed disturbed and unsteady, as though she had not mastered the first principles of walking.”
Amina soon faints from the overstimulation and heat, gets hit by a car, and fractures her collarbone. Terrified that her transgression will be discovered, she agrees to go along with a scheme devised by her children: when her husband Ahmad returns, she will say the accident happened within the house. But she cannot help giving herself away. “She would not be able to lie. The opportunity had escaped her without her knowing how.” As soon as she has healed, Sayyid Ahmad (as he tends to be referred to) banishes her from the household. Looking on his wife with eyes of steel, he barely refrains from issuing the capital punishment, divorce.
Never mind that Sayyid Ahmad is himself a double-faced household tyrant who projects perfect morality while spending his evenings with belly dancers and prostitutes, fallen women whom he treats infinitely better than his wife and children. Amina is not allowed to speak of this, and she doesn’t, not even to herself. And when Ahmad is prevailed upon to take Amina back into his house, she can barely contain her gratitude.
Economically and politically dispossessed, this woman is systematically cheated on, abused, exploited, then abandoned not because she disobeys but because she displays some will – the will to visit a nearby shrine, no more. She has no self-respect, let alone space in which to express it. She cannot raise an objection or voice a grievance, nor is she inclined to, even in the face of patent injustice. This is the Egyptian mother?
It is true, of course, that references to Amina in the popular discourse to which the Pril ad belongs may not be frequent or explicit. But just below the surface of Egypt’s contemporary social contract, which pays lip service to women’s lib (if only to encourage them to work and supplement their husband’s incomes), Amina lurks in wait for the slightest breach of accepted patriarchal norms. Indeed, if you talk to people in private, in situations where neither political correctness nor inter-generational defiance has any part to play, the vast majority of them, men and women, even express admiration for her, if not by name.
“To come home and not find the mid-day meal ready,” a friend recently complained to me, disregarding the fact that his wife’s job is just as demanding as his. “What kind of marriage is that?” One hears this sort of thing often.

Motherhood and Mother’s Day have always generated confusion in Egypt. March 21 is presented as a celebration of what is taken to be a feminine power, the power of selfless love (few images are as deeply rooted in Egyptian culture as that of a mother taking food from her own mouth to give it to her children). The discourse of the day emphasizes the wisdom, reliability and emotional generosity of society’s child-rearing half. But at the same time, it focuses almost exclusively on the woman’s role as mistress of her household: as Aminas.
In films, TV shows and advertisements (even court rooms) the good woman is still defined entirely in terms of her willingness and ability to provide men with comfortable living conditions. Hence the Pril ad and its message to mothers and wives: wash their dishes as efficiently as possible, making use of the latest developments on the consumerist front, all the while instilling the same values in the next generation. The mother is, disastrously for all involved, reduced to a manual labourer of love: a compulsive feeder, cleaner and clother.
Like all quasi-Platonic archetypes, Amina is of course non-existent. Contrary to Azraqi’s claims, it was extremely rare for women to be so housebound in early 20th-century Cairo; anyone who was would surely would have been murderously bitter about it. She is the worst kind of role model: one who only ever existed in a parable, yet has helped spawn real-life offspring. The new Aminas are everywhere in Egypt, though you may not recognize them right away, not even as they are being celebrated on Mother’s Day. But look closely next year: March 21 is not about working-class widows who struggle to put their children through school. It is not about giving women the right to go outside the house, or to have a job. It is not even about well-to-do sons buying their mother gold.
Women today are not only allowed to do the shopping, they are even allowed to appear on TV for everyone to see their bare faces (Amina would faint). They do so to tell themselves and each other, across the generations, that they exist to do the washing up, and to celebrate a product – the sweetest Pril – which might make the job easier.

The Good Turk, two years ago

Orhan Pamuk wih Carol Becker

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Portrait of Orhan Pamuk. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui

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On the occasion of the Columbia Alumni Association Forum, September 22, ’07, organized by Columbia University at La Bourse, historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange, Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts, spoke with Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist and Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture and the Arts at Columbia, about his life and work.

