The Saladin Anthology

The Saladin Anthology Highlights from the International Saladin Days at the House of Literature, Oslo, 2009-2015

The Saladin Anthology Highlights from the International Saladin Days at the House of Literature, Oslo, 2009-2015 With contributions from Şener Aktürk, Tariq Ali, Orit Bashkin, Almog Behar, Mark R. Cohen, Dominique Eddé, Elias Khoury, Thorvald Steen and Samar Yazbek.

Editor: Andreas Liebe Delsett Litteraturhuset/The House of Literature, Oslo www.saladindays.com

04

Andreas Liebe Delsett Introduction: Saladin.

A man for our times?

07

Thorvald Steen About reconciliation

11

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen Excerpt from Desert Storms

29

Thorvald Steen Going to the theatre

34

Tariq Ali The perils of Islamophobia

44

Elias Khoury Re-Writing 1948

58

Şener Aktürk September 11, 1683: The Myth of a Christian Europe and the Massacre in Norway

71

Samar Yazbek Two men

75

Dominique Eddé On polyphony and irreconcilability. In memory of Edward W. Said

82

Mark R. Cohen Jews in the Muslim world in the middle ages

94

Orit Bashkin Iraqi Jews: Bilingualism, nationalism and racism, 1921-1967

100

Almog Behar My Arabic is mute and other poems

106

About the contributors Saladin days 2009-2015, list of participants

4 • Introduction

Andreas Liebe Delsett

Saladin. A man for our times?

In the spring of 2015, not long before the violence, elections and escalation of the conflict between Turkey and the PKK, I visited Diyarbakir, the Kurdish capital in Turkey. Seated around a table were a group of scholars – humanists and political scientists from local Universities. I explained that I had come to Diyarbakir to learn about Kurdish history, language and literature, as part of some research for an annual program called the Saladin days, at the House of Literature in Oslo. Suddenly, I was interrupted in the middle of a sentence, by a simple question: Why Saladin? «You know that he is not very highly regarded amongst the Kurds? He was religious and he chose to fight for Islam, rather than the liberation of the Kurds», explained the youngest of the group.

This was not the first time I had heard criticism against Saladin, or objections to the name chosen for our program in Oslo.

Hence, my answer was yes, I know full well that Saladin was first and foremost a Muslim leader. And yes, he was certainly not a Kurdish activist. And with this, we were placed immediately at the core motivation for founding the Saladin days in 2009.

If you walk around in Oslo for a day, asking a random selection of people who Saladin was, the majority would answer «Sala who?» Most Norwegians do not have a clue who Saladin was. That is, only if you exclude the increasing numbers of Norwegians with a background from the Middle East, for whom the large part, have newly arrived in Oslo. But amongst the majority population, the knowledge

gap is striking. How can it be that one of the most influential characters of history, the man that ended the Fatimide caliphate in Cairo, united Shiites and Sunnis, and reconquered Jerusalem from the crusaders, is not better known in Norway? In my opinion, this knowledge gap is representative of a broader lack of understanding about both the Islamic world, as well as the Arabic world, not only in Norway, but also in large parts of Europe. Moreover, it is also important to note that in many European countries at this time, including Norway, the Islamic world and Arabic world are often erroneously perceived as the same thing. On the one hand, this lack of knowledge is an important underlying cause of the increasing polarization between majority population and religious/ ethnic minorities in Europe, and on the other hand, between Europe and the Arab world.

It was this increasing polarization and its underlying lack of knowledge that led the House of Literature to establish the international Saladin days in 2009. It was named after Saladin, not as an attempt to make him a saint, or to apologize or explain his actions, but to understand and evaluate this man in light of the times and the situation he lived. His biographer Anne-Marie Eddé, demonstrates this point wonderfully in the biography Saladin (Éditions Flammarion, 2008). Assessing the actions of a person who lived almost a thousand years ago based on our own moral standards is not interesting.

But it is interesting to linger at the importance of what he did within the context

Introduction • 5

he lived in. And it can be rewarding to consider it in light of our own times – but only then as a thought experiment, not to make hasty moral verdicts.

In this context, one incident stands out in particular, in the days of Saladin as well as today: The reconquering of Jerusalem in 1187, when Saladin did excaclty the opposite of what was expected, as he gave the Christians free passage out of the city, protected the holy sites of all faiths and allowed everyone to practice their faith in the holy city. This incident was the focus of author Thorvald Steen’s lecture at the conference, Poet and Activist in 2008, commemorating the bi-centennial of Norway’s national poet Henrik Wergeland, which gathered more than twenty authors, intellectuals and religious leaders from the Middle East. It was here that the idea of installing the Saladin Days was conceived, later to take the form of a question, as formulated by the first director of the House of Literature, Aslak Sira Myhre, at the opening of the Saladin Days in 2010: What if ? What if is one of the most interesting questions you can ask. What if I was rich? What if men gave birth to babies? What if I did kiss that girl in high school? What if someone, perhaps an Israeli Prime Minister, an American President or someone else in power, would state that he or she wanted Jerusalem to be an open city free for Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists alike, to come and practice their religion or secularity as they thought best? What if someone with an army should ask their enemies to be protected by these armies when they were celebrating their religious festivals in their holy city. What if someone was to suggest this in 2010? That would indeed be a radical thought. And something just

as unlikely as Martians invading Norway tomorrow.

Through the program, the Saladin Days has successfully demonstrated that it can be invaluable to answering such questions, in order to challenge the deadlocked ways of thinking in our own times and minds. This has developed to become the core of our approach in the following years, as we have focused on topics such as Islamophobia, Israeli and Palestinian history writing, the rhetoric of Crusades in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the 22nd of July 2011, the Arab spring in Syria and Egypt, the history of Islam in medieval Spain and contemporary Europe, and the Jews in the Islamic world.

The approach to these topics have varied from knowledge raising – filling in the gaps in our own formation – to historiographical discussions and stage conversations comprising of artistic and literary starting points.

In this anthology we have made a selection of outstanding contributions given throughout the first seven years of Saladin Days – a difficult task, as there are so many more that could have been included.

The contributions and contributors speak best for themselves. On behalf of The House of Literature I would like to thank the contributors for bravely addressing some of the most contentious issues of our times. They have done so in the most knowledgeable and honest way, and with, if I may add, a solid commitment to the belief that a different, more constructive and peaceful way of living together in this world is possible.

We hope that this can be an inspiration for others.

Oslo, September 2015 Andreas Liebe Delsett

Thorvald Steen • 7

Thorvald Steen

About Reconciliation This speech was given on the 6th of June 2008 at the House of Literature, during the conference «Poet and Activist. Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845). International conference on tolerance and compassion». In 2009, the first annual International Saladin days were held at the House of Literature.

During the last five years, we in Norway have been visited by several well known authors and journalists who stand for reconciliation, in the broadest sense of the word. The Palestinian Izzat al-Ghazzawi fought for reconciliation with the Israelis, the Kurd Mehmed Uzun with the Turks and the Iraqis, the Armenian Hrant Dink with the Kurds and the Turks, and the Russian Anna Politkovskaya with the Chechenes. Of these writers, two were assassinated, and the other two died too early of natural causes. What they all had in common, was the experience of how demanding it is to stand for reconciliation between different countries and peo-

ple. I have heard them say that the most challenging part was how lonely they felt when they noticed that none of the parties trusted them.

These four people, and especially the 200 year old Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, are the ones I have in mind when I am soon to present my proposal.

Wergeland was a priest by education, but the Norwegian authorities considered him far too controversial to be ordained.

He became a brilliant poet, one who to a far too little extent is translated into other languages. What makes me believe that he would have enjoyed what I am about to say, is his international orientation and

8 • Thorvald Steen

conciliatory attitude towards foreign cultures and religions, spending most of his life, for instance, fighting against Article 2 in the Norwegian Constitution, which denied Jews entrance to the Kingdom of Norway.

It is time to mention Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known in this part of the world as Saladin. Even though the Christian Dante Alighieri speaks about Saladin in La Divinia Commedia in a positive way, just as Boccaccio does in his works, there is nothing to imply that Wergeland had any knowledge of Saladin, who, until he was 20, spent most of his time playing polo, studying the Quran and reading poetry. It was Saladin’s uncle, Shirkuh, who trained him to be an officer.

Saladin’s parents were Kurds, and his father was a chief. Saladin was born in Tikrit in 1138. 39 years earlier, the Western crusaders had occupied Jerusalem and massacred Jews and Muslims in the city. Saladin’s uncle Shirkuh was in the service of Nureddin, the leader of Great Syria. Shirkuh, a great military strategist, was called «the lion». Serving as general, he conquered Egypt a few months before he died. His nephew Saladin was a Sunni Muslim, and participated as an officer in the final battle. For a long time, Nureddin was opposed to attacking Egypt. After three hard campaigns, Shirkuh took Cairo. But two months later, during a banquet held to celebrate the victory, Shirkuh choked on a piece of meat.

The reporter Ibn al-Athir from Mosul writes that the caliph al-Adid appointed Saladin to be the new vizier because he was the youngest and the least experienced of the emirs in the army. The caliph figured Saladin would be easy to lead. Saladin was named «The Victorious King», and given a white turban with golden threads. In 1169, he became the unchallenged lead-

er of Egypt, after having fought down a Frank Crusade invasion. In 1171, he got the Sunni and Shia Muslims to cooperate, and in that way avoided bloodshed.

Chronicle writers in Saladin’s time, and historians in our own time, emphasize his generosity, also towards those who did not believe. By looks Saladin was short and slender, with a short cut, even beard. He was observant of all the rules of all religions. He also shared the aim of the deceased Syrian leader Nureddin: to unite the Arab and Muslim world and to conquer the city of Jerusalem, which had been in the hands of the Crusaders since 1099.

After the massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem, only Christians were allowed to practice their belief in The Holy City of the three world religions. In 1183, Saladin’s army conquered Syria, almost without resistance. He survived assassination attempts, as well as several battles against the Crusaders. At the same time, he consolidated his position as the sole regent in Egypt and Syria. Instead of taking Jerusalem back right away, Saladin made an alliance with those of the Crusaders who were willing to negotiate. Within both camps, the men were tired of war.

A cease-fire was entered into. It lasted for three years. The trading business blossomed. Even after a number of grotesque examples of plundering by the Franks, for instance of Mecca, Saladin did not attack Jerusalem.

But Saladin eventually reached his limit. After there had been several attacks on pilgrims, the cease-fire, in Saladin’s view, could no longer be defended. He invited all Muslims to come to Damascus.

Holy War was proclaimed. A few days later, the city was besieged by small camel hair tents, colourful pavilions decorated with poems and verses from the Quran.

Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish soldiers cap-

Thorvald Steen • 9

tured Damascus. July 5, 1187, close to the little village Hittin, on the shore of the Tiberian sea, the most decisive battle in the times of the Crusades was fought.

The Crusaders were shattered by Saladin’s army. Saladin got his revenge, and by his own hand he executed his arch enemy amongst the Crusaders, Count Raynald of Châtillon.

To seek revenge and to execute those who have violated basic human values, is nothing new. In Norway, we executed Vidkun Quisling and 24 of his allies after the Second World War. Nevertheless, what Saladin did tree months later, has barely been mentioned:

[Saladin] decided that no Crusader, nor any Christian in the city, should be victimized or insulted, and he managed to go through with it.

Friday October 2, 1187, 27 Rajab in year 583 after Hijra, on the day Muslims celebrate the Prophet’s night journey to Al-Quds, or Jerusalem, Saladin captured The Holy City. He met little resistance.

And, if that was not enough: He decided that no Crusader, nor any Christian in the city, should be victimized or insulted, and he managed to go through with it.

Officers kept guard around The Church of the Holy Grave and other locations considered sacred by non-Muslims. Saladin invited the Franks to stay, and called on banished Jewish families to return.

Al-Aqsa, which had been converted into a church, he turned back into a mosque, after having the walls sprinkled with rose water. He then freed the slaves, without charging payment, and he proclaimed that he did not intend to hold the wealthiest of the citizens to ransom. Some of his

closest men protested loudly. Saladin answered them that «Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have done them.»

March 3, 1193, at 55, Saladin died, sitting beneath an olive three in his garden in Damascus. Izzat al-Ghazzawi used to say that Saladin taking Jerusalem without seeking revenge, and letting everyone practice their religion in The Holy City, is the greatest ever provocation against humanity. I know that Uzun, Drink and Politkovskaja agreed with him. When it comes to Henrik Wergeland, I can only say that I suppose so. I think that Saladin, just like us, asked himself questions such as: What made him undertake the most outstanding of all redeeming acts we know of ? And which inner battles did Saladin struggle with when he was betrayed by those he had shown such great generosity? Why do we so seldom experience someone with the whole of humanity as his concern? Even the crocodile takes care of its own.

It is time to present my wish, in the spirit of Henrik Wergeland: All of us, in particular the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, should from now on, through the United Nations, work towards making March 3 the annual World’s Saladin Day.

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 11

A play by Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

Desert Storms (excerpt) Norwegian title: Ørkenstormer. Commisioned by and premiered at the House of Literature on the 5th of March 2010, during the second annual International Saladin days. Published in Norwegian and English (bilingual edition) by Forlaget Oktober AS, Oslo, 2010.

Act I | scene 1

Stage divided in two. Crusader soldiers on one side and Saracens on the other. Crusader and Arab music is played whenever necessary, between scenes, giving the impression of a musical duel. In some of the scenes, the two parties meet in the middle of the stage.

Bright lights. Music. Actors occupy their side of the stage, looking at each other. Slight moment of uncertainty as to who will speak first.

Pope Gregory VIII enters and stops in the middle of the stage and lifts his arms.

pope Ex occasione quippe dissensionis quae malitia hominum ex suggestione diaboli facta est nuper in terra, accessit Saladinus cum multitudine armatorum ad partes illas …

Exit pope. saladin Did you understand what he said? richard Most of it.

12 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

saladin I thought I heard my name mentioned. richard Are you Saladin, the Conqueror of Jerusalem? saladin (nods) Sultan of Egypt and Syria. richard Richard, King of England, whom they call Lionheart. By the way, I hate the weather on that godforsaken island. That’s why I live in France, in my beloved Anjou. saladin I never discuss the weather. Too banal. Tell me something, is your conscience clear? richard Only because I never use it. saladin Spoken like a true Crusader. Why are you here? richard I’ve always wanted to meet you. saladin You should have waited at home. Who’s the lady with you? eleanor I’m Eleanor of Aquitaine. His mother. His loving mother. The milk from these breasts made him a lion, a holy warrior on whom the Pope and Christendom depends. Who’s that woman? jamila I am Jamila, his wife. His loving wife who has given him two sons. I don’t want them to be warriors or lions. Better a physician, a philosopher, an astronomer, even a poet … eleanor Are you his only wife? jamila The first and the best. He has others, but I’m also his friend. I offer advice that saves lives. Are you Richard’s friend? And who is that smiling peacock looking over your shoulder? philip I’m Philip, King of France. A nobody. Don’t worry about me. O great Sultan, please don’t look at me. I don’t wish to be recognised if we meet on the battlefield. eleanor (crossing herself ) Is that a Jew I see before me? ibn maymun Yes, and a physician to this great Sultan. My name is Ibn Maymun.

Maimonides. Understand this, Eleanor of Aquitaine, they don’t kill us here.

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 13

richard Really? Why not? Have you run out of money? saladin Better to run out of money than brains. Ibn Maymun shines a light on the darkness from whence you come. richard Oh, don’t be so serious. What are you doing at the moment? saladin Nothing special. (short pause) Anyone can do it, if they try. I’m thinking, Richard. I think of how my brave soldiers defeated the Franks and took Jerusalem. I am truly pleased by my miraculous destiny. And you?

Crusader musician plays religious music.Background: Gregorian chants.

Noises offstage. pope’s voice How dare Richard and Philip keep me waiting? I am the Pope. richard Oops, I had forgotten about him. Sorry, Saladin.

We have to go now. Duty calls. See you soon. philip Au revoir, mon Sultan. eleanor A word of advice, Saladin. Lose some weight before the battle. It would suit you.

Laugh. saladin Was this a bad dream?

scene 2 Richard and Philip on their knees with their backs to the the audience.

Richard holds his own banner with three yellow lions above each other on a red background. The pope addresses the audience. pope Silence, sinners. The land of Jerusalem has been smitten by the divine hand. We and our brothers have been confounded by such great horror and affected by such great sorrow. Oh God, the heathens are my concern. Saladin came upon those regions with a host of armed men. And conquered our city. Go and take Jerusalem, good kings of England and of France. Restore the Cross to its rightful place. Show no mercy to

14 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

the infidels. The more unbelievers you kill, the shorter your journey to heaven. Bring Saladin’s head to Rome, and I will reward you with the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Richard and Philip turn towards the audience. philip Is he serious? The head of Saladin? I can think of nicer parts. richard Wake up. This is no time for levity. In case you didn’t fully understand, the Pope has just launched a new Crusade. We shall make it victorious.

We will conquer huge new areas of land. We shall kill as many infidels as we can. We shall retake our Holy City and we will return home loaded with treasures and the head of Saladin. That is all the Pope wants to see. We shall fight. We shall win. Acre first, then Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad. philip OK. But promise me that you will learn how to dress. We must look better than the Arabs on the battlefield. richard Our swords must be sharper, and penetrate deeper.

Philip makes a face. richard Stop behaving like a puffed up peacock in heat. It is hot enough in Jerusalem. You will come, won’t you? philip I might even reach the Holy Land before you… Unless my ships are waylaid by pirates. Richard, do you remember that Barbary pirate captain who I made my prisoner. He was so beautiful, but he only wanted you … richard Dear cousin, you will fight, you will be a capable soldier. (gives him a gentle, half-affectionate kick on the bum) I will make sure of that. philip Do I have to? Are you really sure about this? Why? richard 1187 was the Devil’s year, Philip. We lost our Holy City to the infidels.

What could be worse than that? If we can’t get it back, we will lose our ability to rule our lands. We will lose all support from the Church and the people. Do you understand?

Richard shakes his head. philip OK. Let’s assume we take Jerusalem back. So what?

