"Nobel laureate seeks Islamists’ permission to publish," from The Statesman, with thanks to RG:
CAIRO, Jan. 28. – Egypt’s Nobel Prize winning author, Naguib Mahfouz, is seeking the permission of the country’s highest Islamic authorities to publish one of his most controversial novels, in a move which has staggered friends and colleagues who see it as a capitulation to the power of conservative Islam. Speaking publicly about his decision for the first time, the 94 year-old confirmed that his publisher had sought the approval of Al Azhar university, Sunni Islam’s oldest seat of learning, to finally publish Children of the Alley. The book was banned in Egypt in 1959 when Islamists declared it blasphemous.“If Al Azhar agrees to publish it, then I want it published,” he told friends and supporters seated around him at a weekly get-together in a bar at the Shepherd Hotel on the banks of the Nile. Mahfouz, whose sophisticated literary works helped make Egypt the intellectual and cultural hub of the Arab world, further dismayed his audience when he confirmed that he had asked Egypt’s powerful Islamic organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, to write a preface to the book. He said he wanted the imprimatur of “the Islamists”.
Not surprising, for Mahfouz at 94 simply wants the book published, and is tired of fighting the universe, which in Islamic countries, means Islam. Not much should be made of the affirmative-action Nobel-winner, tedious chronicler of Cairene lips gossiping and apparently reflecting in the age-old talk something called "the human condition" when not affixed to the shisha, author of a roman fleuve where the fleuve in question is the muddy, slow-moving Nile, and muddy, and slow-moving too, the prose.
If because you've already polished off all of English literature and all of European literature and are dying for something new, and the mysterious Middle East beckons (good god -- if you want to go East, go much further East, go to China and Japan) take it refracted through a Western sense and sensibility -- Edward FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam, Burton's A Thousand and One Nights. And then return to Dickens and Shakespeare and Melville, and stop this search-for-the-exotic grass-is-always-greener nonsense.
Senile?
Or just being satirical?
Maybe he needs his Western royalties boosted?
But, if his faculties are intact, why not, at 94, shame the fanatics and become a martyr to their tyranny as a shining example of the Islamicists' loathsomeness in harassing an VERY old guy over work that has won him world praise?
How much time has he got left to remain true to his life?
If the Muslim lunatic fringe in Egypt punished him, in any way, it wouldn't look good on their resume -except within the Islamic world, of course.
If you can't demonstrate some guts after 9 decades on this planet, when will you?
(I've come across some of his writings, and find Italo Calvino or Joseph Heller more fun.)
He's old and tired. Doesn't want to live his last days under fear of a death fatwa issued against him.
I guess it's also possible that he fears for the future of his family after he's gone. Once he, as an internationally known author, is no longer with them, a jihadist assassination of his relatives would get a lot less notice.
He speaks to everyone except his own countrymen. Maybe he should touch on more appropriate themes that are more acceptable to conservative Islam, such as:
-the young Muslim and his struggle to live a life in a country that does not stone adulterers or whip drinkers..
-the love affair between a Muslim man and Hindu woman, ending with the hanging of the man and the stoning of the woman..
Or maybe a future tale where Shariah law is implanted all over the world. It would be a utopian novel where Islam has been victorious and already killed off all erring beliefs and immoral societies.
"take it refracted through a Western sense and sensibility -- Edward FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam, Burton's A Thousand and One Nights. And then return to Dickens and Shakespeare and Melville, and stop this search-for-the-exotic grass-is-always-greener nonsense."
I liked Les mille et une nuits; contes arabes the first Western translation, into French, by Antoine Galland (d. 1715). (I've only read about 700 of the "nuits" so far.)
I also like the travelogues of Théophile Gautier as well as his Orientalist short stories -- even the ones whose themes were ostensibly non- or pre-Islamic seem imbued with the influence of Islam: same goes for Flaubert's Orientalist short stories, as well as his Salammbô, which, though set centuries before Islam, makes one feel in reading it immersed in the blood, pride and mystical-martial fanaticism of Islam. I know that both Gautier and Flaubert (as well as another of my favorites, Pierre Loti) were somewhat seduced by the shifting sands and veils of Islam (not to mention its whores and handjobbing masseurs), but they were simply too great to lose their minds to Islam as so much of our PC culture has, in one way or another, and they always kept an amused indisputibly superior Western moral eye on that Orient that fascinated them with its welter of glittering decadence, brute corruption, otherworldly sin, ardor and fatalism.
But that didn't implicate the Spaniards. The Inquisition was bad, but not Aztec bad.
OT:
cartoon rage issue escalates even further
now the Islamists want a full blown UN resolution which could entail sanctions against Denmark:
http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/001541.html
Dr Pepper
I chuckled reading your post. I scored only about 200 hundred nights or so, way back in childhood. Never resumed the reading. I wish I could go back to it.