Carol Becker: I’d like to start by talking with you as a literary critic. It seems to me that there is an incredible sense of optimism in the way you write about other writers. In other words, through the works of European novelists, especially Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and Joyce, you have gained your own insights about Europe and inevitably your love and devotion to the novel. In the essay from “In Kars and Frankfurt,” you wrote that “Mallarmé spoke the truth when he said, ‘Everything in the world exists to be put into a book.’ Without a doubt, the sort of book best equipped to absorb everything in the world is the novel.” Similarly, in The Black Book, you have this wonderful phrase, “The world is a book.” And in your marvelous introduction to Tristram Shandy, you talk about the novelist’s ability to bring paradise into the present. Would you talk about the nature of the novel, and why you think it’s capable of such vitality?

Pamuk: As we know, much to our despair, it’s such a common cliché among the journalists; they always call me and say, “I am doing a piece in the arts page for a magazine, and the novel is dead. What do you think?” Most of the time when I was writing the essays that you just mentioned, part of me would get quite angry over these comments. I sometimes, with self-irony, would also say that I am a humble servant of this great art. The novel, beginning in the 18th century, began to take over all the previous literary forms. In fact, we can even say it was the early form of globalization. The world, in so many ways, is so culturally globalized that our ways of seeing it are very similar to the post-Renaissance, let’s say from the invention of perspective in Italian and Dutch painting to the invention of photography and thereafter; we still see the world in a similar manner. We are likewise all globalized in our literary imagination, in the forms that we use, and I would say the literary globalization of the world had been completed years ago, when nobody was talking about globalization. With this, I imply that the art of the novel is well and kicking and that everyone from all over the world has access to and is using it. It is now a common heritage of humanity. It has what I would call an intense elasticity in that it can absorb national problems and represent national dramas, so that you can use and impose your particular understanding of this form into your corner of the world, or discuss your national debate, whatever it is, such that it will hold the nation together, because it is a text that everyone can argue with. Let me give you an example: I wrote Snow, a political novel, thinking everybody would be angry, and, yes, everyone was angry; but everyone was also reading, discussing and talking about it. I think the art of the novel, as a form, is one of the great arts humanity has developed that has continuity, that changes and survives. Over the last twenty years, we have witnessed a return to the 18th century Diderot kind of novel, which is a form that combines essays and novels together. Actually, I consider myself a sort of a representative of that “encyclopedic” novel. In other words, you can put anything into novels; novels are encyclopedias. Mallarmé’s words to that effect say that in the end, everything in the world, for the imaginative novelist or imaginative literary person, is in fact made to end up in a book. That’s how I see the world as well, because I am a novelist, and I care about the informative, encyclopedic quality of the novel.

Becker: You use a Stendhal quote from his The Charterhouse of Parma as the epigram for Snow. “Politics in the literary work are a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.” It’s a great place to begin a political novel. Can you talk about why you think politics ruins the novel and why it is so difficult to create a really successful political novel?

Pamuk: There are so many problems with the political novel.

Becker: Of course, and yet you wrote one.

Pamuk: I wrote one, right, but I don’t think it is a great genre that produces masterpieces. It’s rather a limited genre, despite the fact that Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Stendhal and a few others produced the best examples of it. Still, it’s troubled by some inner contradictions. By that I mean when a novelist or an artist has heartfelt political agendas about prior political tension in some corner of the world where there is a highly dramatized and unstable political situation, he or she tends to interiorize these problems and desires to express them on a political level. But once the author commits himself or herself to those problems, he or she is not a good novelist, because they takes sides. They can’t identify with everyone. They often have clear-cut good guys and bad guys, white guys and black guys, and so on. Once someone is morally committed to a political stance, it is almost impossible, or it is very problematic, to produce a satisfying, aesthetically convincing and “beautiful,” so to speak, novel. However, a few have managed to do that. Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, sometimes translated as The Demons, is a great political novel in this sense. On the one hand, Dostoyevsky had in him the quality of believing angrily, with energy, in a social cause, getting angry about everyone; he had a nasty side to his spirit. He also had the unique ability, even in his anger, to identify with the bad guys. So it’s hard to be politically motivated and committed and write a novel that will not be damaged by the natural consequences of moral commitment, that is, inability to understand the “bad guy.” That is the fragile moment of the political novel. Although there have been a few classics, I think it can never be a major genre.

Becker: What I found so insightful was the notion that a writer or a novelist can break through what you define as “the confines of the self” by entering into the otherness of characters. And it would seem at this moment, when otherness is such a difficult issue in the world, that globally there would be a major reason to be a novelist. That was what I meant when I said there’s an incredible sense of optimism in the way you write, and you managed to express it in Snow.