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 15

richard We will take it back. Did you not hear the pope? Every infidel who refuses to convert will die. Repeat after me: Jerusalem will be ours. philip Jerusalem will be ours. Then what? richard God will help us. philip Had God helped Noah to predict the future, surely he would have sunk the ark? richard You cannot fool me, Philip. Is your real plan to get me out of the way, take my lands in France and then attack England? Are you really with us, or not? philip Depends. richard On what? philip After we have killed Saladin and all their nobles, what will happen to their lands?

Richard and Philip look at each other, and nod. richard Don’t be a fool. We will take it all. The unbelievers will become our serevants. What did you think?

Philip nods, grabs Richard’s banner and looks at the motif. He drapes it around himself and poses. philip What a strange piece of English cloth. Is this the square that men have followed to death for hundreds of years? richard It’s not English. We all have banners. Don’t be so modest, you have a French one with golden lilies on blue. (pause) Next year we shall celebrate the birth of our lord in Jerusalem. philip Dear cousin. How I admire your certainty. Of course I will follow you. Nobody has won more tournaments and battles than you. Can you count how many fortresses you have conquered? I have always admired your courage. richard Enough. Don’t exaggerate. philip I’m only telling the truth.

16 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

scene 3 Arab lute music. Jamila is gently massaging Saladin’s shoulders while he sits on a platform rich in appearance.

jamila (sings)

Come night

Embrace me like a mother

Come night

Cover me like a cloak

Come wind gently rising

Like a lover’s hand gentle and soothing. ibn maymun That was beautiful.

Saladin nods.

Ibn Maymun is feeling Saladin’s pulse and puts a shawl on his shoulders. jamila Your body is tense. Allah, the size of these knots. Hard as rocks. saladin Our occupied cities. jamila Why can’t you forget? Just for now. Relax while I get rid of these knots. saladin They will come again. I know it. We let them go home in peace. They immediately prepare to make war again. Their hatred and greed poisons us as well. A dark, humiliating sickness that spreads over our lands when they are occupied. ibn maymun As darkness follows light, Commander of the Brave, the Franks will return. You’re trembling, Sire. saladin You fuss too much. It’s not cold and yet I feel a chill. My stomach hurts. Here. jamila I will fetch some hot water and mint. It will ease the twists in your stomach. (exit)

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 17

ibn maymun Let me see. Either it’s a twist or there is a build up of tiny stones. If so, we will have to open the stomach and remove them. Don’t be angry.

It’s the method of the Master, Ibn Sina, and it works. saladin (frowning) Are you as good as he once was? ibn maymun I am like a stone in the sand. He was a star in the sky. His light still falls on us. Why are so many of your soldiers still alive? saladin Because in Damascus our physicians learned how to operate, rather than amputate. Our enemy still doesn’t know how. (pause) The stomach pain has gone, Ibn Maymun. Definitely not stones. But I feel weak. ibn maymun Lie down for a while. Is anything worrying you? saladin I have this dream that returns. I am a boy and my mother is watching while I eat my food. She’s smiling. Suddenly a pair of hawks swoop down from the sky. My mother thinks they want the food and shields the platter, but they want something else. I scream. Blood is everywhere. I feel it, but I can’t see anything. The hawks have taken away my eyes. I hear my mother wailing and I wake up in a sweat. I feel thirsty and drink a whole flask of water. ibn maymun How often does the dream return? saladin Always before a battle. Last night was the first time while we are still at peace. ibn maymun A premonition of the new war that we await? Have I your permission to ask you something? Your people know you as a softhearted ruler.

Even your enemies admire your compassion, but is your heart really soft, or does it change when you wear your armour? saladin When I was young and wild, I spent too much time in the taverns.

That helped. And when I went hunting, I left my fears and my soft heart at home. In search of a beast my heart became as hard as stone.

I felt nothing at the time of the kill. It is the same in war. ibn maymun Then the two hawks, o great Sultan, are the hard side of your heart, coming to awake you and warn you that you must remain hard. There is no reason to worry. Do you worry? saladin I have done nothing of which I am ashamed, Ibn Maymun. Fate made me a Sultan and a warrior, and I do not need the night to cover my

18 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

misdeeds like a cloak. I hide nothing, but I am getting old. My limbs are tired, my arms get weaker by the day. ibn maymun Even the sun has spots, my King. saladin There is another dream. Our weavers are working on a carpet. The carpet covers the desert sand. But when you look closer there are many holes in the carpet and blood is coming out of them. And grief-stricken widows and children are trying to mend the carpet, but their tears make the job difficult. That dream is easy to understand, is it not, Ibn Maymun?

Enter Jamila. jamila This will give you new strength. saladin (sits up and drinks the herbal mixture) Why are you so sure that the Franks will return, Ibn Maymun? We have won for ever. They will never triumph again. Of that I’m sure. jamila Are you? I’m not. My eyes watch the horizon with fear. saladin I hate the thought of defending a treasure that we might lose again.

But both of you thrive on mistrust and suspicion. My father used to say that no woman can be honourable and faithful if you look at her expecting vice and dishonour.

jamila The Kings of England and France are not women, my lord.

saladin Are you sure? (laughter) Tell me, Ibn Maymun. What dark force is it that fuels your hatred of the Franks? ibn maymun Look at the fate of Al-Andalus. Under Muslim rule our people lived side by side, but slowly the Crusaders began to take our cities. First Cordoba fell, then Seville. And why? Because the Emirs who ruled these cities had become too complacent, too selfsatisfied, too dependent on courtiers who misled them, who told them what they wanted to hear. We, both Jews and Muslims, were reduced to slavery. We must not repeat our mistakes. saladin Meaning what? Speak clearly. Can I trust your judgement? Sometimes I feel that you are too influenced by your own experiences. ibn maymun Experience is a good teacher. My advice is always disinterested. That’s why I suggest that we should surprise them at home. Stop this busi-

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 19

ness for ever. How long must this go on? They arrive, lay siege to our cities, starve our people and if we cannot lift the siege in time, they capture the citadel, loot the treasury, set our homes and granaries and our people on fire. We must put an end to these infernal tortures. If we fail, we stand the risk of becoming a petrified piece of the world and its history, like the Egyptians of yore. All they left us was tombs and pyramids. jamila Invade their lands, burn their homes, force their women? Become like them? That’s unworthy of you, Ibn Maymun. ibn maymun My lady, sometimes we need to use a knife to cure the patient.

Saladin straightens up and lets Ibn Maymun give him a shave. saladin The great Sultan is tired of war. His body tells him so, but his mind is not sure. Most of my advisors warn against invading the lands of the Franks, but not you. ibn maymun With respect, Majesty, the advisors of whom you speak say what they imagine you wish to hear. Advisors of this sort exist in every court, but the advice they offer is worthless, for they never really speak what is in their minds. saladin In my family we were taught that the sword was more powerful than the book. My uncle Shirkuh used to say: We are Kurds. We think with our swords. Enemies cannot be defeated by reading books. We were mountain people. Life was hard. That’s why we left and came to the cities and offered our skills to any ruler prepared to pay. It is sometimes easier to hire outsiders than convince your own people to fight. When I was building an army to liberate Jerusalem, it was the Kurds who gave the most trouble. Undisciplined. I had to promise that I would pay them well, but after our victory. The maneuvres before a war are sometimes more tiresome than the actual battle itself. Perhaps Ibn Maymun is right. Perhaps we will have to cross the water to defeat them. Perhaps there is no other way to defend ourselves. Perhaps … jamila You’re wrong. You think I only speak as a woman and a mother. Remember before the battle at Hattin. Whose idea was it that we poison the wells to deny the enemy water? That idea came from me, and I still remember the look on your face. Total surprise. Such an evil thought from such a gentle woman. But you did as I suggested, and the result was victory. We knew where all the water holes were located because this was our land. If you cross the sea, you will be in their lands.

20 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

saladin Perhaps. Worse never to have made the attempt for a lasting peace. ibn maymun (stroking Saladin’s cheek with the barber knife) For a lasting peace. Who did Your Highness ask to clean up after the Hashishin suicide attack at the tax collector’s office yesterday? The knife forces Saladin to whisper inaudibly. ibn maymun Al-Adil? Your brother?

Saladin nods. ibn maymun Don’t move, Sultan!

Saladin cuts himself and shoves Ibn Maymun aside. saladin Now you start too. (laughs) I have survived three Hashishin attempts to kill me. They will do anything to create chaos, so that they might rise to power themselves. Uniting the Arabs, Sunnis and Shias, is never easy … especially if you are a Kurd!

Ibn Maymun motions Saladin to rest and resumes shaving him. ibn maymun Please sit still, otherwise the dreams of the Hashishins might be fulfilled.

The blood is wiped from Saladin’s face, and the shaving is over. jamila Conquest leads only to a shameful peace. saladin And when I conquered you. Was that shameful?

Gestures to Ibn Maymun to leave. Ibn Maymun exits. Saladin moves close to Jamila and puts his arms around her from the back. jamila No. It was deceitful. You broke the terms of our private treaty. Sweet honeyed words to seduce and promise there would never be anyone else. You were not like other Sultans. You had not been trained to be one. Power had come to you by an accident of fate. It would only be me. It would always be me. Within two years there were three others and how many concubines? When was the last time you counted them? 32? 35? 40?

Saladin turns her around and kisses her gently on the breasts. She moves away and offers him a plate full of dates.

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 21

jamila Perhaps a few dates will satisfy your appetite. saladin I’m only a man. (aside) It is not always fun. Barely out of my mother’s womb I had to ride a horse bareback and fire an arrow at the mark. At nine I was given a sword almost as big as me. At ten I went hunting with my uncle Shirkuh. Two years later they forced me to taste my first woman. jamila (aside) When I married him I wasn’t sure what life held for me. I told him I had read more books in my father’s library than he ever would in his whole life. He smiled. I knew then that he was a good man. saladin I trust Ibn Maymun completely. His loyalty is not in question, but sometimes I wonder whether he wants me to crush the Franks in order to seek revenge for the Jews that Richard killed. jamila I don’t think so. I may not agree with him, but I trust him completely. saladin Do you trust me? jamila I love you, but I’m not sure I totally trust you.

Saladin and Jamila look at each other with love. She strokes his cheeks. They embrace for a long time. Music. Exit Jamila. saladin A horse! Get my horse.

Noises. saladin (as if on a horse) I wish I could think as fast as I ride. It’s never like that.

I wish you could think for me, dear friend. Should we cross the water on a big boat? Would you be happy to die in a foreign land? And what if you found a delicious Frankish mare, would that be a compensation for losing our wide open spaces? Look at this desert. It has no end. We will never see a sunset like this anywhere else. I would rather be buried here. Butnot yet. Not yet. There is work to be done. Allah Akbar.

He strokes «the horse».

scene 4 Semi-dark stage. Eleanor in bed with barebottomed soldier. Hearing Richard’s deliberately loud steps outside, Eleanor kicks him out of her bed and composes herself.

22 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

richard Mama, Mama. Are you there? eleanor You may enter.

The stage is brightly lit. richard Mama, give me advice. Nobody has taught me more than you. Poetry, literature, all knowledge that I have, even in knighting, it was you who encouraged me. Some of my knights say that Saladin does not hate. eleanor A terrible weakness in a king. Hatred is necessary, and to be effective, it must be pure. It should override every other emotion. richard My hate shall always be purer than his. eleanor Never been a problem for you till now. Be warned. Hate is a strong emotion, boy. And like its twin, love, it can unsettle the human mind.

It must be released in small portions. You find it easier to hate than love, don’t you. Just like your mother. richard What angers me is that this Saladin is different. Many of our old knights sing his praises. They fear him. That’s fine. They will fight harder. But they respect him. They like him. That’s a problem. It creates doubt. It makes him seem invincible. eleanor Never let a war get personal. I learnt that from your father. Mind you, he let nothing get personal, not even while he was begetting four sons.

This is a Holy War, ordered by the Holy Father. You will do what has to be done. And Richard, when you win, you will rule all of France as well as England. Never lose sight of that. richard You never do, but Philip? eleanor We’ll find something for him. Pity he’s a king. He is far better suited to be an actor or a court jester. I remember when Philip was a callowyouth and I came into your room and … richard (interrupting her quickly) Mother. Have you considered the consequences if I am defeated? eleanor What? richard An arrow might hit me in an unlucky moment? eleanor God will protect you.

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 23

richard He might be occupied elsewhere. eleanor Have you lost your inner strength? Your will to win? Wars are never won by brute force or military skills alone. richard I’m aware of that, Mama. Sometimes the will is strong, but the body … would you be really upset if I…? eleanor If you what? Died in battle? richard As a mother, I thought perhaps you should worry a bit more than you do.

Eleanor watches Richard while thinking. eleanor I have never known you in such a state. richard You really believe I can never lose? eleanor Unthinkable, boy. Unthinkable. The Plantagenets never lose. (pause) Have you enough money to raise an army? richard The Jews will find some. eleanor I thought you’d killed them all after you were crowned. richard No. Some escaped, fled to Seville and Granada. A few converted. I let them. They owe me something. eleanor One more thing. Never be moved by remorse. Never fear death. richard Oh, I don’t. I have learned some things from you, dearest mother. The first time you kill, the cost is high. The conscience is uneasy. After that, it just gets easier. eleanor Always better to leave your conscience at home when you are fighting the infidels. richard They’re not all infidels, mother. Many Christians from the Holy Land fought under Saladin’s banner. Our knights were shocked. eleanor He who fights with the infidels against the Pope, is an infidel. (pause) Can you bear the thought of Philip reaching Jerusalem before you?

24 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

richard Don’t joke with me. As if he could. But tell me something, mother.

What if I die? eleanor Perish the thought. The strength of your beliefs, the ability to use sword and lance, the way you inspire those who follow you into battle, means only one thing. You will return as the greatest hero of Christendom.

Richard stands erect, a slow smile taking over his face. richard I know exactly what will happen. When a battle starts, the novelty engages each and every soldier. It is so exciting … to see the infidel heads rolling on the ground, but after a few days of galloping forward, sword in hand, drenched in blood, even the bravest knight gets tired.

And then, strange as it seems, even a little bored. It’s not fun any longer. It becomes a tired old routine. War without passion. When that happens, even the best army in the whole of Christendom can be defeated. Must try and remember that …

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen • 25

Desert Storms, was staged for the first time at the House of Literature in Oslo, during the Saladin Days 2010. The production was produced in cooperation with and featured actors from the Norwegian National Theatre and the National touring theatre Riksteatret.

26 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen โ ข 27

In 2014, Desert Storms premiered in Turkey as Cรถl Firtinalari, produced by the Turkish State Theatre. It has been staged in several cities, such as Istanbul, Ankara and Diyarbakir.

28 • Tariq Ali and Thorvald Steen

Thorvald Steen • 29

Thorvald Steen

Going to the theatre A version of this text has previously been published in Dagsavisen.

Translated by Åshild Lappegård Lahn.

I have just returned from the theatre, in Istanbul. Its official name is Devlet Tiyatrolari – the Turkish State Theatre, and a directorate that organizes tours of plays all over Turkey. The play I was invited to see was Cöl Firtinalari, or Desert Storms in English, written by Tariq Ali and myself in 2010.

The play’s origin is an exciting story.

On June 5th-7th 2008 there was a seminar

on Henrik Wergeland at the House of Literature in Oslo, on the occasion of the 200 year anniversary of this great Norwegian poet. Among the attendants were a number of Norwegians, but also an array of foreign intellectuals and writers. When I, at the end of my talk, About reconciliation, called upon the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to institute a global celebration of Saladin, a strange atmosphere filled the

30 • Thorvald Steen

room. The Norwegians had never heard of Saladin. The applause was feeble and hesitant, but someone was cheering, amongst which were Tariq Ali and Elias Khoury.

Not only did they know of Saladin, but they had written outstanding books and articles about him. The House of Literature in Oslo seized the opportunity and decided to launch the International Saladin Days. They commissioned the play and it premiered at the House of Literature in Oslo during the 2010 International Saladin Days, in cooperation with the National Theatre in Oslo and the touring theatre Riksteatret.

Above all, the play is about the struggle between fundamentalist faith and human doubt.

The play, which went for full houses, was directed by Stein Winge and performed by prominent actors such as Bjørn Sundquist, Monna Tandberg, Pia Tjelta and Pål Sverre Hagen. The latter even received a Hedda Award, the Norwegian national theatre award, for his performance, and the play was nominated twice.

After the last performance, all the contributors and participants dined together and celebrated our great collaboration.

Because this was it. Theatre is the art of the present. We did not think the play would ever be put on again, despite the current interest for its historical themes.

Sadly, but people working in the theatre are used to this. New pieces and roles are waiting.

Desert Storms is about the Crusader King Richard I and the Kurdish Muslim army general Saladin, both fighting for Jerusalem. The year is 1191. The two of them never came face to face. In the play they do. Above all, the play is about the struggle

between fundamentalist faith and human doubt. In 1187, Saladin and his army, consisting of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Jews and Christian minorities, had conquered Jerusalem. For 88 years, the Crusaders had occupied the city considered holy by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

In 1099, Crusaders killed or banished Jews, Muslims and others from Jerusalem. Originally an army general, a sultan in the Sunni-ruled Syria, Saladin partook in the conquest of the Shia-ruled Egypt.

In his early years as a sultan, he was brutal to Shias and Sufis. After beating the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in June 1187, a well-known battle in the Muslim World, Saladin makes a decision that is unusual – to say the least – then as now.

If he and his army should succeed in capturing Jerusalem from the Crusaders, he would keep the holy city open to followers of all religions. And he decided not to seek revenge. In October 1187, this becomes a reality.

Even among Christians and Jews, Saladin’s name was well known during the Middle Ages. Pope Gregory VIII was furious after the herald, reaching Rome before Christmas in 1187, reported that Saladin not only had taken the city, but opened it to both Jews and Muslims. In the Pope’s opinion, the city should be exclusively for Christians, particularly Christians who were not in contact with Jews and Muslims.

