May 8, 2005

Ever since I was a child growing up in Lahore, I have been passionate about history. I loved hearing stories about the Mughal courts and their poets and jesters. Later when I could read English I read and re-read a set of historical novels, enthralled by Alexander Dumas. It was an undiscriminating and boyish taste for history of every sort: the more exotic the better. An orientalism in reverse. From The Three Musketeers and its successors I learnt more French history than anything we had been taught in our post-colonial school replete with its English colonial curriculum. Dumas was an escape from all that.

The young Louis XIV, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, the Finance Ministers Fouquet and Colbert, all become part of my juvenile discoveries and unsurprisingly, one imbibed the author’s prejudices. The Count of Monte Christo, set in a different period, was a novel about a wronged man and the sweetness of revenge, but it was the historical background of Napoleonic history that was much more fascinating than the Court at Versailles. These novels revealed another world and, immersed in them, I hated being dragged away by parental summons or the arrival of visitors and, of course, the boredom of school. These transient glimpses of French history did not satisfy my curiosity. Many years later, I read the real history, which was equally stimulating.

From Dumas I moved on to the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. Here was an incredibly socio-historical panorama: history shaping and re-shaping the lives of the people. True, the past was romanticized and honoured, but the victors were represented as agents of historical advance, ruthless, unsentimental, but alas, necessary. These were then novels of conflict and they were to have a resonance many years later in the literature of the Arab world. In the Cairo Trilogy, for instance, Naguib Mahfouz depicts patriarchy in the home and colonial patriarchy in the world outside with a sensitivity that eluded Scott. The core of the novels is the interrelationship between the inter-generational conflict within the family and the struggle against the British Empire. The midwife of change is history and historical breaks rearrange society and the life of individuals, forcing poets and novelists to view life from a different angle. In this fashion art is spared the torture of endlessly repeating itself.

For the novelist, imagination is sacred and truth profane. It should be the opposite for historians, but leaving aside indisputable facts such as the victor of wars and the rise and fall of empires, the causes and consequences of these events is hotly disputed. In most cases it is the victorious power and the ideologues attached to it that compose history. There are always exceptions. Many decades ago I became interested in the history of the Mongol Empire. Owen Lattimore was then still alive and I went to Cambridge to see him. “Why,” I asked, “had the Mongols got such a bad press?”

“It’s simple. They did not have a written language. Hence their fear of books was a fear of the unknown. All the civilizations they conquered were much more advanced than them and this was a rare case where the history could only be written by the defeated.”

“All truth,” wrote Schopenhauer, “passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” History, today, is instrumentalized by the apologists of the American Empire and presented as if it were a divine truth. This history is necessary so that accomplished facts can be worshipped. It was always thus The British and French Empires had their tame historians as well. But it is the interpretation of facts that matter.

And yet the dichotomy between fiction and history can be exaggerated. There are instances in the 20th century where a writer, living in a country where truth is outlawed and where flattery—-that permanently fertile mother of falsehood—- is the only established mode of discourse, can only speak of history through fiction. Some examples come to mind. The first is the Soviet novelist, Vasily Grossman, who was a wartime correspondent of the Red Army newspaper, Red Star, in Stalingrad. Grossman was born in 1905 in the Ukraine, studied chemistry and worked in the Donbass coal mines as a safety engineer. He moved to Moscow in 1933 and became a protige of Maxim Gorky. With the latter’s encouragement he published a couple of novels and dozens of short stories, none of which was exceptional.

In 1960 he completed his masterpiece, Life and Fate, which was confiscated by the secret police a year later. Grossman wrote a letter to the Politburo demanding the return of his manuscript. Suslov, the ideological watchdog of that period, with the arrogance that characterized senior bureaucrats of the regime, informed the writer that his novel would not be published in the Soviet Union for another 200 years. Suslov had understood the importance of this text. Grossman died in 1964, an embittered and broken intellectual. Life and Fate was published posthumously in 1985 first in the West and a few years later in Gorbachev’s Moscow. The novel is a ferocious denunciation of Stalinism and Fascism. The besieged city of Stalingrad becomes a metaphor for the 20th century and the only characters Grossman identifies with are the critically-minded officers and men in one particular house who openly disregard authority and fight the invaders in their own way. Grossman’s heroes are the remnants of the oppositions destroyed by Stalin.

Life and Fate is loosely modelled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Whereas the old Count drowns himself in sentimentality as he gazes at the Tsarist Generals confronting Napoleon, the Red Star man is fiercely critical of the Soviet High Command and Stalin. Both works are interspersed with stray and, sometimes, vacuous reflections on philosophy and history, but nonetheless it is Life and Fate that is the better and much tighter novel.