Pamuk: Thank you.

Becker: This is especially true with the character Blue, whom you made so attractive. But what really was interesting to me was not just that you were able to represent a radical Islamist, as you call him, as a sympathetic character but that you were able to enter into the philosophical argument that a person like him would pursue. How did you do that?

Pamuk: Well, at the heart of this great art of the novel that we’re talking about lies the human capacity to identify with what we call “the other.” The “other” is an academic word we use for people who are not like us; to talk about those who are not like us has been the problem of the last twenty years. So much has been written about “others” academically, but not in the form of the novel. I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it’s a limited capacity, to be able to identify with “the other.” Only human beings can do this. It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us, which is a rarity. Once you begin to do that, you also imply or define a frame of understanding of a group, because a group is made of people sometimes like us and sometimes unlike us, and once you begin to identify yourself with those who are not like you, you inevitably begin to enlarge both your frame of mind and the frame of the group, you begin to see things differently. This is what Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, the great masters of this art, have managed to develop; this human capacity, which I strongly believe is inherent in all human beings, such that all nations use it as their basis of communication. Now you’re asking me, “How did you do that?” I don’t know. The personal side of me doesn’t want to explain it at all. Of course I have read a lot to understand the inner workings of the political Islamists, the rebels. But then I should also warn you that I have political Islamites in my part of the world, and they had so many affinities, say thirty years ago, with radical Marxists. Among the old fashioned Marxists and political Islamists there is a continuity and repeated pattern of anti-Westernism, of parochialism and all sorts of conspiracy theories in place of logical thinking, especially nationalism disguised as anti-imperialism. Varieties of these thoughts and sentiments are shared by the Marxists and Islamists in many ways.

Becker: In your new book, Other Colors: Selected Essays and A Story, published last September, there is an essay called “On My Name is Red,” which is a reflection on My Name is Red, one of your most popular novels. You wrote, “As I was finishing the book, it seemed to me that the mystery plot, the detective story, was forced, that my heart wasn’t in it, but it was too late to make changes. I had worried that no one would be interested in my lovely miniaturists, unless I found some device to draw the reader in….” It’s as if you were being apologetic for the structure of the novel. I thought that was a humbling gesture. To shift the subject a bit, I know that your first love was painting, at least from the age of seven to twenty-two, and you also have an essay in this volume describing why you didn’t become an architect. Why did you become a writer as opposed to a painter or an architect?

Pamuk: First of all, the idea of wanting to become a painter, between the ages of seven and twenty-two, was encouraged by my family. I came from a family of civil engineers where my parents would say of my other siblings, “this one will go to the same school as his grandfather, the other the same school as his father and his uncle, but this one”—meaning me—“will be an architect,” which is a bit of an artsy engineer, or at least that’s what they thought at the time. Then I dropped out of school suddenly and began writing novels and stopped painting. Now, when people ask how I managed to establish myself as a Turkish novelist in my thirties, or why I gave up painting and architecture, I look at them like a deer in headlights because I don’t have one single answer for them. In fact, if you read Istanbul, my memoir, it explains everything in detail about that turn in my life.
Secondly, I had learned at an early age that painting requires self-imposed discipline and solitude, which is in many ways quite identical to writing and suits my temperament. But now, as I get older, I return back to my childhood by writing more about the visual arts. Actually, I’m teaching a course with Andreas Huyssen which is a sort of survey of the history of the relationship between words and images in humanities, exploring essential points about the differences and shared problems of painting and literature. I hope that students will come to the realization in the end that when we entertain a thought in our minds it becomes an image, which can then be translated into pictures or written words. That is, our minds work in such a way that what we call thoughts or ideas are made up of a combination of words and pictures. I also feel the need to bring up the history of Islamic art, which is so heavily embedded in the idea that the Koran prohibits the use of images, yet the Ottoman sultans didn’t care about that. They made paintings inside books, finding all kinds of excuses to do so. That in itself is an interesting subject.

Becker: It’s especially interesting because increasingly with young art students who want to manifest ideas and work between forms, it’s a question of the appropriate form or inventing forms, which is a different matter altogether. They seem to be more and more interested in what form will best suit their ideas, concepts, or missions. In the future, with an increased availability of media and technology of all forms early on in the progression of an artist’s education—film, video, animation, computer-generated images and so on—we are going to see more of this overlap of form.