The play opens with Pope Gregory VIII’s speech to Christianity, in which he calls upon all Christians to seize the cross, march on Jerusalem and kill as many heretics as possible on their way. My childhood hero, Richard the Lionheart, becomes the leader of the Third Crusade upon Frederick Barbarossa’s death. In addition to the Pope, Saladin and Richard, Jamila (Saladin’s wife), Philip (French Crusader king),

Thorvald Steen • 31

Eleanor (Richard’s mother) and Ibn Maymun (Saladin’s Jewish personal physician) all figure in the play.

After the Oslo premiere on March 5, 2010, critics as well as members of the audience questioned several of the roles in the play. Was it possible that Saladin had had a Jewish personal physician, and that he opened up Jerusalem, was Richard really an anti-semite and fundamentalist (in our current terminology), and was the play too kind to Saladin? Those were some of the objections. In academia and in school, we learn little about Saladin and the Third Crusade. Some wondered if Eleanor was pure fiction. Not at all. She fought in the Second Crusade herself, and supported her son in every respect. King Philip, on the other hand, disagreed with or opposed Richard’s brutal conduct on several occasions.

But for the Norwegian audience, the biggest surprise was Saladin himself, whom they had not heard of. I myself first started reading about him in the early 1990s, after my Palestinian colleague Izzat Ghazzawi told me that the sultan was his prime source of inspiration when seeking contact and cooperation with Israeli colleagues after his son was shot by Israeli soldiers. The first time he said the name, I thought Saladin was the unknown cousin of Aladdin. Most Norwegians I know were shaped by Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe (1817), in which King Richard returned from the Holy Land after freeing Jerusalem. In 1825, Scott writes The Talisman. By then, he has evidently come across information on Saladin, probably from Christian sources. This information must have taken him by surprise to the same extent it did the playwrights of Desert Storms. The Talisman portrays Saladin as a chivalrous man without faults of any kind. The representation is, in my opinion,

rather naïve and romantic. Even Saladin was, as we all are, a complex human being.

Richard’s Third Crusade was a complete failure. He never managed to retake the city. He fled and was captured, not by Muslims, but by another Crusader, Duke Leopold of Austria, but that is another story. If you are unfamiliar with it, you are hardly alone.

In 2013, the Turkish State Theatre contacted me. They had read and discussed Desert Storms, and wanted to speak to Tariq and myself. We are both known in Turkey as writers, but that was not the primary reason for the request, nor their view of the text’s literary quality, but rather «because the piece challenged deep-rooted perceptions in their culture».

Since the premiere in March 2014, the play has been performed in eight cities, among them Ankara and the Kurdish capital Diyarbakir. The ensemble has been on tour for ten months.

The first time he said the name, I thought Saladin was the unknown cousin of Aladdin.

I had seen a few photos from the premiere, and discussed several of the roles with the dramaturg, Selen Korad Birkye, and with the actors. I was excited and nervous as the curtain went up. Around me was an audience of 600 people. I thought it was a shame Tariq had not been able to make it, and that the writer Yasar Kemal, who wanted to be present, had become seriously ill.

It was a powerful performance. The actors wore costumes in bright colors.

New music had been composed, and they used advanced audiovisual equipment. In the last scene, they used footage from our time. The audience saw helicopters ap-

32 • Thorvald Steen

proaching us and missiles being launched.

Four parts of the stage were raised and lowered during the performance, and more than sixty people partook in the battle scenes. The theatre had hired a choreographer especially for that. And most importantly, as in Norway, the actors were first class: Tolga Evren, Celal Kadri Kınoğlu, Nihal Tercan, Burcu Tuna and Yusuf Can Sancali are big names in Istanbul and Turkey.

What in the play caused the most reactions from the audience and the actors during rehearsals? The day after the gala, the theatre, together with the Norwegian Embassy in Ankara, hosted a conversation with the audience and the press, and me onstage.

The audience knew Saladin well, but had never known that he was a Kurd.

They had been taught that he was Turkish, and a warlord who defeated the Crusaders.

The audience knew Saladin well, but had never known that he was a Kurd. They had been taught that he was Turkish, and a warlord who defeated the Crusaders.

Some were surprised that he was physically sick and weak (from malaria), and that his wife Jamila discussed politics and chess with him. That Saladin opened up for reconciliation was news for the older members of the audience. Few knew that Saladin had been popular with the Jews and had a Jewish physician. When the Jews had to flee Andalucia during the Middle Ages, thousands came to Saladin-controlled places in the Middle East.

Among others, this was true for the Maymun family, from which the physician on stage was a descendant. The family was

known for, among other things, producing many eminent physicians.

Several members of the audience also wondered whether there really had been opposition within the Crusader army.

Could it be that King Philip reacted against the massacre that Richard led in Acre, in which thousands of women and children were killed? I could confirm that this was the case, and that military disagreements was most likely one of the reasons the Third Crusade dissolved.

And was it historically correct, many wanted to know, that Richard was unable to take Jerusalem? He never was able to take the city. Saladin invited him to come, unarmed, to the Church of the Resurrection to pray, but he refused, and left to travel home, accompanied by four knights.

The rest of the army stayed behind.

Finally, the fact that Jews and Muslims have a long, shared history was unknown to many. The Crusaders united them during the Middle Ages. Not Cristians, but the Crusaders were their mutual enemy.

A journalist says she read in the program that I do not think Shakespeare would have any interest in writing plays about Richard.

Why? I reply that the Richard that Shakespeare knew was the same man I learned about: someone flawless and without discrepancies. A hero that is mentioned in King John, a one-dimensional man, about whom it was not very interesting to write dramatic poetry.

Finally, a female student asks if there exists a Saladin today. It is hard to find any one such person, but there are actions that contain a «saladin impulse». In Oslo, young Muslims have, literally, formed a «peace ring» around the Oslo synagogue.

Thorvald Steen, Oslo 25.02.2015

34 • Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali

The perils of Islamophobia The Saladin Lecture 2010 This lecture by Tariq Ali was given on March 3, 2010, as the first Saladin lecture.

Before coming here for this lecture I was in Yemen, and I told them I couldn’t stay, I had to return to Oslo for the Saladin Days, because I have written a play about Saladin. And many intellectuals were completely taken aback and bemused.

«You have what? Where? Why?» So I had to explain to them what the Saladin Days are, and people were really touched. So that is what I say when I go to the Arab world, but when Norwegian journalists ask me why I wrote the play Desert Storms together with Thorvald Steen, I give a different reply. I say, «to make up for the Oslo accords. We have to do something to combat that disaster.»

We are here to discuss the barrels of Islamophobia. As always, I think it is important to start with an historical understanding of what the religions were which are supposed to have been clashing and which have been clashing for some time, and the civilizations that they have spurred. What has been the effect of one on the other? Islam was the last of the three monotheistic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Being the last of these religions, Islam was the most modern, scripturally. The Qur’an has many prescriptions which may seem odd to a modern reader, but which did not seem odd at all to those who heard it being recited at that time; about prescriptions for trade, interest, what you charge and don’t charge, what is permissible and not.

The reason is that the religion grew out of a trading community; it was taken to large parts of the world not through conquest – although some places it was taken through conquest, and we will come to that in a minute – but through trade: it was the traders who reached the shores of China, and the shores of Africa. And they found a willing ear, because the religion as such was monotheistic, and preached a simple, but effective egalitarianism in societies which were rent by differences, either hierarchical differences or caste differences.

Christianity, on the other hand, was born inside an empire, struggling before it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And soon after, that empire went into sharp decline. Of course, this is a big debate; the great intellectuals of the European Enlightenment, Hume and Gibbon in particular, argue that it was not accidental that the Empire declined when it became markedly religious, that this somehow ended the spontaneity that had existed in pagan Rome, by making it concentrate too much on religion. However, this view was contested, for obvious reasons, by St. Augustin and other Catholic divines, who claimed that the Empire gave the world something that was absolutely necessary in order to move forward.

This is a debate that goes on, and an interesting one, by the way.

Islam was born outside two empires;

Tariq Ali • 35

the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire. It was a small religion, begun by traders who felt that they had to unite the tribes who where divided in Southern Arabia. Basically then, Islam was conceived of as a political religious movement to unite the tribes so they could defend their interests against these two huge empires which existed on either side. And they did so, by proclaiming that everyone was equal before the Creator. That is written in the text: each and every Muslim is the same. It doesn’t work out like that, as we know, but that is the scriptural version.

This had a big impact in ancient Persia; the caste-ridden, Zoroastrian society were stunned when the Muslim armies arrived; These armies’ generals and the ordinary soldiers were sitting around on the same piece of cloth on the floor, eating food from the same receptacle. This was unheard of in cast-ridden societies, in Persia, or later in India, where you couldn’t even eat from the same receptacle used by a lower caste for fear of pollution. This opened the doors to massive voluntary conversions to a religion that said, «we are all equal».

The origins of Islam, then, were not in empires, but as a religion promising equality, and attempting to unite its tribes.

And it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams or hopes. Having won, first, the Persian Empire, and, some centuries later, the Byzantine Empire, after the fall of Constantinople, it created its own empire and civilization. But this empire and civilization was created always as a synthesis. Because their own scripture didn’t say everything – on the contrary, it said very little – a lot was taken from the traditions, civilizations and cultures that they found, in Persia, in India, and in the Byzantine world. Many things were taken from this world in the best possible sense, and be-

came part of Islamic civilization and culture.

The other big debate that occupies historians is: What would have happened if Charles Martel’s armies had lost the battle of Poitiers in the 9th century? Gibbon was very clear on what would have happened; instead of the boring sound of monks and monasteries, we would have been hearing allahu akhbar in the cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge. Other historians have written that Hegel then wouldn’t have found it necessary to go into tortuous arguments to explain the superiority of Christianity, which he only managed to explain by finding the leader Shalaman, who he said was actually the founding father of Christianity, because he came after Muhammad. Because Hegel, being quite logical, felt that the latest religion was of course the most modern. Others are saying that, if Islam had won the battle of Poitiers, most of Western Europe would have been under Arab civilization, and we would have possibly gotten a book written by the equivalent of Weber Letz ibn Weber called The Kharijite Ethic and Capitalism.

The origins of Islam […] were not in empires, but as a religion promising equality, and attempting to unite its tribes. And it succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams or hopes.

This was the civilization which, despite the fact that it had to coexist with other civilizations, was largely dominant in the Mediterranean world for several centuries, in El-Andalus in Spain, in Sicily. If we were to give this civilization a broader name, I would call it the Judeo-Islamic civilization, because this was a civilization

36 • Tariq Ali

which worked very closely with the Jews and people of Jewish origin. They rose to the highest positions ever in Medieval history, in Sicily, and in Islamic Spain, and of course in the Arab world proper, where 80 per cent of Saladin’s advisors, when he was vizier of Egypt, including his physician, Ibn Maymoun, were people of Jewish origin. This only surprises people now, because they are looking at it from today’s perspective, and find it impossible. But at that time, it was normal.

One big difference, today, between large swathes of the Western world, and the Middle East and the Muslim world, is that, in the latter, there is still a strong sense of history.

So what happened, then? What happened was that capitalism, as a system, as a civilization, as modernity, developed largely in Western Europe for contingent reasons, which, in my opinion, have little to do with ideology or religion, but have a great deal to do with the fact that it was here that feudalism was first born. From feudalism emerged urban civilization in European towns; these towns became absolutely crucial in the passage from feudalism to absolutism, and, subsequently, towards the development and birth of capitalism. From that, you saw the creation of new empires, which became dominant.

We can say that capitalism was born in the 17th or 18th century in Europe, and used Europe as a launching pad to take the world, and came very close to doing it; in fact, more or less did it. And once it did so, it became absolutely vital, ideologically, for imperial conquest to be justified.

This conquest could only be justified by saying that «the reason we won, is be-

cause we are superior.» This superiority, then became a cultural superiority, and, in time, a racial superiority, something it had not been earlier. Although, there is always an element of racism in imperial trajectories; the Roman historians used to write about how the worst and most backward land they ever conquered was England, and how the English were almost as bad as animals, because they didn’t know how to have a bath. And, of course, from one point of view, they were correct. Then they thought that they would civilize Britain, which they attempted to do by teaching them how to bathe and build roads. It didn’t get beyond that, because the weather defeated them, like it defeats even the English working class. And so, the new imperial conquest which took place meant the conquest of large numbers of Muslim lands.

This is how early imperialism works in the dominant empire, in Britain; first, you send the company, then a company is given commission by the government to set up and recruit its own army, and then it conquers. The East India Company took India, the Dutch East India Company took Indonesia. They were companies, set up by government royal charter to do it, and they did it. So immediately, you have the defeat of Islam in India, which more or less had a Muslim ruling class; taken over by the British, and a total conquest of Indonesia, the largest Muslim state in the world, again by the British. And by 1839, the very same year the British captured Hong Kong, they also conquered the port of Aden in Saudi Arabia to challenge the Ottoman Empire, which was the dominant Muslim empire at the time, and which could be brutal, but, interestingly enough, was largely brutal to its own heretics.

Within Islam, Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities received enormous

Tariq Ali • 37

protection; the system of millet meant that the religious groups had autonomy and were left untouched, as long as they paid their taxes to the state. This system still exists, to a certain extent, in what is today Lebanon. The occupation by Turkish forces, then, was largely an economic occupation. They would send senior civil servants to run the country, and make sure that the taxes were collected, so that the imperial treasury in Istanbul was not depleted.

The Ottomans, then, controlled large swathes of what is today’s Middle East.

Gradually, the British and the French began to fight for it, but it wasn’t until the end of the first World War, with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire for backing the wrong side, that they took the Middle East away, essentially turning it into colonial outposts for the two big dominant parties of the time, France and Germany. So, the last stronghold failed, and imperial occupation of the Maghreb by the French, and the Middle East, largely by the British and the French, then brought a new way of life for people, and different people reacted in different ways. Anti-imperial movements developed in different countries. In Libya, you had a very sustained and strong uprising against the Italian occupation, where one of Mussolini’s generals, general Graziani, brutally slaughtered tens and tens of thousands of Libyans and publicly hanged the religious scholar who was leading the revolt.

Interestingly, Ghaddafi, though he is slightly nutty, when he arrived for his first public visit to Rome last year, was wearing a huge badge with the picture of the man the Italians had hanged, and walking behind him was the son of this man, who was in his nineties. When people asked him who is the old man was, Ghaddafi replied, «he is the son of the man you

hanged.» So he is a bit mad, but sometimes, there’s a method in his madness.

People forget that Islam was part of this European world before it was brutally pushed away by the Inquisition, and the re-conquests in Spain, Portugal and Sicily.

I believe that the one big difference, today, between large swathes of the Western world, and the Middle East and the Muslim world, is that, in the latter, there is still a strong sense of history. People remember something that happened six hundred years ago as if it were yesterday.

Now, it can be said that the failure of modernization has pushed this world in that direction, constantly living in the past, but it is not just that. I have suggested to reality programs that you would learn a lot if you set up TV cameras in three cafes; in Damascus, in Cairo, and choose another city in that world, and then set one up in London, in New York, and choose some other European country. Just record without doing anything for three months, come back and edit, and see what people are talking about. It would be very interesting, genuinely, to see what they are. I am prepared to predict that in the cafes in the Middle East, they are discussing the state of the world, they are cursing their leaders as corrupt so-and-sos, they are engaged and lively, whereas a bulk of Europe, I’m afraid, would be discussing what has happened to the latest celebrity love affair, or what the latest fashions are.

If we now turn to Islamophobia, this has only begun in recent years – the last thirty years, or so– with migration from the Muslim world into Europe. And, of

38 • Tariq Ali

course, people forget that Islam was part of this European world before it was brutally pushed away by the Inquisition, and the re-conquests in Spain, Portugal and Sicily. As for the Jews, they suffered together with the Muslims. They were also part of this world, and part of its culture.

There would have been no Renaissance had Arab civilization not dominated the Mediterranean. And looking at the great books of the Renaissance, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, you will find that a lot is derived from European Arabic literature from that period, something Dante himself acknowledges. That world changed completely with the domination exercised

by Europe, when it became what it remains today, or, rather, when it was even more powerful than it is today, because today, Europe essentially does what the United States tells it to do, and in those days, it used to have its own interests, which, in many cases, differed from those of the United States. And so now, you have a Muslim migration into Europe, just like, in the late years of the 19th century, and the early years of the 20th century, you had a Jewish migration to Europe, to escape the pogroms. At that time, the bulk of the world’s Jews, five million of them, lived in what the Tsarist Empire had designated the «Pale of Settlement»; meaning they couldn’t move out of that area. They were quite happy with that, but when pogroms began to decimate them within the Pale of Settlement, they began to migrate. And these migrations, essentially, is what made the traditional anti-Semitism of Christianity something very real. One cannot isolate one from the other.

In the book The Jewish Century, Russian Jewish historian Yuri Slezkine writes that, in the 20th century, the Jews had one hell and three possible heavens. And the one

hell, we know, was Europe. It was the heaven that turned out to be a hell. The three heavens, he argues, were Communism, Zionism and, as he puts it, an intellectual presence, thanks to Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis. He could have added a fourth one, which was entertainment in Hollywood, but he did not. These three heavens, however, meant that two countries in the world became crucial for the Jewish diaspora; the United States and Russia. The numbers of Russian Jews at the top levels of the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties show that an overwhelming majority of the leadership of these parties were Jews or people of Jewish origin, because this was the route they had chosen for their liberation. The more religious ones opted for Palestine. Initially, there was an internal debate over whether they should just have a cultural presence, or a political presence, in Palestine. A cultural presence would not have posed any problems at all for anyone, because it was part of the tradition; there were large Jewish communities in Baghdad and in Cairo for centuries, not to mention Istanbul. But a political presence, which is what the British Empire wanted, and what a section of the Zionist movement went for, created some of the problems which have arisen, but we leave that aside for a moment.

Apart from that, until the last period of Stalin’s dementia, by and large, Jews in the former Soviet Union reached incredibly high positions from 1917 onwards continuously. That is documented. And it was the total overthrow of that world which created other problems.