From war-torn Stalingrad to the sands of the Arab peninsula is a long journey as the crow flies. Not for the historical novel. Abdelrahman Munif, who died a few years ago in his Damascus exile, was one of the most gifted novelists of the 20th century. Together with Naguib Mahfouz, he succeeded in transforming the literary landscape of the Arab world by making the novel central to its cultural and political concerns just as it had been in Western Europe during most of the 19th century and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the bulk of the 20th. In his work history and fiction mingle seamlessly.

Munif, son of a Saudi father and an Iraqi mother, spent his first decade in Amman. Despite the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, this was still a world dominated by cities, a world where frontiers were porous and Arab families and trade moved comfortably from Jerusalem to Cairo to Baghdad to Damascus and beyond. All these territories (with the exception of Damascus and Beirut) were under the control of the British Empire. The lines had been drawn in the sand but no barbed wire or armed guards policed them. Abdelrahman Munif went to primary school in Amman, a secondary school in Baghdad and the university in Cairo. Later he would recall the Amman of his childhood in a delightful memoir, Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman (London, 1996), in which he described school-life in the mid-40s.

Throughout his teenage years he would spend the summer holidays in the Peninsula with his Saudi family. It was here that he heard the stories and spoke with the Bedouins and the oil-merchants and the nouveau riche Emirs who would later populate his fictions. Like the bulk of his generation he was shattered by the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 and became a staunch Arab nationalist. The rise of Nasser in Egypt and the revolutionary wave that swept the Arab world as a result did not pass him by and he became a secular socialist militant. For his political opposition to the royal family he was stripped of his Saudi nationality in 1963 and fled to Baghdad. Here he obtained work as an economist in the petroleum industry and understood the importance of the liquid gold that lay underneath the sands of Arabia and Mesopotamia. His knowledge of the commodity and the industry was used with devastating effect in his novels.

He started writing fiction in the 70s, almost a decade after resigning from the Ba’ath Party leadership in Baghdad and moving to neighbouring Damascus. His active political life was now at an end. Henceforth his mind was fully concentrated on his fictions. He wrote a total of 15 novels, but it was the Cities of Salt — a quintet based on the transformation of the Arab peninsula from ancient Bedouin homeland to a hybrid tribal kleptocracy floating on oil — that established his reputation in the Arab world. He depicted the surprise, fear, uneasiness and tension that gripped Saudi Arabia after the discovery of oil and his portraits of the country’s rulers were thinly disguised, causing a great deal of merriment in the Arab street and the odd palace.

Three novels of the Saudi quintet were translated into English by Peter Theroux — Cities of Salt, The Trench, and Variations on Night and Day — and published by Knopf in New York. But the American critics did not like them and John Updike famously denounced the books for not being the fiction he was used to reading. When I told Munif this he chuckled and his hands gestured in despair. Despite his enormous popularity with ordinary Arab readers and literary critics (the late Edward Said was one of his biggest fans) he was not feted and celebrated by officialdom. He was proud of this fact. I met him in the flesh only once, when he came on a rare visit to London in the mid-90s to be interviewed for a TV documentary, I was producing. He was a soft-spoken and modest individual, genuinely bemused by the thought that a film was being made about his work. In that sense he was the polar opposite of his over-hyped contemporaries in the West. Why, I asked him, had he chosen the title Cities of Salt for his master work?

“Cities of salt means cities that offer no sustainable existence. When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust. In antiquity, as you know, many cities simply disappeared. It is possible to foresee the downfall of cities that are inhuman. With no means of livelihood they won’t survive. Look at us now and see how the West sees us.

“The 20th century is almost over, but when the West looks at us, all they see is oil and petrodollars. Saudi Arabia is still without a constitution; the people are deprived of elementary rights. Women are treated like third-class citizens. Such a situation produces a desperate citizenry, without a sense of dignity or belonging.”

I decided to write the Islam Quintet in 1990 at the time of the first Gulf War. A foolish commentator on the BBC had flaunted his ignorance and declared the Arabs were a people without a culture. This angered me. The ignorance regarding the Arab world was so profound that I felt something had to be done. I was brought up in a Muslim country, where Islamic culture predominated. My interest was essentially historical. I asked myself the following question: why was it that Islam had not undergone a Reformation and remained untouched by the Enlightenment?