Pamuk: I do have sympathy for that kind of representation, but I still believe young artists should not neglect the classical idea of craftsmanship. The hand should be trained before the mind, especially in painting. In the last hundred years or so, the idea of uniqueness and individuality is becoming more and more emphasized, so much so that we tend to think less of past art. Actually, the old masters were less self-centered than we are now. The idea that is, as in conceptual art, a water bottle sitting on the table can be put in a frame and shown as art.

Becker: Not necessarily even with a frame.

Pamuk: Yes, it’s too seductive and appealing to those who can execute such conceptual ideas which qualify them as artists. But what about the art that requires the hand to deal with color, pigments, and all the complex issues that come with them? We can think of a person who wants to express himself and whether he or she should study painting or literature. He or she can do it all, but there are limits to time and acquiring craftsmanship.

Becker: In Istanbul, which I read with such delight because it reminded me so much of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses: it reveals the process of how someone becomes a writer. For me, the book is about the ways in which an imagination is challenged for an entire childhood, and at the very end declares, “This imagination will be a writer.” It’s an amazing Proustian moment. The book ends with your decision to become a writer. But of course the writer has written everything we have read so far. What did you learn while writing that book?

Pamuk: Well, my anxiety was not in learning something in particular, but in putting together all my memories in the shape of a book. I ended up learning more about the process of going back to my history. To some extent, writing an autobiography is deleting or editing out 95 percent of your life, and it’s such a painful process. I have so many wonderful anecdotes of, let’s say, my primary school, which I share with everyone, but if I write all of them, I’d have to write another ten volumes.

Becker: The Nobel speech “My Father’s Suitcase,” included in the recent book, is a beautiful tribute to your father. His temperament was such that you say, “He was too comfortable in his skin, too assured about the future ever to be gripped by the essential passions of literary creativity.” He would say to you, “Life is not something to be earned, but to be enjoyed.” In some sense, this is your explanation for why he did not pursue the sort of literary career that you have, even though he wrote. You present him as someone who didn’t seem to have the hunger or disquietude necessary to give his life over to writing. Then also you present the wonderful notion that we don’t really want to know the interior lives of our parents, that our own narcissism precludes our desire to understand them as anything other than our parents. Could you talk a bit more about your father?

Pamuk: Well, on the one hand, my father’s father was a very rich man, and that made life easier for him. He came from a secular Westernized family who had enjoyed the first two or three decades of the Modern Turkish Republic. They strongly believed in Turkish Nationalism and Turkish Occidentalism, that is Westernization, which they thought of as a path towards civilization. That said, my father being the son of a very rich family, I strongly felt that he did not want to endure or live through the hardship of a literary life during the late ’40s to mid-’50s, when that life would have been very tough, and it was considered a rich man’s fancy to be a writer. On the other hand he was an intelligent person who enjoyed books and had literary friends. He would also, behind their back but in a charming manner, mock them for only addressing a Turkish readership. Listening to my father—even at an early age—I had the impression that an author should address not the national concerns, but all humanity. When he was bored with us at home, he would often travel to Paris, stay in hotel rooms, and fill pages and pages of notebooks, which he gave me just before he died. I remember him saying to me and my brother, with a laugh, “Well you guys have to work hard. I was privileged but there’s no money left, children. Too bad.” But he did this in such a graceful, kind manner that you liked the man for even saying it. He had an immense and excellent library and cared about Jean-Paul Sartre instead of Pashas and Saints in Turkey. It inspires me to think similarly, that I should take a modern writer as a secular saint, one I’ve decided I want to be like. My father had tremendous confidence in my brother and I, which we took for granted. I would draw a line and he would say, “Oh, this is genius!” Not because he really believed I was a genius, as I sometimes thought. He believed in himself so much that he thought only a genius’s son could do such a thing. But he gave me the self-confidence that I needed.

Becker: You have written about writers who were physically on the so-called “periphery,” like Borges, but who were in fact central in terms of their contribution. I would add Neruda or García Márquez to that group. Can you elaborate on the meaning of such categories?