However, the propaganda used against the Jews of Europe, was not that dissimilar from that which is used against Muslims today: they wear funny clothes; they cover their heads; they wear kaftans; they speak a strange language which is foreign to us,

Tariq Ali • 39

yiddish; they have a different day of Sabbath; they have a diet, which means they don’t eat pork (why that should be a problem for anyone, I don’t know, but it obviously is). All these kinds of things were said about Jews, and, looking at old documents, printed in fairly reasonable, liberal papers, you will be quite astonished at the level of prejudice and hostility against the Other, asserting that «they are not like us». They never ask «why aren’t they like us?», because they expelled the Jews from Europe. The poor Jews were described as Bolsheviks, and the rich Jews were described as plutocrats, so they couldn’t win in any way. To write off a people like this is totally, completely foolish and crazy, and it lead to horrific crimes.

Now, if you look at some of the things that have been said against Islam at the present moment, they are very similar.

And these are not even said by ignorant people, or editors of extreme right newspapers in Denmark, these are said by people who teach history. At Harvard. This is the professor of history at Harvard, Niall Ferguson: «A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize – the term is not too strong – a sleeping Europe.» This is Christopher Caldwell, leading columnist of the Financial Times, a fairly liberal newspaper: «Muslims are already conquering Europe, street by street.» You may point out to these people that Europe has a population of 493 million, and out of these, Muslims are, at best, three per cent, or – if you want to exaggerate – four per cent. Let’s exaggerate. But if you point this out to Christopher Caldwell, his reply is interesting: «Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably» – and he doesn’t say Jews – «there were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than

there are Islamists in Europe today.»

«Europe is becoming Eurabia» is a widespread notion amongst European columnists, while the Dutch Geert Wilders have proposed to expel millions of Muslims from Europe.

The arguments made today are virtually the same as the arguments used against the Jews; «they are different, their dress is different.» A more modern excuse, which wasn’t used against Jews, is that «they mistreat their women». All Muslims mistreat their women? And all Christians are good to their women? A few years ago, statistics showed that more women were mistreated in Scotland by good, decent, indigenous Scottish people, than by any minority in that country.

The propaganda used against the Jews of Europe, was not that dissimilar from that which is used against Muslims today.

Now the hijab, a headdress, becomes an absolutely critical point of discussion.

But why? My position on these things is very straight forward; I am strongly opposed to Iran and Saudi Arabia forcing women to wear the hijab, not to mention the Taliban, so how can I be in favour of a supposedly liberal government telling women what they should not wear? For me, it is two sides of the same coin. The argument you are met with then, is «yes, but women are only wearing it because they’re pressured by their men.» But I say, that is not the reason. I have talked to large numbers of women wearing the hijab, and reasons vary. I remember asking a young Turkish woman once, in Istanbul, why she wore it, and she said, «because I can’t go out to meet my boyfriend, and it is to deceive my father.» Well, fair enough. I

40 • Tariq Ali

was quite sympathetic. Large numbers of hijab-wearing women were on the beaches, engaged in hard work with their boyfriends, and all wearing the hijab, so what?

Would it be better if they weren’t wearing it? Furthermore, covering the head is an old tradition which actually predates Islam in large parts of what is the Islamic world. There is no Qur’anic injunction against it; all the Qur’an says, in one and a half sentence, is «dress modestly». There are, however, patriarchal traditions, which have been very strong, especially in tribal areas, but not just in the Muslim world.

Although no one is interested in really arguing it out; it is part of the Islamophobia. We have to oppose it, because it is accepting all this rubbish coming out from these people. We have to oppose it, because, otherwise, what is the fear? That you be taken over? How could this possibly happen? This idiot Caldwell talks about the Bolsheviks, and does not understand anything about how that revolution was made. It is an extremely worrying development that is taking place, and it is largely related to fear of the Other, to the migration that is taking place in Europe. I am strongly in favour of Muslim women, like all other women, fighting for whatever they wish to fight for, and to impose something on them has exactly the opposite effect. If a government told me «you can’t wear a jacket», I would wear it every single day, no matter what the bloody government was. It is a basic instinct not to be told what to do by the state on this level.

However, there are, obviously, many things happening in different communities, some Muslims, some non-Muslims, that need to be criticized; honour killings, for instance, are disgraceful, and have to be stamped out. But you use the laws of the land to do that. I am in favour, not of religious laws, but of one law for every

citizen of every European country. In European countries where you have religious laws; Jewish laws or Christian laws, or courts which serve those, you cannot deny it to any other religion. Nor, should I say, are honour killings confined to the world of Islam: in South America, they are part of a large tradition, from a particularly virulent form of Catholicism; Catholicism and patriarchy. Garcia Marquez wrote a whole novel about it; The Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Sometimes, in the British press, they report a «Muslim crime»; a crime committed by a Muslim guy. Big headlines! It is awful what has happened, but similar crimes are committed, unfortunately, by everyone else too.

Somehow, a campaign is underway.

One reason, I said, is the migration into Europe. And the other reason, which many people don’t like talking about too much, is the European occupation of Muslim lands. You have Iraq wrecked and occupied, and that occupation shows no sign of ending. The United States are building 50 bases, for how long? «As long as it takes.»

As long as it takes for what? What they don’t dare say; as long as Iraq’s oil lasts.

Because this process we are witnessing in the Middle East today is, essentially, a process of re-colonization, albeit with a different ideology. These horrific little bases that the United States are building in Iraq are like small town America. They have everything; a Subway to buy your sandwiches; Starbucks; Eastern European prostitutes brought in, because they are needed too; drug dealers, rampant. This is small town America, totally recreated in the middle of Iraq. And Europe is part of it, because it does nothing.

Secondly, we have Afghanistan. I have said this many a time before; the number of armies and soldiers present in that unfortunate country is quite staggering, if

Tariq Ali • 41

you think about it. Apart from Norway, you have Ukraine, Romania, Georgia, then all the Western European countries.

The one big country of the world, apart from China, which hasn’t sent troops to Afghanistan, is Russia, and there is a good reason for that: they were there before.

They know what happens. And then we are told that this is going to help the Afghani people, although all the intelligence that has been coming out of Afghanistan over the last six years, suggests otherwise.

The conditions for women: worse. The level of social and wage differences: huge.

The production of heroin: hits the ceiling.

Arms dealers, smugglers: it is their world.

This is what the NATO armies are defending. And having told their populations for the last nine years that we are going to destroy the Taliban, which is the worst, most evil thing that exists in the world, they are now saying, «we are negotiating with the Taliban, and trying to bring them into the central government.» There is no clear answer from the NATO armies, now, as to why the hell they are there in the first place. Europe went in because the United States wanted them to, and that shows the shift in Europe, because not a single European country sent troops to fight in Vietnam. But now, the United States beckons, and Europe goes. And Europe’s citizens sleepwalk from one disaster to the other, not thinking about it. One reason why they don’t think about it is, essentially, because of this big, Islamophobic mood that is being created: «It is only Muslims that are being killed.» Over a million Iraqis have died. Any other politician responsible for that would be charged with war crimes. But you cannot do that now, because these are Western politicians responsible for occupying and destroying that country, and they cannot be charged, can they? The laws are not made for them,

they are made for the people who oppose the West. So Islamophobia is becoming part of these double standards that dominate European politics today. We know what the US is like, it is an empire, and we know what empires do, historically; they defend their interests, and if their interest is to occupy country A and wreck country B, they do it. But Europe, which one had thought had gotten away from that whole imperial business, is back in it again. The European project is dead now, if you think about it. All that unites them is this stupid Islamophobia.

Islamophobia is becoming part of these double standards that dominate European politics today.

The last point to be made about Islamophobia, is about the amount of education that has taken place in Europe since the second World War, but specifically over the last thirty years. The Judeocide, or Holocaust – I prefer the word Judeocide, because it is more accurate – of the second World War, which lead to these massacres and killings of Jews in Europe; we are all educated about it, as we should be. But there must be something wrong if all this education is limited simply to one community. So a million Iraqis can be killed, but that doesn’t affect people so much.

Or five million Congolese have died over the last fifteen years, in wars which Western countries were involved in directly through their companies. That doesn’t involve too many people. The Judeocide does. If this is the only effect of that education, then it is faulty. And it is now used in a new way across Europe, by the Israeli embassies, who say that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic. This sentiment is very strong now, although not in all of Europe, thank

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God, because the response to Gaza in Norway was exemplary, and the response to Gaza in Britain was pretty good. But in France and Germany, the response to Gaza was pitiful. Why? Because Germans are still made to feel guilty for what their fathers or, mainly, grandfathers did. How long can this go on? Even Jewish people that are critical of Israel were banned, just a few days ago, in Germany, from speaking in Germany. Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were in Auchwitz, and who said, «I started my investigations because my mother said to me, ‘there’s something wrong with the number of people who died in the Holocaust, it seems to be going up and up, because people are busy making money’.» He wrote a book called The Holocaust Industry, of which one of the greatest Jewish scholars of all time, Raul Hilberg, said: «Finkelstein has not gone far enough, it’s even worse than he writes.» Finkelstein was not allowed to speak in Berlin, because a whole group of Greens and others got together and said it was anti-Semitism. Naomi Klein, whom many of you will have heard of, came out after Gaza and demanded a boycott of investments and sanctions against Israel, like, she said, we did against South Africa.

She was denounced in the German press as an anti-Semite – she is Jewish herself !

It is a crazy world we are living in at the moment.

All this has become part of the Islamophobia, because a lot of Zionists who support Israel are totally part and parcel of this campaign. Even though they should know what happened to Judeo-Islamic civilizations, now they talk about a Judeo-Christian civilization. The aim of this is not to take seriously what is going on in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. There is a blindness to Palestinian suffering, and a big campaign against the Palestinians –

who have suffered defeat after defeat. Now the Israelis want ghettos for the Palestinians: «We want a Palestine with which we can live,» is the phrase they use. But the only Palestine with which they can live, is a Palestine in which Palestine will die.

I want to end with two wonderful quotes, from novelists both. One from Joseph Roth, one of the great European novelists in the Interwar period. And what he wrote, in 1937, is very important for us: Jews will only gain complete equality and the dignity of external freedom once their host nations have attained their own inner freedom, as well as the dignity confirmed by the sympathy for the plight of others.

The same applies to Islam today, just as much. And it is worth pondering about.

The last point is that, despite the fact that things are bad, that politics has become totally predictable in most parts of the West, and that this often leads people to giving up hope, I think that is the worst of all alternatives. Because many of us, who are educated, who can read, we have a responsibility not to give up, but to carry on. And a very famous Chinese novelist, Lu Xun, wrote something very wonderful in 1921, when it appeared that China was just going under, with warlords, desperation, famine, the Japanese threatening to come in, killings, and civil war. And Lu Xun wrote: I thought hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads that cross the earth. For, actually, the earth had no roads to begin with. But when many men pass one way, a road is made.

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Elias Khoury

Re-writing 1948 The Saladin lecture 2011 This lecture by Elias Khoury was first presented on March 7, 2011, during the Saladin Days. It has later been published by the Critical Inquiry (Vol. 38, No. 2) under the title «Rethinking the Nakba».

In his novel The Orchard (1972), the Israeli writer Benjamin Tamouz reformulates the image of the land as the arena of the struggle in Palestine. In this symbolic novella, the Israeli writer tries to go beyond the image of the Arab in the Israeli literature, as a dumb shadow. The dumb in this novella is Luna the woman, who symbolizes the land. The struggle between the two brothers on her will end with their consecutive deaths, and the son will appropriate the mother- land.

One can say that the very highly symbolic style in Tamouz’s work overshadows the magic elements that a tale embodies.

The memories of the narrator will show the limits of symbolism, and how the story of pain in the Palestinian Theater is erased by a poor mirroring of the old myth of Abraham and his two wives and sons.

Ishmael and Isaac will take the names of Obadiah (Abdullah) and Daniel, two brothers born to a Russian German father, the first from a Muslim Turkish mother, and the second from a Jewish Russian mother. The two will meet in the orchard of Mahomet Effendi, a Turkish land owner in Jaffa, who has an adopted girl, whose origins are vague, is she a Jewish or a Muslim Arab? No one knows.

The fight between the two brothers for the woman, who takes the shape

of a mythical character, will end in their deaths, and the mother will become pregnant by her Palmachi son.

One can read this novella as a new version of A.B. Yehushua’s story Facing the forests. The same dream of fire and the same ambiguities that veil the story of the indigenous Palestinians. In Facing the Forests, not only the nameless Palestinian is called an Arab, but also the name of his original village disappeares alongside the village itself under the forest. Whereas in the novella of Tammuz, the Palestinian is not even an Arab, he is the son of a Turkish mother, and the identity of his people is vague.

But the interesting development here is the woman who resembles the orchard, or the Bayyara, as the Palestinians call their orchards. This woman is dumb, and she refuses, all through the novel, to speak with her husband, the Russian immigrant, while there are signs that she speaks with her Muslim lover. What is sure, is that she will speak to her son, the new Jew, the Israeli Kibutznik and soldier, who will inherit his two fathers by his sword?

The Arab or the Muslim is not dumb in The Orchard, and he is not the ghost of the two Arab twins Khalil and Aziz haunting the dreams of Hanna with rape, as in My Michael by Amos Oz (1968); he is a partner and an enemy, and his death

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will declare the new Jew as the legitimate heir of the mother and the land.

The twins in the novel of Amos Oz are two ghosts infiltrating from a vague childhood memory of a Gloom and dark Jerusalem, whereas the Arab in Facing the Forest, is represented as a man whose tongue was cut, and whose memories can only express themselves through the fire that will eat the trees, thus becoming only an agent for the Jewish young scholar to discover the land and appropriate it.

In the novella of Tammuz, the land is mute. Luna, the lover of the two brothers cannot speak for herself, and her appropriation by the son, who will become her true lover, will be accomplished with the fire of two consecutive wars, the war of 1948, which the Israelis call the war of independence, and the Palestinians saw as their Nakba or disaster, and the invasion of Egypt by the Israeli army in 1956, alongside with the British and French troops in the Suez campaign.

The question of muteness is not only a literary problem; it is an integral part of a literary paradigm.

One must note that this way of seeing the struggle in Palestine is also loaded with direct symbolism in the Palestinian Literature. The first Palestinian novella narrating aspects of the Nakba, written

by Ghassan Kanafani and published in 1963 (the same year of the publication of Yehushua’s novella), was also loaded with a similar heavy allegorical aspect. Men in the Sun relates the story of three Palestinian generations in the search of individual salvation, and their tragic death in the desert without obtaining the chance to knock the walls of the water tank, where they were hiding in order to be smuggled to Kuwait.

How can one understand this similarity in both literatures?

One can argue that this was not the case in the Israeli literature, and will refer to the major novella of S. Yizhar Khirbit Khiza (1949), as a realistic testimony of the war of 1948. I have argued that this novella is a very important and impressing work, and it is a rare demonstration of the ability of literature to cross the walls of dominant representations, but on the other hand Khirbet Khiza respected the lines that cannot be crossed. The Palestinian peasants who were driven out from their village are voiceless, they are a part of a landscape that was in violent transformation during the war, and their role in the story is limited to the biblical paradigm, where they remind the Jews of their need to redemption, and give them the possibility to have their own Jews.

The question of muteness is not only a literary problem; it is an integral part of a literary paradigm.

This literary work was unique in the Israeli Literature of the generation of the war, and when the story will be related by the next generation of writers, they will keep the limits and lines drawn by Yizhar.

One can argue that relating the story of a human tragedy in such an indirect way was a demonstration of the muteness of language, facing the cruelty of history. But let us try to define this notion of muteness. Is Language mute? What is the meaning and the connotations of a literature written without a tongue?

I will try in this paper to read the Palestinian Nakba, through this situation of muteness that will give the Palestinians their status in the post 1948, as the Jews of the Jews.

Literature is not and cannot be a historical reference, and all the novels and

46 • Elias Khoury

poems, both Israeli and Palestinian, that related fragments of the Nakba, cannot be treated as documents, but they can be conceived as mirrors of the different trends in the ideological scene. Knowing that these mirrors are parts of the history of the genre, one must not neglect the literary tendencies, and schools. In this sense we cannot study the early works of Oz and Yehushua and Kanafani without understanding the huge impact of French existentialism on the world literary scene.

On the other hand, the ideological approaches, The Canaanite movement in Israel, and the revival of the Marxist realism in the Arab World, will give us a better understanding of the works of Tammuz and Kanafani and Emile Habibi.

With the Emergence of Rita, as a stable figure of the lover in the poetry of Darwish, an Israeli girl will occupy the love myth in modern Arabic Poetry.

I suggest that The Orchard can play a major role in clarifying the muteness of language. First, we have the Binding of Isaac (the Akeda), as an approach and a theme of sacrifice and victimization. Second, the reference to Luna, the moon goddess, is essential. She is the ageless mother, who embodies the histories of the two brothers, playing the role of an archetype.

Third, the feud between the two brothers, that will cover the real history with myths.

Questions like «who is the real lover and father», «who is right and who is wrong», will be rendered meaningless the moment the Palmachi son kills his unclefather and make love to his mother. The new Israeli is the issue and not the Jew. Daniels’ words at the end of the novella

will be a hopeless scream. The Jew will die in the orchard, hoping to meet the shadow of his dead Muslim brother, but his voice will be echoing emptiness.

You see that the orchard serves as a cover and hiding place for all sorts of things that have no justice in them, said Daniel. ... Yes, no justice in them, he repeated his words firmly. I came to the land of my fathers so that I can live a life of justice and honesty, and look, what have I done?

I have made a dark orchard, a sanctuary for wrongdoers. I murdered my brother in the orchard. ... Perhaps burn it, Daniel whispered. If we burn it, bare trunks will remain, and it will be possible to see from one end to the other, everything will be transparent and clear again.

The orchard is not burned, as in the case of Facing the Forests, and the fire of Yehushua will purify no one, on the contrary, it will become part of the conquest of the land through appropriating it, and inheriting a map with the traces of fire.

The allegorical nature of this novella will give the narrator a kind of freedom that will permit him to erase the Palestinian from the map of the land. Obadiah is not a Palestinian; he is half Jewish half Turkish. And the dispute with his brother is demonstrated in the frame of the Canaanite approach about the Hebraic people. The non-existing Palestinian is not a small detail here; it is the issue that dominates the whole approach.