Completely offtopic... but has anyone else watched Hirsi Ali kicking Iqbal Sacranie's ass on CNN?
She answered his "Islam is peace" bullshit with hard cold statistics. Priceless!
I can't get CNN. I would have liked to have seen that.
Sir Ikky has an arse just made for kicking.
The Statesman was at one time a fine Calcutta newspaper, but it has one of the worst websites. Suggestion: avoid using it in future
The Islamic Jihad group of Zawheri fame have tried to kill Mahfouz just a few years ago. He was stabbed in the neck and barely survived. He may or may not care about what happens to him, but he has to think of his family and publishers after all. Egypt is an intellectual desert.
Hugh,
Even better than Mahfouz, if you want a taste of the beauty of Eastern writing, look to the pre-Islamic literary works such as the Shahnameh or the poetry of Kabir (who abandoned Islam and sought God through Hindu, Buddhist and Christian spirituality... or look to the poems of Jalal al-Din Rumi, whose love of romance and beauty was a quiet rebellion against everything Muslim.
In fact, almost all the great "Muslim" poets and novelists (including the female writer Scheherezade) were rebels against the oppression of Islam. One of my favorites is Laurence Hope's 1906 translation of the Persian poem "Memory" which celebrates the intrinsic value of a woman in a distinctly un-Islamic passion, (a small excerpt below):
"And for this, my sin,
I doubt if ever, though dust I be,
The dust will lose the desire,
The torment and hidden fire,
Of my passionate love for you.
Aziza whom I adore,
My dust will be full of your beauty,
as is the blue
and infinite ocean full of the azure sky."
There is much to celebrate in the literature of the "Muslim east" precisely because the greatest literature is softly anti-Muslim and a celebration of love and freedom.
This may be the CNN transcript.
Scroll down towards the bottom.
Oops. I guess I should have provided the link.
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/26/i_se.01.html
Don't be hard on the Spanish because of the inquistion. After centuries of Moslem rule, they picked up too many islamic habits.
The inquistion is typical of islamic thought not Christian.
Just saw a news item about the Danish cartoon controversy on SBS television. They mention 2 cartoons, one which has a picture of Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, and another one which shows Mohammad with a face of a pig. The picture of Mohammad with a face of a pig, WAS DRAWN BY MUSLIMS, because they didn't think that the original 12 drawings were offensive enough.
Another offtopic post that I read at the excellent blog Cuanas:
http://homepage.mac.com/cfj/.Pictures/saudi-visa-page.gif
^^^Check out Saudi tolerance. Incidentally, when they say "No Jews allowed" they are actually being racist (Jews are an ethnic group whereas Muslims are not).
The entry form for which the link is given immediately above, offers conclusive evidence that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia bans all Jews from entering.
Would the United States have diplomatic relations with a country that banned, for example, all "non-whites" from entry? I assume it would not. Would it allow its citizens to travel there, much less to live and work there for the Saudi state, a country which despite having received, unearned, trillions of dollars, is still incapable of creating anything like a modern economy, and always will be incapable?
Why is this matter not raised in Congress? Is it misplaced fear that somehow there is this thing called an "oil weapon" because this "oil weapon" idea was first imposed by Arab smoke-and-mirrors propaganda (read J. B. Kelly, "Arabia, the Gulf, and the West") in 1973, carried on by Sheikh Yamani's blague, at assorted OPEC meetings, and breathlessly repeated, and mindlessly believed, by all sorts of people who were either incapable of analyzing how the oil market actually worked and what Saudi Arabia actually desired to do, or repeated and believed by those who were then, or later became, Saudi agents of influence, who needed to pretend that the Saudi propaganda they spouted for pay was in fact the truth, and that behind their own actions was not the personal desire for petrodollars but a "patriotic" desire to ensure that the "American interest" was served by appeasing the Saudis (as opposed to those bad old "unpatriotic" people who didn't much cotton to the pro-Arab policies, nor to the throwing Israel to the wolves policy favored by not a few, in the hope that somehow that would fix -- how? -- the "oil problem"). More than 30 years of a non-policy on energy have passed, without any attempt to diminish the use of fossil fuels or to diminish the "wealth weapon" of the Jihad. Those people high up who were and are Saudi agents are traitors, and should have been investigated. There is still no law on the books that makes it a crime to promote the Jihad, through its various instruments -- including that of propaganda.
Why not? Why is not promotion of the Jihad against the law in the countries where Infidels still live, and wish to remain living, without the malevolent imposition of Muslim laws, and Muslim ways -- whose result would lead us to the kind of lives one sees being led in Ramadi, or Riyadh, or Ramallah, or Rawalpindi. Is there an Infidel in his right mind who would wish that on himself or on his descendants?