Pamuk: I lived practically all my life, except the last two or three years, in Istanbul. That is to say, especially in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, we were living in the provinces. The center of the world is somewhere else. Even though we identify with and follow Westernization, we are not a part of it. That gives you a heavy sense of living on the sides, not at the center. V. S. Naipaul, though I may not agree with his politics, is a good observer of this kind of situation—what was academically called the post-colonial situation—although it doesn’t quite apply to Turkey, as Turkey was never a western colony. We Turks have never been victims of “imperialism.” That makes the Turkish situation somewhat unique. But then being on the margins inspires you to go to the center. The cultural consequences of this kind of sentiment are an important part of my work. When a new book of mine is reviewed positively by international press, especially in the first books, I had the impression that, say, my love scenes were considered to be about “Turkish love,” while I thought I was writing about love in general. It seemed that when I wrote about love it was about Turkish love. When Proust wrote about love he wrote about love in general. All my life I fought against the impulse to impose my story, to make others accept my story; not to pigeon-hole me to an ethnic or national identity, but to accept my humanity as a part of a whole humanity, to accept my story as humankind’s story.

Becker: I’d like to ask you about the issue of freedom of expression. There is always the assumption that when artists and writers speak out politically, exposing the lies or the contradictions within their own society, that they are somehow anti-American or anti-Turkish, while in fact if you are truly attempting to call attention to what is happening in your country, if you care enough to really do this, you are being the most patriotic. I remember being on picket lines during the anti-war movement during the ‘60s and people would yell out at me, “Go back to Russia!” I would think, “Go back to Russia? I don’t come from Russia, I come from this country and I’m trying to make a statement about this country.” You talk quite elegantly about notions of the novelist’s desire, ability, compulsion, and obligation to record the secret “shames” of his or her society, even though others want and need to keep them hidden while feeling betrayed when they are made visible. I’ve seen this in the United States, especially with the war in Iraq, and in South Africa. In fact, when J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace came out, even though it was an accurate representation of part of the reality of the new South Africa, it was received by many in the ANC government with negative criticism and accusations, which I know was very painful for him. You must have gone through the same experience.

Pamuk: Well, firstly, political hardships have taught me not to pay attention to rhetorical figures or rhetorical maneuvering of political enemies. If they insult you on something, you shouldn’t go back and say “That’s not the fact.” We should not pay much attention to it. My mind is not concerned with the lies ultra right-wingers tell about me in Turkey. Secondly, in a semi-repressed society like South Africa, once you talk about things the establishment doesn’t want you to talk about, they will use their power to misrepresent you. You cannot fight back. Even if you fight back, it’s hard to convince the majority of the people that the accusations are untrue. You call them the establishment because they have the media, they have the army, and so on. This is not only in Turkey, it’s everywhere. The definition of being critical is to say something to the establishment and to say something against the media. It has its costs. My point is that sometimes the political situation is so repressive that little things you say get grossly enlarged and distorted by the time they come back to you. Either you have to take a step back or wait for them to pass away. I did not really look for the political troubles I was forced into but I felt that they fell into my lap so to speak. I never sought them out. I see myself as a person who is writing in solitude all the time. I know that politics is a matter of community, of friends getting together, talking, drinking, living, thinking together, especially in my part of the world, but at the same time, the art of the novel implies that you become another person, someone who doesn’t join the community so willingly.

Becker: You mention this in The Implied Author. All the work you have done has become so politicized that you’ve been thrust into the political arena, even though you’d rather lock yourself in your room and write. And yet, in your own terms, your involuntary political involvement has helped you to grow up, at the expense of a certain childishness. How difficult was that realization?

Pamuk: These are my words, but I’m not happy growing up.

Becker: This I understand.

Pamuk: I make it clear when I say creative thinking requires a sort of irresponsibility. By that I mean the seriousness and responsibility that society demands, which you impose on yourself and others, will vanish once you find yourself in a political situation. However, creativity also requires the kind of freedom of a child who does not consider the political consequences or any other consequences of his playfulness. In fact, new ideas come to us when we pay attention to this playful aspect, which is in some ways contradictory to politics.

Becker: Do you have a sense of who your readers are in Turkey?

Pamuk: My readers inside of Turkey and outside of Turkey are always the same, that of women and students who like to read novels, and “intellectuals” who want to be updated on the scene, about the recent creative writing. But that may be less true outside of Turkey. Ninety-five percent of men over 35 don’t read novels in my part of the world. It’s true in other places as well. I have seen so many resentful attitudes that say “I could have written novels, too. But there are more serious things to do in life.” Or they say, “Mr. Pamuk, I don’t like your political comments, but I respect you as a serious writer. Can you autograph this book for my wife?” But then students, or people who care about creativity and different ideas, about representing a nation and its problems, all the things that make a good intellectual student enthusiastic—all these people read my novels. Including woman readers à la Madame Bovary. But this is not a Turkish situation. It’s a global situation.

