If the paley christians can see the light of reaosn, they would rather support israel and seek inclusion into israe; as citizens than cast their lot with muslim paleys who'll persecute them with dhimmi status of not wipe them out completely by violence and conversion (familiar pattern, no?)

Posted by: voletti at December 9, 2004 8:33 AM

Even Hanan Ashrawi must be just a bit worried, but doesn't dare say so.

And just as "Palestinian" Christians who made their pact with Arafat and the PLO long ago are now in a quandary, so are many of those people who, born into Islam, but thoroughly Westernized and, one suspects, in the amount of their truth-telling so very close to being ex-Muslims as to be, in truth, ex-Muslims (but can't come out of the damned closet), including an Indian "Muslim" who writes for Newsweek and also has a wine column, or Fouad Ajami, as close as the Muslim Arabs have come to a truth-teller even though his meditations on dream palaces and suchlike never quite get to the heart of the matter -- the gap between the Arab Muslim view of where Arab Muslims should be, and the reality (that is the real "Dream Palace" problem, one grounded in Islam), or any number of others, now find that as the crunch comes, and Islam is shown to be the problem, and the islamization of Europe the most important issue, they are going to be off less and less value.

And so too is that feelgood book of Ms. Nafisi, who by the way owes the estate of Vladimir Nabokov a good deal of money, because without "Lolita" in the title, that book by a woman writer, snapped up by women readers, about a handful of women who, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, showed that the Indomtiable Human Spirit Can Triumph Over Black Superstition and Oppression Through the Transformative Power of Literature, turns out to be just the kind of exercise in using literature not "to point a moral or adorn a tale" but to present a Lesson For Our Times, which Nabokov would have deplored.

No, at this point in world history, only full-fledged defectors from the KGB (i.e., Islam), not the quasi-ex-Muslims still inhibited by filial piety, or careerist concerns (it is much better, as a career move in America, to be described as a wonderful tolerant "moderate" rather than as a dour apostate from Islam, so obviously bitter and therefore not to be believed) who can be listened to. Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian, and the rest.

As the old song says: Don't Mess with Mr. In-Between.

Posted by: Hugh at December 9, 2004 2:21 PM

A little unfair to Ms. Nafisi, but whenever there is a whiff of a book that might be picked up by earnest book clubs, and editions are put out with Questions for Study and Discussion at the end, or there is a hint of Oprah's imprimatur, one simply becomes more critical than one's natural amiability usually permits.

A few points, though. She treats Khomeini as an aberration, but Khomeini was a learned theologian, and his views about intercourse with chickens and so on are not his alone. Was Khomeini, and his view of Infidels, the aberration -- or was it the Pahlevis, who treated the Infidels far better than they had ever been treated in the history of Muslim Iran?

Ms. Nafisi never comes to grips with what is specifically "Islamic" about the Islamic Republic of Iran. She may be from the enlightened and well-off classes, but what does she make of the long history of the mistreatment of non-Muslims? Did she ever read Mary Boyce on Zoroastrians, or consider why she, and others, have not simply gone back, since apparently everyone in the Middle East has got "to be something," to Zoroastrianism? When she had her rendezvous in that tiny Armenian restaurant, with the "Religious Minority" sign posted in the window so that no Muslims need be corrupted by "najis" Infidels -- just the way our current hero, Al-Sistani, could never meet face-to-face with Ambassador Bremer (our Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy) because Bremer, of course, is najis -- why not take the trouble there to say a little something about that problem, which is not new, in Iran, not some strange concoction of Khomeini or Khalkhali or any of the others.

And when she describes the climate of fear that she finds so well described in "Invitation to a Beheading," she makes Nabokov's views completely abstract. But in both "Invitation to a Beheading" and even more in "Bend Sinister" (the Ekwilist movement) Nabokov was quite good at portraying, as he put it, the "Communazi state" and the specific elements of Socialis Bolshevik-style and National Socialism are nicely blent. But Islam -- not "fanatical" Islam but Islam itself -- while in its most unfettered form instills fear, and fear as an emotion is similar everywhere (here we can turn to the Higher Sentimentalism of Steichen's Family-of-Man "people are the same the whole world over"), the precise nature of the despotism or mental straitjacket has to be delineated.

There is no real encounter with "Islam" in Nafisi's book. Nor does she see the larger connections between the Western apologists, and those who have (successfully so far) managed to keep non-Muslims from studying the great scholars of Islam (who are just now being unearthed and republished and restudied), byut the "intellectual thuggery" (Ibn Warraq's phrase) of Edward Said. Nafisi humorously recalls someone who attacks her studying "Mansfield Park" without realizing it was similarly denounced by Said -- but her phrasing, I recall (I read her book nearly a year ago, and returned it to the personw who lent it to me), showed that she remained uncritical of Said himself, who while not a Muslim, and though he had never studied either the tenets of Islam or the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, would not brook any criticism of Islam. For 20 years this criticism has helped to nearly ruin the academic study of Islam and of Islamic societies. For every Reza Afshari or Azam Kamguian, there are a hundred Hamid Dabashis, with their stalinesque odes to Said (who made the careers of the Dabashis and the Salibas and the Khalidis all possible).

Another problem is that she invokes Nabokov on every other page. Tempting, of course. But Nabokov's idea of literary criticism was to "caress the words," not to use the plots, the characters, and so on as a source of solace or uplift -- which is what, understandably but still un-Nabokovianly, Nafisi herself did in her private meetings which, of course, remind one and all of those "book groups" where people choose not-too-terribly-difficult texts, and then they read them, and then they "share their feelings" about them.

Nabokov would have discussed prosody, and figures of speech --- look, here is hypallage, and over here is a beautiful example of proparalipsis, and ....

Perhaps in her next book, she can blend Mary Boyce, and the chronicle of Arakel of Tabriz, and then some Leo Spitzer, Empson, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Ricks in his "Approximations" not his Dylan mode, and a few others.

And by all means, retain the couleur locale -- the roses and bulbuls of Gulistan. They never fail.

Posted by: Hugh at December 9, 2004 4:39 PM

Palestinians already kill Homosexuals for Allah so why the shock that a "Terrorist producing" State wouldn't embrace Islam to
put the MiddleEast back 1400 years.

It's geting very dificult for Muslims to con the West about the "Peaceful and Tolerance" tenets in Islam,if the collective behaviuor of Muslims isn't what defines Islam then Islam has nothing to do with Muslim that hijacked Islam as the "True" faith with the real God.

Posted by: ala-sux at December 9, 2004 5:52 PM