The Palestinian writer Anton Shammas was obliged to redraw the two twins Khalil and Aziz in My Michael as two deaf mute sons of Surraya Said in his novel Arabesque. The struggle between the victor and the defeated, will take the form of

Elias Khoury • 47

a struggle about who of them will be the story teller.

The irony of deafness is a metaphor of the muteness of the Israeli story.

Amos Oz will frame the conflict as a struggle between two absolute justices: «As I see it, the confrontation between the people that returns to Zion and the Arab inhabitants of the country is not like a western film or saga, but like a tragedy. Tragedy is not a conflict between ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, between justice and crime; it is a clash between total justice and total justice.»

This definition of the struggle will erase the notion of crime, and instead of producing a human image of the enemy, it falls in stereotypes, and make from the other a window to the inner psychological worries on the one hand, and a mere part of the landscape on the other.

Khalil and Aziz will become nightmares, and their inability to speak will leave the story incomplete.

Hilmy in The smile of the Lamb, by David Grossman, is different, He is nature incarnated but his difference will not take him far from the paradigm of Israeli literature. He will play the role of the agent of the story of the lamb, Yuri will become his son, and Katzman will pay the price.

Although Grossmans novel is written in the frame of the occupation of the West Bank, after the Six-Day War, and has very little to do with the deep questions of justice and justifying of the creation of the Jewish State, it couldn’t escape the frame of the Akeda, and was unable to give the Palestinian his own and distinct voice.

The muteness of Literature is part of the muteness of history, or to put it in other words, part of the inability of the victim to write the story. Anton Shammas formulated the struggle as a struggle related to the story teller. Who will own the story and the language, to use the words of the

Palestinian great poet Mahmud Darwish, will own the land, because «land is inherited like language».

The Journey from The Orchard of Benjamin Tamouz to The land of Sad Oranges, as Palestine is named after Ghassan Kanafani, was long. The Palestinian story will be under the trauma of the Nakba, and will try through symbols, metaphors, parody to find its own voice.

I want to sign out here, the major role of poetry in this process, and mainly the poems of Mahmud Darwish. Darwish did not only reproduce the invisible Palestinian name, buried under the rubbles of the Nakba, but he also told the story. In his autobiographical long poem «Why did you leave the Horse Alone», the poet will become a story teller and will participate in structuring the narrative of the Nakba, through creating the epic of the defeated.

But we can argue that also the Israeli is not represented in the Palestinian story.

Here we have to admit that in the majority of this literature this can be true, but there are three elements that will challenge this assumption profoundly.

1. The infiltration of Biblical myths in the Palestinian poetry.

2. The major novel of Ghassan Kanafani Return to Haifa (1969), where fragments of the Nakba are narrated, and where the Arab reader will meet Miriam, a holocaust survivor, who embodies in her story the Jewish tragedy.

3. With the Emergence of Rita, as a stable figure of the lover in the poetry of Darwish, an Israeli girl will occupy the love myth in modern Arabic Poetry.

What I want to point out here, is that literature is also an arena of misunderstanding. The absence of the Palestinian in modern Israeli literature, and his presence as a ghost embodies all the problems of this long conflict.

48 • Elias Khoury

The Palestinians call this conflict the Nakba or Catastrophe. The term was coined by Constantine Zureik, a Syrian Historian, and one of the intellectual father figures of the Arab National movement. The term was very problematic; its philological root has the connotation of a natural catastrophe.

The absence of the Palestinian in modern Israeli literature, and his presence as a ghost embodies all the problems of this long conflict.

Many intellectuals refused this term, arguing that it liberates the Palestinian leadership and the Arab governments from their direct responsibilities for the defeat. The critics of Zureik had a major point, but words have their own histories, and when a word becomes an untranslatable proper name, we have to try to understand the wisdom of language.

In his small book, The Meaning of the Nakba, published in 1948, before the end of the war in Palestine, Zureik’s idea was that the creation of Israel was the major and most dangerous challenge facing the Arab World in the twentieth century. His modernist and rational approach was an early alert to the Arab elites, declaring that facing the Nakba can only be possible through radical changes in all the aspects of Arab life.

Zureik’s approach was part of the discourse of «AL INKILAB», a term frequently used by Arab nationalists under Ottoman rule, and became popularized

by Michel Aflaq in his book Fi Sabil Al Baath. This ambiguous term that meant something between a coup and a revolution, would take the form of continuous military coups following the Egyptian model of 1952. The crea-

tion of military dictatorships would lead the Arab World to a situation of political misery. The disastrous defeat of 1967 lead Zureik to publish a new version of his book, entitled The meaning of the Nakba once again (1967), leaving the questions of the first book without answers.

The analyses of Zureik, with all its prophetic elements, neglected the nature of the Nakba. His hypothesis was built upon two elements: 1. The Nakba was an outcome of backwardness, which must be replaced by modernism and rationality.

2. The Nakba is a historical event that happened once in 1948. It is a national catastrophe, and the nation (the reference here is to the Arab nation) is responsible to find an adequate answer to it.

Although Zureik analyzed the Zionist movement as a colonial project, his understanding of the Jewish problem and the impact of the holocaust was schematic, and he did not understand that the new world order after the Second World War, and the interests of the two emerging super powers, would give the Zionist project many elements of superiority, and make it possible.

But the main point in Zureik’s analysis was the hypothesis that the Nakba was a moment in history, and that the Palestinians and the Arabs, would begin, after 1948,, their new awakening in order to face this challenge.

Although the small book of Zureik was written during the Palestinian War of 1948, it did not take into consideration the fact that the Zionist victory in 1948 was the beginning of the process and not its end.

The Arab nationalist thought would stay under the influence of this small book, and the nationalist strategy led by Nasser of Egypt would concentrate upon

Elias Khoury • 49

accepting the boarders of the cease fire, in the hope that one day, the Arab military force would solve this problem. This day never came, and on the contrary, the spectacular defeat of Egypt and Syria and Jordan, and the occupation of all of Palestine in 1967, would demonstrate that 1948 was the date of the new beginning of the Israeli project, and that the national discourse understood this major turning point in the history of the Arab World with the tools of the past.

Edward Said’s book The Question of Palestine can be seen as part of this lineage of thought that began with the small book of Zureik. But what Said did must be conceived as a radically new approach to the question of Palestine. Zureik understood the Nakba as a historical event that must be the base for a new Arab awareness of history,while the author of Orientalism would analyze it in a global perspective, and read it in the context of the colonial movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as a point of departure for what Said used to call the idea of Palestine.

The book of Said published in 1979, is a concrete political application of his book Orientalism. Putting the idea of Palestine in the heart of world’s history would give this idea its universal dimension, and make it one of the references of justice and freedom. The Zionist conquest, according to Said, is part of a global European colonial project, where the Zionist movement adopted the colonial discourses and practices.

Palestine is a field of struggle between presence and interpretation. The Palestinian presence will be the victim of the Israeli interpretation. The victory of interpretation through military force, will lead to the catastrophe.

The negation of the Palestinian presence in the land is a reincarnation of the

Orientalist discourse, covered by a progressive and socialist terminology built around the myth of the kibbutzim.

It is one of the major ironies of history that the victims of European racism and anti-Semitism will adopt the racial discourse of their victimizers, to the extent that the Israeli new historian Benny Morris, who was a leading figure in the New historian movement in Israel, will identify with the Roman Empire, making an analogy between the struggle of the Romans against the Barbarians, and the struggle of Israel in the so called war against terrorism.

It is one of the major ironies of history that the victims of European racism and anti-Semitism will adopt the racial discourse of their victimizers.

In his novel, Said the pessoptimist, Emile Habiby uses parody in order to forge a popular personality, with a combination of intelligence and stupidity, that can incarnate the experience of the Palestinian minority in Israel. The Palestinian individual has to defend his presence in his country against the Israeli assumption of his absence. Most of the critical readings of this book gave the personality of Said the central role. He is The Palestinian Israeli par excellence. All his attempts to adjust and collaborate are in vain. He is a tragic hero, and his humor is black. A Palestinian Candide, who mixes optimism with pessimism in order to rationalize an irrational way of life.

In the mosque of Al-Jazzar in Aka, Said would meet the refugees from different demolished villages in upper Galilee.

The women and their children who are awaiting deportation in the mosque, become the shadows of the atrocities of the

50 • Elias Khoury

Nakba that will frame the three women of the novel, Yaad the first, Yaad the second and Bakia.

These three women incarnate the process of the Nakba. The attempts of return by the two Yaad, and the relationship between Bakia and her secret, blur the frontiers between the Palestinian past and present, and put the story in the context of an opened tragedy.

The facts about 1948 are no longer contested by any one, but the meaning of what happened is still a big question.

How can we read the Nakba today, and what is the place of memory in this reading? The realities of the Nakba as an ethnic cleansing cannot be neglected or negated any longer, after the works of the Palestinian historian Walid Al Khalidy, and the works of the new Israeli historians. The ethnic cleansing as incarnated by the plan Dalet is not a matter of debate between historians any longer, even when the new Zionist historians in Israel justify it as indispensable.

On February 14, 1948, during the 1948 War, the Palestinian village Sa’sa’ was invaded by the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, precursor to the Israeli Defense Force, whose commander was Yigal Alon. The villagers did not resist, but thirty-five houses were destroyed and 60-80 people were killed. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes the incident in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, drawing on a report by the commander of the battalion responsible for the attack, Moshe Kalman.

The order was very clear: you have to blow up twenty houses and kill as many

warriors (read villagers) as possible. Sa’sa’ was attacked at midnight. The New York Times (16 April 1948) reported that the large unit of the Jewish troops encountered no resistance from the residents as they entered the village, and began attaching TNT to the houses. «We ran into an Arab Guard, Kalman recounted later, he was so surprised that he didn’t ask Min hada, who is it? But Iesh hada, what is it?

One of our troops who knew Arabic, responded humorously Hada Iesh - ‘this is’ in Arabic, ‘fire’ in Hebrew, and shot a volley into him.» Kalman’s troops took the main street of the village, and systematically blew up one house after another while farmers were still sleeping inside.

Are we speaking here about misunderstanding? Why did «lesh» (what in Arabic and fire in Hebrew) become so essential in the events of the Nakba? Were the Palestinians unaware of the realities of the Zionist movement? Or were they weak and unable to understand the difference between fire and language? Most probably it was both, a mixture of unawareness and weakness, and a feeling of betrayal and hopelessness.

The facts about 1948 are no longer contested by any one, but the meaning of what happened is still a big question. Was it a struggle between two absolute rights, as Amos Oz formulated it? Before tackling this issue, I want to point out, that I am questioning in this paper the whole approach of dealing with the Nakba as a historical event that happened in the past, once and for all. My hypothesis is totally different: what happened didn’t end 62 years ago, and it is still happening now, the moment I am presenting this paper.

The Palestinians lost in 1948 the four main aspects of their lives: 1. They lost their land, which was confiscated by the new born Israeli state. 80

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per cent of the Palestinian population was peasants, who became refugees, living in camps in the outskirts of different Arab cities, in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Even in Israel, the peasants of the destroyed Arab Villages became refugees in other villages, and had no right to return to their original homes, although they became the citizens of the new state.

2. They also lost their cities, the major three coastal cities Jaffa, Haifa and Aka were occupied and their citizens evacuated. Jaffa, the biggest Palestinian harbor on the Mediterranean and the cultural center of Palestine, would become a small poor suburb of Tel Aviv. Jerusalem would be divided along the new borders of 1948, and the Palestinian neighborhoods of West Jerusalem evacuated. Haifa would face the implementation of the first Palestinian ghetto in Israel - This process is described by the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The first Israelis. Aka would become totally marginalized, and the historical old city would become the refuge of many Palestinian refugees.

The destruction of the Palestinian cities would leave the Palestinians without any cultural reference, and create a huge cultural vacuum. We have to wait till the sixties to witness the emergence of a new Palestinian culture, which would take place in Haifa and Nazareth in the milieu of the Al Itihad newspaper (the organ of the Israeli communist party, with Emile Habibi as its editor), and in Beirut with the emergence of a new Palestinian consciousness, with Ghassan Kanafani, as its leading figure.

3. They lost their Palestinian name.

Suddenly a whole people became nameless, with no right to use his name or refer to his national identity. This was one of the most painful elements of the 1948 war.

One can argue that Palestine never existed as an independent state. This is true not only for Palestine, but also for most of the countries of the region. But this land was known to every one as the land of Palestine. Even in the Zionist documents this name was used. The people who inhabited this land are known as Palestinians. Suddenly the name would vanish. The small Palestinian minority in Israel would be called by the new authorities The Arabs of Ertz Israel. The Palestinians of the West Bank that was annexed to Jordan after the war of 1948 would become Jordanians, and the others who were scattered in Lebanon and Syria would become refugees.

Appropriating the name would become a major issue with the emergence of a new Palestinian literature in the Sixties.

One who is insisting upon the nameis Mahmud Darwish, in his poem ÂŤLover from PalestineÂť (1966), where the woman, who is also the incarnation of the land, will be named Palestinian several times, as if the name incarnates the identity, and will become the precondition of a political revival. This insistence upon the name will become a major element in the Palestinian literature, and will take different forms: The voice of the peasants (Darwish), the refugee (Kanafani), the intellectual ( Jabra Ibrahim Jabra), the story teller (Shammas), and the popular hero (Habibi).

The name will be totally regained after the Arab defeat of 1967, when the Pan Arab nationalist ideology will begin its agony, and when the Palestinian political movement will find its homeland in exile with the P.L.O. 4. They lost their story, or their ability to tell the story. I want here to suggest the replacement of muteness by deafness in Facing the Forests of Yehushua, and Men In the sun of Kanafani. The narrator of the Israeli story begins with the hypothesis

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that the Arab (this is how the Israeli Palestinian is named) is mute and his tongue cut. On the other hand, the narrator of the Palestinian story ends his novel by the driver of the water tank Abul Khaizaran shouting, «Whydid they not knock?».

We know that the narrator of the Israeli story doesn’t know Arabic; what if his ignorance led him to suppose that the Arab is mute? The muteness of the other who does not speak our language was part of a long tradition in classical languages, The Arabs used to name someone who don’t speak Arabic as «A ‘Jami», or mute.

Maybe the Israeli’s inability to understand the Palestinian led him to call him mute.

While in the story of Kanafani, there is no reason to believe the narrator, he is sure of something he cannot prove; who told him that the three poor Palestinians didn’t knock? Even if they did knock, he was unable to hear them because he was inside a closed room, with the heavy sounds of air-conditioning, trapped with the silly investigation by the Kuwaiti policeman, about his sexual adventures in Basra. The impotence of Abu Al Khaizaran will take on its full meaning with this last trap of deafness.

The Iraqi film maker Tawfic Saleh in his adaptation of Men in the Sun changed the end in his film «The Dupes» (1972). In the last part of this interesting film, we see the knocking. Saleh justified the small/ huge change he had done, by the changing political reality, and the emergence of the Palestinian resistance movement.

The film director’s reading was very faithful to the novel, and this film, with its realistic structure, and the fluidity of the flash backs, was considered the beginning of a new wave in modern Arabic movie production. What Saleh missed were the possibilities of interpreting the symbol through the realities of the present, thus

we can introduce the hypothesis that the Palestinian became mute in the story, because the Israeli narrator didn’t want to hear him, and/or because the Kuwaiti policemen and the Palestinian driver developed deafness out of their impotence.

The two stories written by Kanafani and Yehushua echo each other. The symbolism that dominates the two works is a sign of the difficulties facing the unfolding of the story of Palestine, not because the story is not there, but because there is nobody to hear it.

The misunderstanding in the village of Sa’sa’, was based upon one word, lesh, it was both the question and the answer, the astonished poor peasant didn’t realize that answering him with his own question, is not a sign of misunderstanding, but a sign of death.

Death will cover the stories of the Nakba with silence. The symbolic representation of the Palestinian in the Israeli literature, and /or his status as a shadow or a young boy or a Bedouin, will make his story invisible, and will destroy his or her ability to find an audience.

This absent audience is due a major fact, the Palestinian is the victim of the victim. His tragedy is covered by another tragedy, and his victimizer is The Victim of European racism, who was taken to the gas chambers in a special historical moment of madness, when the Nazis were trying to impose the final solution.

We can argue that the Zionist movement has nothing to do with the holocaust victims and survivors; it is a colonial movement, based upon combining modern nationalism with a mythical story. This is true, but not reasonable. Historians of Zionism will tell us that the movement dominated the Jewish consciousness only after the holocaust and because of it.

The Western world found that wash-

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ing its hands from the Jewish blood with Palestinian blood is the easiest way to cut with the atrocities of the Second World War. The Palestinians were alone; nobody was ready to hear the story of their pain, even the voices of Marten Buber and Hannah Arendt who defended the idea of a bi-national state, refusing the transfer of the native Palestinians, was neglected and not accepted.

Tom Segev relates the story of Deir Yassine, the Palestinian village that was massacred on April 9, 1948 by the Ergun.

Buber tried to convince the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben- Gurion to keep the village empty and as a memorial site, but the demand of the Jewish philosopher was refused, and today one can go to the place to discover the Israeli mental hospital built on the site of the crime.

When Jean Paul Sartre visited the refugee camps in Gaza in 1965, he gave the Arab intellectuals a major lesson of the meaning of silence. In the fifties and sixties, the French existentialist philosopher was the model of the engaged intellectual. His popularity among the Arab intellectuals was huge, especially after his positions against the French war in Algeria, and his introduction to the book of Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth.

Sartre refused to speak; no one can forget that his condition to visit Egypt was the release of all the leftist intellectuals who were imprisoned by the regime of Nasser.

But when the issue missed Israel, he was unwilling or unable to speak.

No one was ready to hear, even in the Arab world, where the Palestinian refugees became a reminder of defeat, the Palestinians were silenced, and there, the Nakba will take new forms. The Palestinians, under their trauma, rebuilt their lives through imagination; in the alleys of the miserable refugee camps, they renamed

the neighborhoods after their destroyed villages. Their silence was their secret way to make, from their loss, a way of life.