Becker: Would you comment on the geographic distribution of the novel? Are there literary cultures without novels? And if so, why?

Pamuk: Franco Moretti, who was a Columbia professor, now at Stanford unfortunately, wrote extensively about the geographic mapping of the novel. He paid so much attention to the geography, in fact, that I think he sometimes lost the point. But as I said before, anyone who reads books in translation in any corner of the world is similar to those who want to write them. We cannot make a generalization about the art of the novel. It is definitely a global art. The unity of humanity and the world is based on the fact that everyone still wants to write novels.

Becker: Could you read something that would represent your voice as a writer? (Hands him a marked passage from his new book, Other Colors).

Pamuk: (To the audience) This is a fragment from my Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled “My Father’s Suitcase”: (Pamuk reads.)
As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? Here’s an answer: I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—just as in a dream—I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

BIDOUN REVIEW OF AZAZEEL

Syriac book, late fifth century

Azazeel, Beezlebub, Youssef Zeidan, Cairo: Dar Al Shurouk, April 2009 (seventh edition)

Last month, at a symposium in Kuwait, I bumped into the Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon, head of the jury of the first round of the Abu Dhabi-based International Prize for Arabic Fiction (better known as the Arabic Booker because it is administered by the Booker Foundation). While bitterly complaining of lack of alcohol, which is illegal in Kuwait, Shimon told me the story of his visit to Wadi An Natroun, the site of some of the world’s oldest monasteries in Egypt, and how he argued with the monks there for still holding a grudge against a man who died over 1500 years ago. I asked him who he meant.

Of course I knew that, like the late poet Sargon Boulus, Shimon was born Syriac Christian; what I did not know was that, while the Coptic Christians of Egypt (along with all other Eastern Orthodox denominations) reject the teachings of Nestorius (AD 386-451) – the Archbishop of Constantinople, about whom the contemporary Archbishop of Alexandria, Cyril I wrote the Twelve Anathemas – Assyrians belonging to the Oriental Orthodox rite of Syria, Iraq and Turkey are Nestorian. It did not seem to matter what the ecumenical dispute was about – not that Shimon, a secular who has spent practically all of his adult life outside the Middle East, would have been able to explain it to me had I asked. It just struck me how he was able to give something so weird and arcane the necessary relevance, talking about a recent experience.

Did the Virgin give birth to God, a human being, both, or something in between? All Nestorius had done when he was declared a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in AD 451 – his would-be supporters, notably the Archbishop of Antioch, John I, were tricked into arriving too late – was reject the term Theotokos (Mother of God) in favour of Christotokos (Mother of Christ). The question sounds absurdly disproportionate to the amount of bloodshed it caused, especially considering that the Virgin’s conception was, anyway, immaculate. But in his novel Azazeel, or Beezlebub – just like Shimon in Kuwait – the head of the Alexandria Library Manuscripts Department, an Islamic studies scholar, Youssef Zeidan manages to communicate a sense of how relevant such issues can still be, and how horrific their consequences.

While reading Azazeel, I spoke to a devoutly Coptic work-mate about Nestorius. “But of course he’s a heretic,” my work-mate said, as if he had had coffee with the Archbishop only yesterday. “He denies that Marium is the Mother of God!” In a slightly lower voice, my work-mate continued, “You know it was a follower of Nestorius who taught Muhammad.” Muhammad? “Yes, your Muhammad. And that’s why Muslims share in the heresy that Jesus was not divine,” he hissed; it occurred to me that he must be thinking, “So the greater heresy, the ecumenical disaster that is Islam is all Nestorius’s fault.”

It is in the context of Zeidan being Muslim that Nestorianism should be nuanced. As he presents it, the claim was that, unlike that of God the Father, the divinity of Christ was not an intrinsic, everlasting attribute but something that happened to him after he was born and grew up to be a human being like any other. Zeidan uses Nestorius to suggest, for example, that in Egypt the Mother and Child was but an extension of the ancient tradition of Isis and Horus – a lesser break with paganism than Nestorius’s (or indeed Islam’s). Azazeel is unequivocally on the side of “the heretics” – how much does this reflect a bias for Muslim theology? Much, I think. With ruefully sectarian irony, while thinking it, I have been listening to Sheikh Mustafa Ismail’s beautiful recitation of a verse in the fourth chapter of the Quran, An Nisa (The Women) which, amazingly, says practically as much: “the Messiah, Isa son of Marium is only a messenger of Allah and His Word which He communicated to Marium and a spirit from Him…” So much for Islam.

