April 13, 2003

Harran is stable, he said to himself, and that’s all it will ever be until the last drop of oil is gone. Then all the men and beasts will walk away and leave nothing behind but wind and tombs.

Abdel Rahman Munif,

The Trench: Cities of

Salt II

The vast desert, the shimmering, illusive sand and the wealth buried underneath, the oppressive heat, the howling winds and the eternal solitude are the key etchings of Munif’s vast canvas, throbbing with mortal beings — subaltern and the elite — and their ephemeral lives and transient power games. With delicate yet masterful knots he weaves a tapestry that is a mirror image of the Arab society in transition. Abdel Rahman Munif’s medium is poetic prose, his subject modern Arab society and ordinary lives, and his genre the novel. “We are living in the age of the novel... the novel is the most important tool with which to create awareness,” he says.

However, Munif is also a historiographer par excellence, but of a different kind. He writes history of the people with compassion — sultans and sheikhs and their women, political agents and spies, traders and petty shopkeepers, village idiots and simpletons — loving and hating, subjugating and liquidating each other — without robbing them of their essential human-ness, truthfully exposing both their vices and virtues.

This is the reason his works are banned from all the oil monarchies in the Gulf, and criticized by the western establishment, but loved and honoured by the Arab people. The Arab literary world acknowledged Munif’s achievement by awarding him the first prize (and the accompanying £50,000) for novelistic creativity in the First Conference on the Arab Novel held in Cairo in 1998.

Considered as one of the most prominent Arab writers working today —and rumoured to be short listed for the Nobel Prize in 1988, the year Naguib Mahfouz won — Munif made his debut as a novelist in 1973, rather late in his life, at the age of forty. He wrote profusely and by the end of the 1980s, had completely taken over the Arab literary world. However, he reached the western readers only in the early 1990s, when the first three volumes of his monumental quintet Mudun al-Milh (Cities of Salt) were translated by Peter Theroux into English.

Most of his works remain to be translated till today, including the two last novels of the quintet, Al-Munbatt and Badiyat al-Zulumat. Perhaps this is the reason Munif has not, as yet, achieved the fame he deserves in the non-Arab world. In Pakistan, he is known even less as his translated works are not easily available.

In his five-volume work,Cities of Salt, Munif has dealt with the issue of cataclysmic changes under colonization of a land and its people, the dynamics of internal and external forces and its devastating impact on a society. The brilliance of the series of novels lies in the fact that it is not just the colonizers — British and Americans — whose Machiavellian intrigues to rip apart a society and control its resources are stripped naked, but the greed, the ruthlessness and the pursuit of self interest of the local tribal elite and its conniving with the colonizers are exposed to the core, to the minuscule, ironic, funniest, pathetic details.

And all of this is done through a narrative seeped in the classical form of Arabic storytelling, leaping back and forth in time, in a poetic language that flows as smoothly as silk and as rhythmically as a desert unfolding its mysteries. All of Munif’s characters emerge alive, robust and well-rounded. Even if they don’t hold the centre stage and are placed at the fringe of the canvas, they are rooted firmly in the place, integral to the story.

The five novels of the series, set in the 1930s up to the 1950s, present the saga of a bedouin society whose tribal structures, community ties and social values are torn asunder when the oil is discovered in the desert by aliens — Americans. Tribal chiefs are pitted against one another, manipulated by the foreigners till the independent power of the tribes is curtailed and the rule of one is consolidated and tribal structures and the institutions of Islam-mosques, schools, courts — are made subordinate parts of its corrupt and repressive political system, losing much of the collective ability they had in the past to challenge oppressive systems.

It is no surprise that Munif’s work, banned by oil monarchies, has displeased the American establishment. F. Gregory Gause in his Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf, (published by the Council on Foreign Relations Press, USA, 1994) has criticized Munif:

“...there are some critics who idealize tribal and village life before the advent of oil wealth, criticizing the regimes for allowing and encouraging the social and cultural changes it brought. Perhaps the best known of such critics to the American audience is Abdel Rehman Munif. While it is ironic that someone whose political affiliations are leftist and Arab nationalist would engage in radical nostalgia for the pre-industrial era, there is no denying the emotional power and pull of his writing.”

When you read the three translated novels of the Cities of Salt, what you decipher is not the nostalgia (which is looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses) for the bygone tribal era — as the work is the most scathing criticism of an Arab society — but an objective probing of the onslaught of external forces which through usurpation brought to surface the ugliest face of a human society. Reducing Munif’s work to just ‘emotional power of writing’, is in itself an emotional reaction of an academician whose work lacks objectivity-for Gause has skipped the hideous American role in the Gulf from his ‘Oil Monarchies...’

At the moment living as a controversial writer in the quiet suburb of Damascus, Abdel Rahman Munif has spent his early life in various parts of the Arabian peninsula and the European continent. Born in Amman, in 1933, to a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother, Munif had his schooling in Jordan. He then studied law in his maternal town Baghdad. During his student life he got involved in the politics of the left and became an activist in the Ba’th Party in the 1950s.

He went to the Cairo University for further studies and spent a few years in the former Yugoslavia where he took a PhD in petroleum economics at the University of Belgrade. He returned to Baghdad and worked as an oil economist, and as a consultant for OPEC in the 1960s. During this period he kept returning to his native land, until his political activism annoyed the Saudi government enough to strip him of his citizenship in 1963.

After the Arab defeat in 1967, Munif gave up politics and turned to writing and made a living from his career as an oil economist. From Baghdad, Munif moved to Boulogne in 1981 and lived there for five years. In 1986 he left France for Damascus, Syria, where he and his wife took up residence. Since 1981 Munif has devoted himself entirely to writing, both fiction and non-fiction. His themes include oppression, personal freedom, human rights and social justice. Deeply against US policies , Munif also writes occasionally for the Arab media on current political issues.

His recent work, Ard Al Sawad (Land of the Common Folk), published in 2000, like Cities of Salt, is a multi-volume treatise, focussed at Iraq in the early 19th century during the Ottoman period. His subject is not oil this time. Instead, Munif has probed into the process of urbanization, examining the dynamics of inter-linked, interdependent relations between city and countryside, between farmer, feudal lord, bedouin, and city dweller.

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