The novels are an attempt to answer that question. Interestingly enough they irritate orientalists, post-modern subalternists and Islamic fundamentalists alike. Even my fictional narrative is unacceptable. This cheers me up enormously. The orientalists dislike my depiction of women as strong and independent-minded despite their structural subordination, the subalternists accuse me of “orientalism” because I am for modernity and the better aspects of the Enlightenment and the Islamic fundamentalists are angry because my knowledge of Islamic history is deeper than the superficial rantings of most of their supporters.

I try and depict a world which was much more dynamic and subversive than is generally acknowledged. Islam today has become static. Its political militants look backwards as in Afghanistan (under the Taliban) and the Iran of the mullahs. It desperately needs a Reformation. From that point of view the most promising developments are in modern Iran. I think the new generation has seen through a great deal of the charade and will fight in the future. It would be wonderful if Iran, for so many decades, a byword for obscurantisms became a model for something liberating and enlightening.

A few words about my own literary-historical project: in Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, the first novel of the Quintet, I depict the Iberian Peninsula as a much more tolerant region when it was part of the House of Islam. The Jews in particular, far from being discriminated against, reached high positions throughout the Cordoba Caliphate and later. Finally in my novel, the Church wins. The first major ethnic cleansing in Europe takes place in the 15th century. Jews and Muslims are expelled from Spain. This is a founding moment of the new European identity. All the terrors of the Middle Ages were crystallized in Peninsular Catholicism.

In reality wherever Islam ruled, with few exceptions, the Jews were well treated. In The Book of Saladin, the second novel, I show how many of Saladin’s advisers were Jews. In fact, when he was Sultan of Egypt almost 70 per cent of his close advisers were Jews. And it was Saladin who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders and made it a multi-denominational city once again. State subsidies were provided so that the Jews could rebuild the synagogues burnt by Christian fundamentalists. Think of the irony today! In reality relations between Jews and Muslims turned nasty with the attempt to create the colonial state of Israel in Palestine and at the expense of the native population.

And, in The Book of Saladin, I also depict Arab infighting that has been a regular feature of Arab history. Even as the Kurdish warrior Saladin was trying to create a united Arab force to drive out the Crusaders, the Damascus nobility resisted. They were contemptuous of the “mountain people”. Today the lack of Arab unity is taken for granted.

Yes, Saladin, is seen, as a hero in the world of Islam, but this view is by no means universal. I was recently in Istanbul for the Book Fair and the publication of the Turkish edition of The Book of Saladin. At my publisher’s bookstall I could not help noticing that the bulk of young people who came to buy the book were Kurds. I couldn’t help feeling that, for many of them the decision was politico-cultural rather than literary. This search for individual heroes in the past, present and future is not a healthy one. “Pity the country that needs a hero,” Breech once wrote and it is interesting that in Palestine today the hero is a collective one.

These two novels were followed by The Stone Woman, in which the disintegration of an aristocratic family mirrors that of the Ottoman Empire, raising every possible question. This Empire lasted for 500 years and its failure to modernize proved fatal for Islam.

My literary project was disrupted by Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. I abandoned it to write non-fiction books, but last summer I completed the fourth novel, A Sultan in Palermo, which is set in 12th century Sicily, an island that was dominated by Arab culture for 350 years. This has just been published and slowly this project is nearing completion.

Ironies of history. Recently I was told that these novels are being published in Korean. Curiously, Islam bypassed the Korean Peninsula on its way to China. When it came it did so with the Turkish soldiers who fought with the United States during the tragic war of the 1950s, but even though new mosques have emerged in some Korean cities, knowledge of Islamic culture is limited.

I will conclude with a few remarks on the present politico-cultural crisis that dominates the media. The beginnings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were not dissimilar to the formation of political parties in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since they all believed in one God and the scriptures of the last two borrowed liberally from that of the first, it was unsurprising that they became rivals. They were competing for recruits and space in the same Mediterranean region. Judaism was politically and militarily defeated by the Roman Empire and did not recover a political identity till after the Second World War. It was Christianity as a state religion that battled it out with the upstart Islam. The rise of the latter was sensational. Within the first century of its existence it had replaced the two great Empires in it vicinity and reached the Atlantic coast. By the late 9th century Cordoba and Palermo rivalled Baghdad as the most glittering examples of Islamic civilization. If the early Muslims had not quarrelled with each other they would have taken Rome as well.

Unable to defeat Islam ideologically, the Catholic Church launched a military campaign whose aim was the re-conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and later the Crusades to re-take Jerusalem and the Arab cities of the East. This history is still vivid in the Arab imagination and the Iraq war revives old memories. But this was a conflict between rival Empires and power centres. It was given a civilization colouring relatively recently.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)