Azazeel purports to be the Arabic translation, completed in April 2004 (some four years before the book was published) of seven rolls of parchment discovered ten years earlier in the vicinity of Aleppo, near the Turkish border – “on the ancient road linking Aleppo with Antioch,” the fictional Translator tells us. Written originally in late Aramaic (Syriac), the seven rolls making up the book’s seven chapters recount, in the first person, the life of a Coptic-speaking monk doctor from Upper Egypt named, even more confusingly, after the pagan woman philosopher Hipatia of Alexandria (AD 355-416), Hipa.

Hipa adopted this name in honour of the woman whom he met on his arrival in Alexandria, and whose lynching by the Christian mob – initiated by Cyril I – he later witnessed on the streets of “the Greatest City”. As a frustrated student of medicine at the Monastery of the Church of Saint Mark, Hipa is repelled by the dogmatism and violence of Cyril I, but he does not return to his homeland near present-day Akhmim where, as a child, he witnessed the equally barbaric lynching of his father, a pagan fisherman – a crime his mother incited in order to marry a Christian. Instead, Hipa travels, eventually reaching Jerusalem, where he settles down as a monk-physician, meets Nestorius, and on his advice moves not to Antioch, where Nestorius is a bishop at the time, but to the monastery north of Aleppo where – encouraged by Beezlebub, as the devil is called throughout, without explanation – he records his life story in the present text.

Zeidan carries out the task of mimicking manuscript editing brilliantly, and his message – that Beezlebub’s truest evil, far from heresy or even sin, is his capacity for getting people to excommunicate, massacre and otherwise do wicked things to each other in the conviction that they are doing good – comes through beautifully. And though extremely classical in language and style, the novel makes for an engaging and intelligent read. You are inclined to overlook the more obviously modern interpolations: when Octavia, the woman with whom Hipa sins on his arrival in Alexandria, calls Aristotle “backward” for his classification of women and slaves as below men, for example; or when Hipa, whose rationality chimes with Nestorius’s, begins to sound like an agent of the Enlightenment. But it is with the same sectarian irony, perhaps, that the book should be appreciated as a comment on contemporary political Islam and sectarian strife both within the Umma and between Muslims and Christians. In a beautifully roundabout way what Zeidan seems to be telling the West is, “Dogmatism and violence existed, you know, long before Islam came into being.”

Copyright: Bidoun Magazine

The National: A civilisation under glass

At Doha’s new Museum of Islamic Art, Youssef Rakha wonders when ‘Islamic’ came to mean ‘antique’.

 

Last week when I went to preview the new Doha Museum of Islamic Art, it did not occur to me to ask why objects and buildings from different cultures, both secular and religious, are referred to collectively as Islamic (this is true even in Muslim countries). Since the galleries were not yet open even to journalists, I took in what I could of the magnificent exhibits from behind glass doors, took pride in the range and the power of my heritage, and eventually took the plane home.

When I returned, a Western colleague asked me: What is it that makes an art object Islamic – even when it is secular? Works of art and architecture in the West are rarely exhibited as “Christian” – even when they are overtly religious. “It’s generic,” I responded, reflexively: a thing is called Islamic to indicate that it was produced under the rubric of a civilisation, a culture, other than the one predominant today – in many ways the only civilisation now, one that happens to be Christian in origin. Modern and contemporary works by Muslim artists are not usually referred to as “Islamic”, even when they have religious connotations, so the use of the term “Islamic” to refer to objects like chandeliers, statuettes, scientific manuscripts, carpets and other artefacts that have no religious content would suggest that the word, in this context, indicates that these are relics of the past.

That night I recalled the chapter of Istanbul: Memories of the City in which Orhan Pamuk remarks that, while growing up in the republican (hence vehemently secular) upper class of 1950s Turkey, it was unclear to him why he was supposed to reject anything Islamic. The only justification he was offered was that religion, and the religion of the Ottomans specifically, impeded progress. As per the essentially authoritarian dictates of the Father of the Turk, Mustafa Kemal – himself, ironically, a native of Salonika in present-day Greece, with no more claim to Turkic ancestry than any Muslim anywhere in the myriad lands formerly comprising the Ottoman Empire – to be modern, intelligent, educated, evolved, even to be benevolent or respectable, you had to be of the West.