The occupation/unification of all of Palestine, i.e. The West Bank and Gaza in 1967, will witness the emergence of the Palestinian national movement, and the major role of the Palestinian literature, in creating the new image of the Palestinian identity, where fragments of the stories of 1948 began to be told and heard.

The Nakba is a continuous process.

1948 was its major event, but it never stopped.

The specificity of the Palestinian Nakba, lies not only in the loss of the major four elements of the Palestinian life, that I tried to analyze briefly, but in the fact that it is a continuous tragedy, a catastrophe without borders in space or limits in time.

The Nakba is taking place now in Palestine; it is not history to be remembered, but a present threatened by interpretation, to use the words of Edward Said.

We can suggest a typology of this continuous Nakba, and speak about its ways inside Palestine and in the neighboring countries, thus presenting a history of the region with its wars and civil wars, occupation and oppression.

I want to suggest an outline permitting us to read the different pages of the Nakba from the expulsion of 1948 to the Wall and settlements in the West Bank, and the expulsions that are taking place nowadays in Jerusalem. In this outline we can notice five elements: 1. The confiscation of the Palestinian land that continued after the end of the war of 1948, two villages: Akrat and Bir’im give only an example of the destinies of those who stayed as strangers in

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their homeland, and lived under military rule till 1965, and their status as second class citizens in the democratic Jewish state of Israel.

2. The hunt of the infiltrators, where the Palestinian peasants tried to cross back over the borders in order to join their homes or to collect their harvest. Emile Habibi, in Said the Pessoptimist, gave us examples of these cases, and Mahmud Darwish in his autobiographical poem: «In the Presence of Absence», relates his personal story as a boy of 8, when he crossed the Lebanese Border with his parents and siblings, to discover that their village Al Birwa was demolished.

3. The refugee camps, with their structure as a combination of slums and ghettos, and the oppression the Palestinians suffered in the different Arab countries.

(Political oppression, work, education, travel...)

4. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the new structure of settlements, oppression, the wall, the continuous confiscation of land and property, the uprooting of trees, siege... which make the occupation a continuation of the war of 1948. Even the retreat from Gaza, became a way to create a ghetto under siege and fire.

5. The massacres of the Palestinian camps, Jordan 1970, Lebanon since 1975, and the two major massacres of Tal Al Zaatar camp (1976) and Shatila and Sabra (1982), are a continuation with new tools of the massacres of 1948.

This schematic outline is full of stories of pain and loss, thus the idea that when we speak about the Nakba, we are dealing with the events and atrocities that happened in 1948, is misleading. The Nakba is not only a memory, but a continuous reality that did not stop in 1948. Dealing with it as a history of the past, is a way to cover

the struggle between presence and interpretation that never stopped since 1948.

Memory can be a trap, and the Nakba as only a memory is the biggest trap that can mislead any rational analyses of the Palestinian Present.

We don’t need to prove anymore what is now considered as a historical fact.

What two generations of Palestinian historians and chronicles tried to prove, became an accepted reality after the emergence of the Israeli new historians. There is no more any point in negating the «nuanced» facts revealed by Benny Morris in his book, The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem (1988), these nuanced facts will become solid ones, through the works of other historians, mainly Ilan Pappe’s master work, The ethnic cleansing of Palestine (2006), where he proves that there was a master plan of expulsion, and takes us to the «red house», revealing the details of the plan Dalet.

No one will argue about names like «operation Dani», or «operations Hiram» and «Dekel». Many stories of massacres, rape, and expulsions are known, and many other stories are still to be revealed. Tantoura, Safsaf, Ein Al Zaitun, Sa’sa’, Sha’ab, Kabri, Abu Shousha, Ai’laboun, and so on...

The Palestinian historian Walid Al Khalidy has claimed, since 1961, that the Dalet plan was a «master plan of the conquest of Palestine», while Ilan Pappé led us in his book to the red house in Tel Aviv, which became, by the end of 1947, the headquarters of the Haganah. In a meeting held in this house, March 10, 1947, the final touches was put on the Dalet plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. And in 6 months, the mission was completed.

The red house is not there anymore, but the traces of what happened in those six months are everywhere in the land of

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Palestine. The memories of 1948, which were covered by the cynical negations of the official Israeli historiography is unveiled now, but there are signs that a new wave of Israeli historiography is trying to justify what happened, putting it in the frame of historical memories.

Justification is problematic on the ethical level; nothing can justify ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

The only possible justification, which is also immoral, is to put these crimes in the realm of history. Who can judge history?

One can argue, we can take lessons from history, but judging it morally has no political implications.

What we are witnessing now, is the emergence of what one can call the new Israeli Zionist history. In an article published in the Journal of Palestine studies (autumn 2010) Ilan Pappé analyzed this major transition based upon a collective work entitled Israel War of Independence 1948-1949 (in Hebrew), edited by Alon Kadish, a former head of the history department at the Hebrew University. What is interesting in this book is its ethical approach. The atrocities of 1948 are read in a theological approach that justifies the ethnic cleansing as a necessity to avoid a new showa.

Benny Morris made a political revision to his revisionist history of Israel.

In an interview with Haaretz, January 9, 2004, he didn’t only give a justification of the ethnic cleansing of 1948, but he also spoke about the possibilities of a new wave of transfer of the Palestinians, not only from the West Bank, but also from Israel.

His justification is simple: «I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 are war crimes.

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs; you have to dirty your hands... A society that aims to kill you, forces you to destroy it. When the choice was between

destroying and being destroyed, it is better to destroy.»

This assumption contradicts another assumption, where Morris declares with clear words that expulsion was a precondition for the declaration of a Jewish state.

This has nothing to do with a threat, but is the outcome of an offensive act by the Israeli leadership. «... Of course Ben-Gurion was a transferist... if he had not done what he did; a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.»

Benny Morris goes a little further, criticizing the first Israeli prime minister for not accomplishing the job: «I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948... If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country, the whole land of Israel as far as the Jordan River, this place would be quietter and know less suffering.»

The most important idea in this interview, is that the Israeli historian understands that what he is dealing with is not the past but the present. This is why he suggests to put the Palestinians in cages, and make a prophecy of the coming transfer that will accomplish the work Ben-Gurion left behind in 1948. What Benny Morris told us, while defending the ethnic cleansing, is that we are not only speaking about the past, but mainly about the present and the future.

The old Zionist discourse that interpreted the Palestinian presence by negation, is now taking a new phase, through admitting that this negation was a planned act with a structured rational, and that this rationale clarifies why peace, or what was called the peace process, was merely an illusion.

The justifications can vary between the fear from a new holocaust and the

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Islamophobia that considers Arabs and Muslims as the new barbarians threatening Rome. But they arrive to the same conclusion: The Nakba is an Arab memory and an Israeli continuous action at the same time. Although, with the new Israeli law, the native Palestinians are forbidden from commemorating their Nakba, but the world must admit that what has happened, and what is happening now, is a memory of the past that must be forgotten.

The major Palestinian error in the Oslo agreement was that the Palestinian surrender presupposed that the Nakba is the past, and didn’t understand that the Nakba is still in the making. This is why the surrender of the Palestinian leadership was without any horizon, and took the shape of a trap.

The Nakba is a continuous process.

1948 was its major event, but it never stopped. It went through different phases, and took different shapes. The Palestinians are absent, and/ or absent present, and/ or the barbarians dreaming of bloodshed and rape.

The image of Khalil and Aziz in My Michael is not the product of the hallucinations of Hanna, but rather an archetype of the absent mute Palestinian. One can ask, what is the meaning of two absolute justices if one of the two has no tongue?

What is the meaning of the words when the voices of the two brothers in The Orchard will be melting inside a symbol that transcends reality and pushes it towards myths and allegory?

My personal relationship with the Nakba began through the long process of work on my novel, The Gate of the Sun. I discovered that the love story I wanted to write need the background of the events that took place in northern Palestine in 1948. I felt that my job was to collect

memories, and write stories never written before. In this huge personal journey, I discovered Palestine, a land I never visited. But the secret that was revealed to me, as it is the case with literature, where the writer and the readers will discover the generosity of life, my secret in The Gate of the Sun was that 1948 is not a year. 1948 is a long period of time that began in that year and was disguised in the names of the years that followed.

My novel was published in 1998, to narrate 50 years of the Nakba, and twelve years after the publication of my book, I see the Nakba as a process without an end.

I tried to create mirrors instead of allegories and metaphors; the allegory pretends reflecting reality, while mirrors reflect other mirrors. My stories were mirrors of stories and pain was mirroring pain. My hypothesis was that once we write the pain, we push it to the realm of memory, and make from it a past that we can transcend in order to build a future. But the story betrayed my presuppositions, the protagonists were not revealing their memories, on the contrary, they were living their present, their stories were not the past but the present, and their pain was not the memories of pain, but the experience of their daily lives. This is why my feeling is that The Gate of the Sun is an unfinished novel, and it will stay open till the moment when this wound will be healed.

I am neither a nihilist nor a pessimist; I think that the moment will come, when the peoples of the Mashreq will wake from this nightmare, to discover that life is possible without wars and massacres and madness, and that Man is not the slave of myths and ideologies, and the rights of minorities will only be guaranteed in the region and by its peoples through democracy and the respect of human rights.

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Şener Aktürk

The Myth of a Christian Europe: From the Siege of Vienna to the Massacre in Norway This text reflects the content of the talk that the author delivered on March 2, 2012, in Oslo, Norway, as part of the Saladin Days. A previous version of this essay was published as the lead commentary with the title, «September 11, 1683: The Myth of a Christian Europe and the Massacre in Norway», in Insight Turkey 14, no. 1 (2012): 1-14. It was subsequently revised by the author for the current publication.

The underlying cause, the self-conscious «motive», of Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre in Norway, which he stated rather verbosely in his fifteen hundred pages long manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, was ignored in the numerous analyses about his motivations: The myth of a Christian Europe, which is based on the identification of Europe solely with Christians and Christianity. While Breivik put down his «motive» for mass murder on paper in great detail, the «willful ignorance» of European intelligentsia,

politicians, and especially the media, regarding the role that the Christian Europe myth played in this terrorist attack, is astounding. Breivik’s key motive for mass murder is, in essence, the same malicious and mythical claim that has been calamitously employed many times throughout history in almost every episode of ethnic cleansing against non-Christians in Europe, from the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492 to the genocidal campaign against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, and in the Western Chris-

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tian powers’ multitudinous campaigns to solve the «Eastern Question» by pushing the Ottoman Muslims out of Europe, among many other similar campaigns of ethno-religious cleansing. Hence Breivik chose 2083, the 400th anniversary of the Ottomans’ second failed siege of Vienna, and the beginning of two hundred and forty years of Ottoman retreat in southeastern Europe, as the title of his manifesto, which can be appropriately described as the Mein Kampf or the Turner Diaries of a European Islamophobe.

The myth of a Christian Europe that motivated Breivik to undertake what Roger Cohen described as the «biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times»1 is unfortunately not the preserve of violent right wing extremists. 2083: A European Declaration of Independence includes many copy-pasted material from other Islamophobic American and European authors, almost giving the impression of a collective effort, hence strengthening my contention that this myth and the fallacious claims that it is based on are deeply ingrained in the Euro-American thinking. This myth is supported by a wide swath of mainstream conservative, Christian Democratic parties in Europe, and by many Republicans and conservative intellectuals in the United States.

One of the key developments following the attacks of September 11, 2001, has been the meteoric increase in Islamophobic pseudo-scholarly publications around the theme of «Eurabia», referring to the imagined impending takeover of Europe

by Muslims, mostly written by Americans on the Islamic threat facing Europe, and the tacit acceptance of this claim by influential actors ensconced in the mainstream media.2 Many of these works, in particular those of Robert Spencer and Bat Ye’or, are cited many times in Breivik’s manifesto as

justifications for his attack on social democratic youth, whom he blames for what he thinks of as the Islamic infiltration of Europe. However, the myth of a Christian Europe has a hold over much more mainstream figures and organizations other than the likes of Robert Spencer.

Looking back at 9/11 ten years later, I certainly think that one of its worst legacies has been to galvanize the myth of a «Christian Europe».

Let me give one example from Germany, arguably the engine of European integration, and home to the second-largest Muslim minority (after France) among EU member states. In March 2011, Germany’s new Minister of Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, set off a controversy by declaring, «[t]hat Islam is part of Germany is a fact that cannot be proven by history.»

He was soon joined by the leader of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of Germany’s governing Christian Democratic Union. «Of course there are Muslims in Germany,» CSU General Secretary Alexander Dobrindt told the Sunday weekly Welt am Sonntag. «But Islam is not part of the German Leitkultur [leading culture].» Add to these remarks the attempts of the Papal authorities and their supporters among Catholic-majority member states of the European Union to enshrine a reference to Christianity in the constitution of the EU. The sad truth is that most people on both sides of the Atlantic, including a large segment of the educated public, would agree that «factually», Europe was a Christian continent, where non-Christians have only recently arrived. But is that really true? Or is this the building block

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of a historical misrepresentation that lies at the very foundation of an age-old propaganda that produced hatred and violence against non-Christians in Europe for centuries? In the brief sketch below, focusing on European Muslims in particular, I suggest that it is the latter, in the hope of convincing at least a critical segment of the educated public in the West that Muslims and Jews have been «Europeans» not for a few decades but for centuries, and that to assume or claim otherwise may imply an intellectual kinship, however passive, with those who perpetrated or condoned Auschwitz and Srebrenica.

How would Breivik, the rabid Islamophobe, confirmed Norwegian Lutheran and self-styled Knights Templar, receive the news that the Ottoman armies were trying to secure the religious freedom of Protestants against Catholics?

The Siege of Vienna: From September 11, 1683 to September 11, 2001?

The second siege of Vienna was indelibly impressed in my mind, not when I was in a Turkish high school, where this episode is one of standard ritual mourning in history classes, but later when I left Turkey for my undergraduate studies in the United States. By a fateful coincidence that Breivik would surely relish, my encounter with the second siege of Vienna occurred in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. I was in Vienna, where my college, the University of Chicago, had a study abroad program on «Western Civilization». We had a thematic trip to a local monastery during our

week of studies on the Middle Ages. It was hoped that through such a field trip we would gain a deeper understanding of Medieval Europe. We kind of did.

The young monk who was giving us the tour, an Austrian Catholic who spoke impeccable American English, was a graduate of a leading American university.

In the middle of the tour, he stopped in front of a cracked wall, and told us that the wall crack was the result of the siege of Vienna by the «Turks» in 1683: A catapulted stone cracked the wall, and a frame was put around the crack as a constant «reminder to us», he said, «of who the enemy of the Church is.» From the tone of his voice though, it did not sound as if he needed a reminder. He then dramatically concluded: «And this is the struggle we are still fighting today, with the September 11 attacks in New York.»

The professor on board for the trip, a world-renowned scholar of Germanic literature and philosophy, quickly approached me to prevent what he thought was an impending scandal, patted me on the shoulder and joked, «terrible Turk,» adding that I should not mind what this ignorant monk was saying. Both of us being non-Christians, I thought the Christian bravado of the monk would also offend the professor, despite the «Judeo-» amendment sometimes affixed to the «Christian civilization» as an afterthought. Given his background, though, the monk was anything but ignorant. In Vienna of 2001, he was nothing less than an erudite provocateur and falsifier of history at a sensitive moment. Jörg Haider’s right wing extremist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), having won the most recent elections in 1999 with a stunning 27 percent of the vote, was governing the country in a coalition with the conservative ÖVP. Turkish immigrants being the

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largest minority in the country, with an estimated hundred thousand Turks in Vienna alone, our American-educated monk was not making an innocuous remark at a time of interethnic harmony. Little did he know that a «terrible Turk» infiltrated what he must have thought of as the Chicago battalion of Western Christendom in his imaginary struggle against Islam.

Looking back at 9/11 ten years later, I certainly think that one of its worst legacies has been to galvanize the myth of a «Christian Europe», an age-old discourse of exclusion par excellence, which implies that non-Christians have no place in Europe because they are «foreigners».

Europe was not inhabited by Christians only, neither in 2001 nor today. But that fact would not refute, but rather incite the likes of Breivik. In order to expose the fallacy of the Christian Europe discourse, one needs to counter the claims of Islamophobes more broadly, both geographically and temporally: Europe has not been only Christian but also emphatically Jewish and Muslim for more than a thousand years. Even the siege of Vienna in 1683, to which Breivik owes the title of his manifesto, was not the religious clash that he thought it was. These malicious myths deserve to be taken apart separately.

Muslims ruled most of Spain and Portugal for almost eight centuries, giving rise to a dazzling Judeo-Christo-Islamic culture in the Iberian peninsula until the Reconquista and the Inquisition wiped out Muslims, Jews, and any heterodox Christians, rendering the peninsula completely Catholic. The Iberian story is relatively better known than many other examples of Muslim heritage in European history.

Today, the new Muslims of Iberia and Latin America, immigrants and converts alike, are rediscovering and celebrating the Islamic heritage of Spain and Portu-

gal as an antecedent of their existence as Spanish-speaking Muslims.

Much less known is the Islamic heritage of Sicily, which was also a Muslim kingdom for several centuries. As in Iberia, Muslim dynasts following the Islamic law provided sufficient guarantees for the lives and property of the island’s non-Muslims, so that Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Greeks lived side by side, a history of coexistence manifest in tombstones in four different alphabets associated with four main religions in Sicily: Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Muslims were not a tiny elite minority without a connection to the land either. Thirteenth-century Muslim geographer Yaqut claimed unequivocally that, «most of [Sicily’s] population became Muslim,»3 and many if not most places in present-day Sicily have names derived from Arabic.

In Palermo, Muslim traveler Ibn Jubair said, «there are so many mosques that they are impossible to count,» whereas Ibn Hawqal, who visited Sicily in 973, claimed that there were three hundred mosques in Palermo alone.4 Where are those three hundred mosques of Palermo today? «The Norman conquest of Sicily had a devastating effect on the Muslim population of Sicily in the late eleventh century,» and «[t]he Greek, who formed a substantial population in the northern and eastern parts of the island…followed a similar course.»5 Frederick II deported the remaining Muslim population of Sicily in 1224 to Lucera, a «Muslim colony» he created in the Italian peninsula.