Pamuk never poses the question, but I wonder whether, had the European powers defined themselves explicitly as Christian, Ataturk would have ordered a mass conversion to Protestantism.

As it was, he prohibited the broadcast of Eastern music or Quranic recitation on the radio, closed down the dervish lodges, silenced the azan, disinherited men of religion, and effected the irrevocable divorce of the Ottomans’ direct heirs from the great literary traditions of Farsi and Arabic by switching to the Latin alphabet. He abolished all those incredibly sophisticated turbans, and forcibly replaced the fez, that unique trope of Muslim modernity, with the hat of the common white man.

It was all in the name of progress – and nationalism, another European import, perhaps the most destructive of all. But nationalism (irony of ironies) was not a theory anyone could apply without recourse to religious affiliation. When all was said and done, in the Ottoman scheme of things, nothing unified the Sultan’s Muslim subjects apart from the faith. There were those with their own languages, nationalisms and territories newly granted by the British and the French. But the subjects who remained in Constantinople and Anatolia, those who spoke Arabised and Persianised varieties of the ancient Turkic tongues, had no sense of collective identity or a common ethnic root. The only thing that could qualify them to be citizens of that modern republic to which the First World War reduced the devleti aliya, or the Sublime State, was the religion that they were urged not to practice. To be a good (that is, non-Muslim) Turk, by the logic of the Ata, you must first be a real (that is, Muslim) Turk.

So much for nationalism. Turkey had been on my mind in Qatar because the highlight of the museum, for me, was a firman, or royal decree, of Sulaiman the Magnificent, heir to the combined glories of his father Selim the Grim (who took Egypt) and his great grandfather Mehmed the Conqueror (who took Istanbul). As Caliph, Sulaiman was the closest thing to a worldly embodiment of the deeply moving Quranic verse with which Pamuk prefaced My Name is Red: “To God belongs the East and the West”.

That verse becomes doubly moving once you realise, as a Muslim living in the shadow of post-Christian civilisation, that there was once a time when the predominant culture was that of the faith into which you were born. Under Sulaiman, the word “Islamic” could viably lay claim to the world in the way “Western” does today, normatively categorise it, and in so doing produce such jaw-dropping objects as the scroll of that firman, its bottom quarter sealed with one of the most beautiful images I have seen in my life: the tughra, or abstracted calligraphic monogram, of the Sultan, which manages to compress the words “Sulaiman the son of Selim Shah Khan, victorious forever” into a single sign.

The real question raised by the term “Islamic art” is how Muslims in the contemporary world might strive to be part of the predominant, post-Christian civilisation without losing, à la Ataturk, all that is meaningful to them. Islamic is a difficult framework in which to define your make-up precisely because it is so hard to say how, in an increasingly uniform, identically global world, Muslims might nonetheless positively affirm their identity.

It would have to be in a very subtle way, perhaps through a shift in world view, maybe a willingness to be more catholic at a time when the contemporary world is so mechanically narrow, to make room for contradictions, to understand and accommodate the impulses to violence that have more recently stunted Muslim progress, rather than attempting to exterminate them. Islam, and especially its Ottoman incarnation, demonstrated remarkable scope for tolerance, realism and exchange. How might this repository of constructive memory enrich humanity today?

There are as many responses to this question as there are Muslims, from the most secular to the most devout; and the Doha museum, an initiative to preserve heritage and make it globally accessible in the framework of a Western-style institution, is certainly one of them. But the response this Muslim wants to suggest, in the Sufi tradition of speaking through a veil, is a riddle:

Between the East and the West there is an object in common. It exists in both but can be found whole in neither. It is something that people seek. Once you have it, you will have the power to see human beings, lucidly and insightfully, as human beings, to interact with them in a way that is beneficial to all, and to realise that the rifts between them are mere shadows. Once you have the object, you will find a way to transcend without looking down on the day job, the chores of house, finance and family. The pursuit of fun becomes not an escape from reality but a way of engaging with it. But those who are aware of only the East – or only the West – have no chance of finding the object.

A hint: the answer to the riddle is Islamic.

See also: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20081120/ART/513431811