This internment colony proved to be the penultimate step before the final eradication of Muslims. The fourth book of Tariq Ali’s wonderful Islam Quintet, A Sultan in Palermo, is a mythical and poetic reminder to the English-speaking world of Sicily’s Muslim heritage. «[N]ot long af-

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ter Frederick’s death, most of its [Lucera’s] people were massacred. A few thousand, mainly women, were forcibly converted.»6 With the disappearance of Muslims, Jews, and the Greek Orthodox, the island became fully Catholic, foreshadowing the catastrophe that would befall Spain two centuries later.

Moving from Spain and Italy to France, perhaps the quintessential core country of the «West», one encounters a spectrum of diverse religious groups, including Cathars, Waldensians, Muslims, Jews, and Huguenots, and a history of their eradication either through mass expulsions or massacres, or both. Jews were expelled from France at least four times, in 1010, 1182, 1306, and finally in 1394. Since it was «illegal» to be Jewish in France, when conversos, Jewish converts to Christianity, were expelled from Spain, those who chose to immigrate to nearby France had to live, at least publicly, as Catholics, because «nowhere in the region was Judaism officially tolerated before the 1610s.»7 Crusades against Muslims initiated by the Popes and undertaken by various dynasties were also an excuse for attacks against Jews as internal enemies.

There were also entirely «internal Crusades» against heretics. Such was the Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc undertaken at the instigation of Pope Innocent against Cathars, which lasted for twenty years. By the fourteenth century Cathar religion and people were completely annihilated. Waldensians, also known as the poor of Lyons, met a similar fate, and the persecution of the Protestant Huguenots is a well-known episode of French history.

There were also Muslims living in the territory of present-day France more than a thousand years ago. Muslim warriors invaded southern and western France and clashed with Charles Martel’s armies

somewhere between Poitiers and Tours in 732, in what Edward Gibbon called «an encounter which would change the history of the world.» Much less known is the fact that a sizable Muslim population was present in Fraxinetum in southeast France from 889 onwards, resulting in «Arab/Muslim control of the Alpine passes which connect Italy with the remainder of Western Europe for a number of decades in tenth century.»8 Moreover, «[the] discovery of mihrabs in the walls of some churches in southern France, notably in Narbonne,» suggests that «some present-day churches and cathedrals in the Department of Var and Rhone Valley may have originally been built as mosques and later converted.»9 Archeological, linguistic, economic, and ethnographic evidence points to Muslim settlements in the Alpine regions of France and Italy. In the end, Christian princes launched a major attack on Fraxinetum sometime between 975 and 983, and successfully destroyed this Muslim colony.10 Europe was not home to Christians only, as the foregoing vignettes from the history of Muslims in Western Europe demonstrate, but nor were Christians and non-Christians necessarily allied against each other in major conflicts. A hard test for this claim is Breivik’s favorite «Christian victory» over «Muslims»: The failed siege of Vienna in 1683 by the «Turks, the enemies of the Church,» since this episode is a world-historical event that changed the fortunes of European Muslims decisively for the worse by beginning the retreat of the Ottomans from Hungary all the way into Asia Minor in the next two hundred and forty years. Hence, one would think this episode could be easily characterized as a colossal clash between Muslims and Christians, but in fact it cannot.

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Writing in the New York Review of Books Blog, Timothy Snyder, renowned Yale historian of Eastern Europe, already opened a major dent on the simplistic description of the Siege of Vienna as the defense of Christendom against Muslims, by pointing out that the Polish forces under the command of Jan Sobieski, which saved Vienna by routing the Ottoman armies, included a very large contingent of Muslim Tatars, who were crucial to the allegedly «Christian» victory. Moreover, Snyder says, «the very tactics of the Polish cavalry, regarded at the time as the best in Europe, were developed in contact with, and indeed copied from, the Tatars.»11 Snyder’s take on the siege of Vienna also serves as a reminder about yet another relatively unknown but significant autochthonous Muslim population that inhabited the lands of Christendom for centuries: Known as the Lithuanian Tatars, these Muslims lived, and few of their surviving descendants still live, primarily in present-day Poland and Lithuania, but one can find a Lithuanian Tatar mosque even in Brooklyn, New York.12 Getting back to Vienna in 1683, it now appears that thousands of fierce Muslim warriors and their Polish imitators saved Christendom from the Islamic onslaught.

Following Snyder’s eye-opening description of 17th century Poland and its army, one should turn around the same question to the other side and ask: Was the Ottoman siege of Vienna a campaign inspired primarily by Islam and waged solely by Muslims? The answer to both of these questions is a definitive «no».

The political reason for the Ottoman campaign was to support a Hungarian rebellion against Austrian oppression, and the religious reason was to support Protestantism in Hungary against the Catholic onslaught waged by the Austrian

Habsburgs. Indeed, it was Imre Thököly, the Hungarian Protestant statesman, born and raised in present-day Slovakia, or «Upper Hungary», who called on his allies, the Ottomans, to organize a campaign against Austrian Habsburgs, which culminated in the siege of Vienna. How would Breivik, the rabid Islamophobe, confirmed Norwegian Lutheran and selfstyled Knights Templar, receive the news that the Ottoman armies were trying to secure the religious freedom of Protestants against Catholics?

If Europe is a geographic designation and not a religious one, then I could count as a full-blooded European on account of all of my grandparents.

Imre Thököly can in some ways be described as the Hungarian William Wallace. After his father was killed in a rebellion against Catholic Habsburgs, Thököly fled to Ottoman Transylvania to meet with other independence minded Hungarian noblemen fleeing Habsburg persecution, and under his leadership, they organized a successful Hungarian rebellion against the Habsburgs in 1678, forcing Habsburg emperor Leopold to restore Hungarian liberties in the Treaty of Sopron in 1681, and recognize Thököly as the sovereign of Upper Hungary. Yet hostilities soon resumed, and the definitive war over the independence of Hungary and the fate of Protestantism in Central-Eastern Europe began, when Thököly’s call for help was answered by the Ottomans, and the Ottoman vassal states of Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and the Crimean Khanate, whose armies appeared before the gates of Vienna in 1683. Based on the foregoing, it now appears that a coterie of

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Muslims, Protestants, Orthodox (Moldavia, etc.), and various independence minded Hungarians, led by the Ottoman grand vizier, laid siege to Vienna, which was rescued by the Polish king with the indispensable aid of Muslim Tatar warriors from Lithuania. This is hardly the picture of an existential clash between Muslims and Christians. How would the conservative European and American historians react to such a revisionist, and ultimately «factual,» rereading of the Siege of Vienna, as a world-historical clash between Catholicism and Protestantism with crucial Muslim (Tatar and Ottoman, respectively) allies on both sides?

A true foreigner […] visiting Thessalonica in 2011 would not have had a clue that this was an overwhelmingly Judeo-Islamic city in 1911.

Following the debacle in Vienna and another series of defeats against the Habsburgs, Thököly died in exile in Ottoman Anatolia, in Izmit (ancient Nicomedia), where I was born. I was born in Izmit, Turkey, but none of my great-grand parents were. All of my ancestors arrived in Turkey following the expulsion of Muslims from Greece in 1924, as part of a mutually agreed upon «population exchange» between the two countries, which witnessed an estimated four hundred thousand Muslims, more than a tenth of Greek citizenry, leave Greece for Turkey, and more than a million Christians leave Turkey for Greece. If Europe is a geographic designation and not a religious one, then I could count as a full-blooded European on account of all of my grandparents. Known as the muhacirs (the same

name given to millions of Indian Muslims who had to leave for Pakistan twenty five years later), these Muslims left behind ghost towns in Greece. Drama, the city of my maternal grandparents, was once 80% Muslim, and was almost completely emptied out with the exchange. Likewise, around the turn of the 20th century, Thessalonica, the city of my paternal grandparents, was 40% Jewish and 35% Muslim, and a significant number among the latter were both, that is, ethnically Jewish and nominally Muslim; the community of the Dönme, the descendents of Jews who, following their messiah Rabbi Sabbatai Sevi, converted to Islam in 1666.

I visited Thessalonica in April 2011, eighty-seven years after the expulsion of Muslims from Greece, as the first person in my extended family of several hundred people to go back to what is now Greek Macedonia. Mark Mazower’s brilliant book on the city is called City of Ghosts for a reason,13 because the city’s non-Christian communities are virtually non-existent today; that, I already knew. What I did not know for sure but feared nonetheless was the fate of Islamic and Jewish heritage of the city.

Thessalonica was an Ottoman city for almost five hundred years, from 1430 to 1912. Muslims and Jews together constituted around three quarters of the city’s population throughout this period. It was the intellectual and economic center of Ottoman Balkans: The Ottoman constitution was declared there in 1908, and Ottomanism, Ottoman socialism, and Turkish nationalism, along with the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, were born in this city. Having the largest Jewish population in southeastern Europe, it was also known as the «Jerusalem of the Balkans». Against this background, it was shocking for me not

Şener Aktürk • 65

to find a single mosque in the city of my forefathers. Why is there such a persistent intolerance of pieces of Islamic religious architecture in Europe, I thought, thinking of mosques and minarets, thousands of which had been destroyed in the past and those that are being prevented from being built at present? After all, it was only two years ago that a majority of Swiss voters were mobilized in a referendum to amend the constitution of their country in order to prevent any minarets from being built on Swiss territory.14 Neither have I seen a visible synagogue anywhere in the city center, but I was informed that there are a couple of synagogues tucked in somewhere.

The square where the Ottoman constitution was declared in 1908, the same square where Jews were gathered by the Nazis prior to their deportation to Auschwitz, was being used as a parking lot. In 1997, when Thessalonica was declared the «European Capital of Culture», a rather small plaque was placed, commemorating the deportation of the Jews «by the Nazis.» I roamed around an intersection for half an hour to find the building of an Islamic foundation around the block, Alacalı Imaret, because there were no signs pointing at it. I was disappointed once I located it since it was not only locked up but also covered in graffiti.

A true foreigner, or the proverbial «Martian», visiting Thessalonica in 2011 would not have had a clue that this was an overwhelmingly Judeo-Islamic city in 1911.

Ethnic cleansing is a sad phenomenon of modern history, but the total destruction of architectural heritage adds much insult to injury.15 A fully Christian Europe has been the aspiration of some political and religious ideologues for centuries, but «factually», it was a historical aberration, because Eu-

rope was religiously diverse until recently, with vibrant Jewish and Muslim communities scattered around Europe. A wellnigh religiously homogenous continent was only achieved by 1945, after the Holocaust, a continent almost entirely «free» of Jews and Muslims, the culmination of centuries-long collaborative work of many states and peoples. In the 20th century, these European efforts at «cleansing» were epitomized in Auschwitz and Srebrenica.

Sadly, Auschwitz and Srebrenica are also factual proofs, if such proof is indeed needed, of Europe’s Jewish and Muslim history and heritage, because one cannot mass murder a people who do not exist.

It is also misleading to think of postwar Europe as one of religious diversification and increasing tolerance: As late as in 1987, Todor Jivkov in Bulgaria forced all Muslims to take up Slavic Christian names, leading to the flight of three hundred thousand Muslim Turks, a third of Bulgaria’s Muslim minority, in three days once the border with Turkey opened, a spectacle that rivaled the fall of the Berlin Wall for those experiencing the end of Communism in southeastern Europe.

It was in 1992 that Slobodan Milosevic launched his genocidal campaign against Bosnian Muslims, only three hundred miles away from Vienna. The homeland of Muslims in Greece, bordering Bulgaria, was a military zone that outsiders could not visit, a literal «state of exception» Giorgio Agamben would appreciate.

Back to Vienna in 2001: Retrospectively, the study abroad program on «Western civilization», with its trips to Budapest and Prague, was a nice rebuttal of the monk’s claim of a Christian-only European us, against the non-Christian them. At the time, visiting Café Central, where Trotsky and Freud, Lenin and Herzl, none of them conventionally Christian

66 • Şener Aktürk

but unabashedly European, were among the regulars, was more important to me than a failed siege my purported ancestors carried out centuries ago to capture this city. That being said, with Freud’s house in Bergstrasse 19, Kafka’s grave in Prague, the Dohany street synagogue and the Gul Baba tomb in the «mosque street» of Budapest, it seemed that non-Christian people existed in Europe for centuries and contributed a lot to the civilization of these lands. That a right-wing extremist ideology in the 20th century vilified Jews in an attempt to destroy them as a people of Europe and erase their heritage does not, and certainly should not, make us forget that millions of Jews lived and died in Europe for centuries. Likewise, although one might perhaps «forgive» the incessant expulsions and worse, that not only annihilated Muslims demographically in much of Europe but also destroyed most architectural and other reminders of their civilization, as religious nationalist excesses or sad but usual consequences of interstate warfare and cynical population politics, one must not «forget» that indigenous Muslim peoples once flourished from Spain to Lithuania and from Hungary to Sicily, and that «factually», Europe was not only Christian but also Muslim in the past, as it is today.

Notes

Roger Cohen, «Breivik and His Enablers», New York Times, July 25, 2011. It is unfortunate that in the following years Roger Cohen occasionally swung to the essentialist camp, viewing «Islam and the West» at war with each other. See, Roger Cohen, «Islam and the West at War», New York Times, February 16, 2015.

2 Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from within (New York: Broadway, 2006); Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007); Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008); Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006); Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: Euro-Arab Axis (Lexington Books, 2005).

These authors and the impact of their publications have already been noted and discussed in some of the analyses focusing on Breivik’s massacre, and therefore I will not dwell on these works here.

3 Alex Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p.15.

1

4 Metcalfe, Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily, p.19; Gian Luigi Scarfiotti and Paul Lunde, «Muslim Sicily,» Saudi Aramco World, Vol.29, No.6 (Nov-Dec 1978).

5 James M. Powell, «Frederick II and the Rebellion of the Muslims of Sicily, 1200-1224», Uluslararasi Haçli Seferleri Sempozyumu: 23-25 Haziran 1997, Istanbul (Ankara. Türk Tarih Kurumu), pp. 15-16.

6 Tariq Ali, A Sultan in Palermo (New York: Verso, 2005), p.246.

7 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.320.

Şener Aktürk • 67

Manfred W. Wenner, «The Arab-Muslim Presence in Medieval Central Europe», International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.12, No.1 (1980), p.59.

9 Ibid, p.65.

10 Ibid, p.75.

11 Timothy Snyder, «Toleration and the Future of Europe», The New York Review of Books Blog, August 10, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/ blogs/nyrblog/2011/aug/10/anders-breiviks-historical-delusions. Accessed August 28, 2011.

12 Abdullah Aymaz, «New York’ta mahzun cami,» Zaman, 15 August 2011.

13 Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (New York: Knopf, 2005).

14 On the Swiss referendum, its causes and consequences, see Şener Aktürk and Mujeeb R. Khan, «How Western anti-Muslim bigotry became respectable: The historic roots of a newly resilient ideology», Today’s Zaman, 3 January 2010; Sener Akturk, «Of Mosques and Synagogues: Religious Diversity in Europe», Hurriyet Daily News, 18 January 2010; Sener Akturk, «Mosques, minarets, religious diversity: Europe and the rest», Today’s Zaman, 25 January 2010. A four-part interview was conducted with me and my coauthor Mujeeb Khan by the Real News Network internet television, and the videos of the interview in YouTube were overwhelmed with hundreds of hate messages posted by what appears to be right wing extremist, fascist individuals and/or groups.

See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3po5rRpdcFs. 8

15 Foreshadowing a felicitous development perhaps, at a public dinner with the mayor of Thessalonica in Istanbul in late September 2011, in response to my critical comments along the lines outlined above, mayor Yannis Boutaris made public promises to restore and make accessible to public key pieces of Ottoman heritage such as the Yeni Djami and Alacali Imaret, along with placing a commemorative plaque about the declaration of Ottoman constitution in the Eleftheria (Freedom) Square.

The Moorish Beat of the Baroque

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the baroque period many musicians travelled extensively and collected impressions and inspiration from other cultures. In el-Andalus, musicians from Europe, Africa and the Arabic world would meet before they carried their inspiration further afield, incorporating new scales and rhythmic patterns – even into Norwegian folk music.

During the Saladin days 2013, the internationally renowned saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm was joined by a team of amazing musicians, inviting the audience to join them in a musical journey in Renaissance, baroque and folk music from several corners of the world. The Spanish musicians Raquel Andueza (soprano) and Jesús Fernández Baena (theorbe) specialise in baroque music, but also in Spanish folk music. Including one of Norway’s most distinctive fiddle players, Nils Økland, as well as the West African singer and koramaster Solo Cissokho, also allowed an exploration of how the music of El-Andalus has spread to the most unexpected places.

Samar Yazbek • 71

Samar Yazbek

Two men In 2013, Samar Yazbek participated in the Saladin days. This text is an excerpt from her book A woman in the crossfire. Diaries of the Syrian revolution.

Two huge men entered the room. They stood in readiness, in plainclothes. One of them stood to the right and the other to the left. With a signal from his eyes, each of them seized me by the shoulders, though not roughly. They seized me as if I were some object, easy for them to move. I did not resist when they started to lift me out of my chair. I even stood up, surprised at what was happening. Would they finally arrest me, putting this nightmare to an end? That would be easier on me than this madness.

He gave the officer a jaunty look, and I looked at him not knowing what was next. I tried to read some good news in their eyes, body movements, and demeanor. Talk doesn’t interest me. He was neutral, looking at some spot in the spacious room. The two of them put a band of cloth over my eyes, or that is what I assumed, because my world suddenly went black. Moments later, I was blindfolded, scenting a strange smell from the cloth. A strong arm seized me, an arm sure of its grasp of my elbow, of its push and pull. It moved sluggishly. Then I straightened up and shouted, «Where are you taking me?»

He answered calmly, and I heard a certain buzz.

«For a little drive, to improve your writing.»

I was certain they had decided to arrest me; that admission was preferable to the alternative, and an end to all the operations of the madness he had delighted in torturing me with for days.

I pretended to be composed, wanting to attest that what happened a month ago, and

72 • Samar Yazbek

even now just a nightmare I would awake from at any moment.

It was less than two minutes; all these thoughts passed faster than that, because I would have collapsed had it not been for the man on the right and the other to the left moving me along, which they were still doing with fastidious calm. They must have been ordered to do that, but when I almost fell and they caught me, I knew we were going down some stairs. One of them slackened on me; it appeared the staircase was narrow. I tried to peek around the blindfold, but it was firm and tight. My breathing grew tighter; I felt we had descended several flights. I was not sure, but a nausea started to rack my body, and rotten smells mingled with odors I had never smelled before. At last we stopped. A burning pain shot up my lower back and I shivered. I knew my fragile body. A hand undid the blindfold from my eyes. I did not expect what awaited me to be horrible, despite everything I had read about the world of prisons, I tried to write about what I had heard and imagined, but all that meant nothing the moment I opened my eyes. There was a long passage. I could scarcely see the cells lining it; I could scarcely believe this was a real place and not a space in my mind, sick from writing. This was real!

A passage down which two persons could barely pass side by side, the far end enveloped in blackness. A passage bereft of faces, I looked behind me and saw nothing, and before me was utter blackness. A passage with no beginning or end, suspended in nothingness, with me in the middle, and closed doors. The man standing before me opened one of the doors. A sharp buzz started quickly and then ended with slow beats, sad beats like a melody I heard one day in a Greek bar. One of the men grasped my elbow and pushed me further in, and kept holding my arm and the open door, and there … I saw them. It was a cell scarcely big enough for two or three to stand in. I could not see clearly, but I made out three bodies hanging there, I did not know how! I was bewildered and felt that I held my cheeks with my jaw, and my stomach began to convulse. The three bodies were nearly naked. There was a dim light seeping in from somewhere. I did not know whether there was an opening in the ceiling, but it was transformed into feeble rays for enough vision to discern that they were youths of no more than twenty years old or in their early twenties. Their fresh young bodies were clear beneath the blood. They were suspended from their hands in steel handcuffs, and their toes barely touched the floor.

Blood streamed down their bodies, fresh blood, dried blood, deep bruises visible on their bodies like the blows of a random blade. Their faces looked down; they were unconscious, and they swayed to and fro like slaughtered animals.

I retreated, but just then one of the men grabbed me and pushed me, in total silence.

One young man raised his head in agony, scarcely able to raise his head, and the weak rays of light allowed me to see his face.

He had no face; his eyes we completely encrusted. I could see no light in his eyes.

There was no place for his nose or even lips. His face was like a red painting with no lines.

Red mixed with black, which was also red!

At that point I collapsed, and the two men lifted me up. For a minute I teetered on a slippery spot, blindly, and it took several moments for me to regain my balance on my feet. I heard one of them tell the other, «Man, she can’t take it. Look at her. The closet’s killing her!»

Then that smell gushed out, the smell of blood, urine, and feces. The smell of iron rust. A smell like putrefaction, of dead flesh, that is what that smell had to be.

Samar Yazbek • 73

Abruptly they took me out of the cell and opened another cell, and as they did so, the sounds of screaming and torture came from somewhere, someplace far away yet near. I staggered. Never had I heard such sounds of pain. They came from the farthest depth of the earth, and took root in my heart. The sounds did not stop until we left the passage.

The second cell was opened. There was a young man curled up on the floor, in a fetal position, his back to me, the vertebrae of his spinal column like an anatomist’s drawing.

He too seemed to be unconscious. His back was sliced up, as if a knife had carved a map into it.

They closed the cell, and so on with cell after cell, grabbing me by my elbows and pushing me into them, then pulling me out. Bodies lay on top of bodies in heaps. This was Hell. As if humans were just pieces of meat, laid out to put on optimal display the arts of murder and torture. Young men under thirty, how they were transformed into cold pieces of meat in damp, narrow cells, with faces that were not faces, bodies making a new topography. Here the word of God was null, for if God existed, he would not permit his children to be recreated in such a horribly distorted fashion.

I asked one of the men, as they were tying the blindfold back on me, «Are those the boys from the demonstrations?»

«Those are the traitors from the demonstrations,» one of them answered gruffly.

My question irritated him. He seized my elbow and squeezed it harshly, until I thought he would break it. I had no idea what was going on in their heads, but my stomach was churning again, and the man was dragging me along in his grasp. I stumbled and fell, but instead of letting me get up, he kept dragging me. My knee struck the stairs, and then he knocked it even more roughly, and decided to drag me up the stairs like a sack of potatoes. I felt a scalding pain in my bones when I thought back on the boys who had gone out to demonstrate. I was convulsing again, and the convulsions were concentrated deep inside my stomach. All those smells were in my mouth, and the images from the cells covered the blackness before my eyes. We stopped. They pulled off the blindfold and I saw him sitting behind an elegant desk, and I knew that this was not a nightmare. He stared at me derisively.

«What do you think?» he asked. «Did you see your traitor friends?»

Here something began to come out of my guts with intense speed, as if I wanted to shed my skin. In life I used to tell my girlfriends, «if a man’s touch doesn’t make you shed your skin like a snake, it’s not love.» Now I could say that there were other things that change our skins: casting them off toward death, or gliding into the abyss.

That moment: I was gliding into the abyss, but instead of flying, I vomited. I was standing, and fell to my knees. They got very angry. He got out of his chair to stare at the beautiful furniture I had ruined. I kept vomiting. My eyes filled with water—not tears, I am sure, because tears fall in drops, and that was not what came out of my eyes. The thought came back to me: everyone who goes out to demonstrate in the streets here is either shot, or lives as a fugitive, or is detained and tortured like those boys. What courage was now growing from this flinty ground!

My voice was weak but I heard it say: You are the traitor. I know he heard it because he leaned over and hit me hard. Finally I fell to the floor and everything began to fall apart. Before I passed out, I could feel it. My mouth was open against the floor, and the blood started flowing.

Dominique Eddé • 75

Dominique Eddé

On Polyphony and Irreconcilability.

In memory of Edward W. Said Delivered at the symposium on the legacy of Edward Said on the 4th of March 2014.

Translated by Trista Selous.

Edward Said was a man of a period that came to an end just before his death. Just before.

Like a great tree with many branches, this period begins in the late seventeenth century with the birth of Bach, and roots in the Enlightenment, with Mozart, Wordsworth, Swift, Diderot, Voltaire and the philosopher Giambattista Vico, a figure of crucial importance to Said. It was at its most concentrated in the nineteenth century – the century of orientalism – with strong links formed at either end: at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with Jane Austen, Keats, Coleridge, Beethoven, Goethe and Byron, and the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Nietzsche, Freud, Yeats and Forster. I do not, of course, want to minimize the importance to Said of composers and authors who fit squarely into one century, such as Berlioz, Nerval, Armed with the tools of Western Flaubert and Marx, to name but a few in criticism, Edward the Westerner the nineteenth century. But I do want to turned against the arrogance of that highlight Said’s great attraction to diversity and hybridity, even in relation to time. self-assured culture to assist Said, the He was fascinated by connections and Easterner, the Palestinian, turning points; the places where modithe dispossessed. fication, transition and the co-existence of before and after are negotiated; places where opportunities for action and radical change, and their attendant risks, are played out. It goes without saying that the most important time for him was the time of his own life, the twentieth century. It was here that he found his travelling companions, with all their complicity and discord. The list is too long to mention all their names here. Why

76 • Dominique Eddé

do none of these Arab, African and Indian authors, who influenced his thinking, feature among the names I mentioned before? Firstly, because most of them were Said’s contemporaries – Fanon, Achebe, Césaire, Tayeb Salih, Naguib Mahfouz and others. But also, we must acknowledge that the foundations of Edward Said’s critical thinking were primarily Western, however great his curiosity about other cultures. While it is true that the three centuries I mentioned earlier were times of enormous changes, these changes occurred around a comparatively stable axis, which I shall briefly characterize here as a relationship between space and time that was still human, in other words a relationship between history and geography that could still be represented in human terms, with the twin potential for humanism and inhumanity that we know. In this context, Said made a very clear choice: he chose humanism, based on recognition of the other, as his motive and weapon against the inhumanity of relations of domination. This choice was reflected in a permanent movement that he described very well in his dialogue with Daniel Barenboim as «a constant going back and forth between the requirements of the past and the question of the relevance of the present.» He had chosen a battle to fight, and focused on a goal that was all the harder to attain because this field of thought was largely unexplored. It cannot be repeated enough that Orientalism is the work of a pioneer. The questionable part of the undertaking is inseparable from its force. And the force of this intellectual endeavour is itself inseparable from the inner endeavour in which it was rooted. Armed with the tools of Western criticism, Edward the Westerner turned against the arrogance of that self-assured culture to assist Said, the Easterner, the Palestinian, the dispossessed. He says as much in the introduction to Orientalism: Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

Edward Said had a very particular sense of the past. He didn’t regard it from a distance, he examined it closely, through a magnifying glass, as durable material, in order to give it consistency, to keep it alive. For him the past was an affair of the present. It was the shore from which he set off to take on the contemporary world and to which he constantly returned, like a piece of music. He never lost sight of it. He even said, «I wonder very often whether I am too much in the past.» I don’t think he was «too much in the past» – quite the opposite. I think that his approach, his sense of counterpoint, his erudition, the extent and multiplicity of connections that he was able to maintain simultaneously, belong to a time that he represented magnificently and whose final days he witnessed.

Shortly before his death and in the time since, the shattering of the space-time equation, the triumph of experts, the accelerated mixing of East and West, who are increasingly moving in with each other, the morbid divisions and bursts of life within the two systems of representation are now subjecting thought to an entirely new and crushing pressure.

This pressure does not undermine Edward’s method, but it constantly necessitates an impressive number of adjustments, which he had begun to make, notably concerning Is-

Dominique Eddé • 77

lamic fundamentalism. Today, we are experiencing a transformation in which everything is becoming mixed and losing shape. The frameworks are gone. The most contradictory movements support and cancel each other out without arbitration. It is a spiral that takes us in one direction, then the other; it undermines and unmakes connections, trumps the laws of politics with those of finance and pushes religion to the fore. The more the circles close, the more wars they contain. Countries are split in two, three, four. Even tribes are fragmenting. Everything is mixed up with everything else and, with a very few exceptions, there is nothing solid in between. We are in a world that is liquefying in order to change its skin. On one side, the present is speeding along like a racing car, on the other it has broken down. It is separating from the past before it has moved forward.

This is quite the opposite of Said’s movement, which I described earlier and which We are in a world that is liquefying is the movement of thought itself. Today, words are being upended and their mean- in order to change its skin. ing is gradually ebbing away. The surface is everywhere and the content nowhere. There is a cruel absence of land among all these swirling waves. There is nowhere to stand, nothing solid to strike. Said’s value system remains exemplary, intact and entirely valid as a response to this turmoil. But to be operational, it requires us to make a vast, dual effort of mourning and freedom.

Like Freud, who, at the end of his life, came up against the underlying, untameable id, so Edward, at the end of his life, came up against an impenetrable core that resisted all his efforts to tie everything up, at both the political and the personal, existential level. It is this ultimate resistance to his powerful desire for synthesis that he called «irreconcilability». We can think about it in the terms he used to describe the late works of Beethoven in Parallels and Paradoxes: «There is something irreconcilable about it. Instead of getting resolutions, you’re getting things pulled apart». It is no coincidence that, in his book Freud and the Non-European, Said links the late works of Beethoven and Freud – Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. Of Moses he says, «Everything about the treatise suggests not resolution and reconciliation, but, rather, more complexity and a willingness to let irreconcilable elements of the work remain as they are, episodic, fragmentary, unfinished.» I would say that the same is true of Edward Said the activist when, relieved of the burden of persuasion (that work was done), simply a man struggling with illness, he considered «the intransigence, the difficulty and unresolved contradiction» of coming to conclusions. «I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents,» he wrote at the end of his autobiography. «I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing.»

Polyphony and Irreconcilability. The former notion is apparent to all who are familiar with Said’s work, which is a vast effort of interpretation involving several voices in the understanding of a single subject. An attentive reading of his books clearly reveals the palette of nuances he establishes between the orientalist and the Other, and, crucially, his constant assertion of his right to combine a sometimes boundless admiration for many authors, including Conrad, Austen, Kipling and Flaubert, with radical criticism. The second notion, irreconcilability, is less recognized. Firstly, because it has a negative ring

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to it, apparently contradicting the passionate fervour of Said’s struggle against imperialism, the reign of cliché and the falsification of history. Secondly, because it emerged late – officially in any case. For right from the start, in his earliest writings and lectures, there is always an unofficial voice that – if only in just a few words – keeps disturbing and questioning at the point when the other voice – which is perfectly articulated, louder and sometimes authoritarian – is trying to establish the truth. In reality, the truth advocated by Said when he said, «speak truth to power» was first and foremost an effort to demolish lies. It was not for nothing that he often cited Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. It is here that his thought is not only very relevant to us today, but, because of its plasticity, pertinent to the challenges we have faced since his death. It is one of Said’s most productive paradoxes that he belonged to a period that is moving away from us, while remaining a figure sorely missed in the formulation of the present.

His thought reached into the future with its precision and independence, and also its absence of dogma. He did not want to be a maître à penser, he wanted to communicate a freedom of thought to others. «I have been more influenced by Marxists than by Marxism or any other ism», he wrote in The World, the Text and the Critic. This shows that, in his mind, singularity was always more important than systems. Criticism was inseparable in his eyes from irony. He preferred travelling to arriving, intelligence to faith, movement to «once and for all».

We had two relationships at two different times, Edward and I. The first began in 1980, when Orientalism was published in French. I was responsible for launching the book for the publisher Éditions du Seuil. I was 27 years old, he was 45. The second was shortly after the publication of Culture and Imperialism in 1993. It was a time when his desire to live, create and love was at its height, despite the leukaemia that led him to repeat that he was «a dying man», as if the evocation of death was a successful way of postponing it. And indeed, it was for him. Luckily, he survived ten more years. It is only now, rereading these two books, that I see the relationship between them and us.

Edward returned to me just as he returned to the first book by writing the second. His life and work were strongly marked by repetition and a return to the same theme in a different key. At both the emotional and the intellectual level, all his departures – he hated departures – were instinctively linked to a promise to start again. Shortly before his death, I had surprised him, and I think convinced him, with the observation that the W between Edward and Said, which was his father’s initial, was also his «double you». Is it pure coincidence that the same letter W separates Theodore from Adorno, one of the thinkers Said cited most in his works and who was also constantly negotiating between his Jewish and Christian identities, between Germany and America, between his father – Wiesengrund – and the mother whose name he took?

This double you that sometimes links and sometimes separates Edward and Said stands as a symbol of his life’s journey. «It took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly to feel less uncomfortable with ‘Edward’, a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said,» he wrote on the first page of Out of Place. While he was writing it, this book bore the title Not Quite Right.

I’m partly sorry he abandoned that title, because in my view, it contained all the irony of his vision of himself: his wounded narcissism, his charm, his unfailing acknowledgement that he had never been quite right, quite what was required in the eyes of the – equally

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irreconcilable – couple that were his parents, and so in the eyes of others, the eyes of the world. Edward was always examining the beginning of things, and this included the couple whose only son he was, alongside four sisters. On the one hand was the unsubtle, sometimes brutal authority of his father (a member of the American expeditionary forces in 1917) and, on the other, the attractiveness, intelligence and ambivalence of his mother. Couples were his subject, and also his method: comparison, conflict, guilt, closeness, friction, a void to fill, plenitude to decode, the risk of fusion, of separation and a praise of diversity. He endlessly considered the cast of characters, transferred it, rearranged it, this way, that way, patiently, impatiently, excitedly, placidly and always with extreme determination. East and West, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine.

In his thought as in his life, it was the journey that interested him, the round trip from one to the other, the overlap. And his secret – which enabled him to create links In his work as in his life, music was when the tension between extremes was everywhere. Free from words, it was at breaking point – was music. In his work as in his life, music was everywhere. Free the happy pursuit of his quest for from words, it was the happy pursuit of meaning. It was the school of inventive his quest for meaning. It was the school repetition, the antidote to the negative of inventive repetition, the antidote to the negative repetition of political realities. repetition of political realities.

The Israel-Palestine situation and the degeneration of the Arab world had taken negative repetition to its worst extremes. Omnipresent throughout his work, inventive repetition was his compass. He repeated himself by saying the same thing in a different way. And this «other way» produced the small difference that changed the perspective, that added a great deal with very little, that set life going again. «Repetition connects reason with raw experience», he wrote, confirming for me the intuition that his work is also a self-portrait – as he went on, «Repetition is the frame within which man represents himself to himself and for others.» I know of few bodies of work that so clearly and deliberately reproduce the same quotations from one book to the next, sometimes within the same book. Not to mention his constant return to the same authors from his first book to his last, with Joseph Conrad breaking all the records in this respect.

Edward carried Said with him. He transported himself as if he were two people. The one brought the other along. One held back, the other was in a hurry. These two alternate or superimposed movements were like those of a fugue, which, counterpoint aside, creates a constant sense of flight. Edward was in flight, but with a point of inertia or immobility that enabled him to foresee the future without cutting himself off from the past. He advanced physically just as he thought: he would launch his attack by making connections. He was a force carrying a weight. His modernity lay less in his speed than in his point of inertia. It was his sense of slow emptiness that gave weight to his leaps forward, that gave him force – unlike the contemporary haste that replaces thought with opinion and comment.

This way he had of setting off at a gallop while also reining himself in can be seen in his handwriting, which is half impulsive, half restrained, ready for the offensive or the defensive, to open up or to focus inwards. His letters are elegant, responsive, pos-

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sessive, sometimes stretching forward, sometimes hunched. His confidence and speed turn «which», «that», «you» or «of» into something akin to musical notation. He was particularly fond of the physical tools of writing: pens, ink and paper. To watch him write was to see him become absent and settled all at once. His silence was as inhabited and solid as mine was permeable and lost in thought. He was in contact with his subject like a swimmer in the sea who stays in his depth. Often he would rest his head on his hand, cradling his temple, waiting anxiously – but never for long – for his thoughts to overcome an obstacle or untie a knot. When his hand set off again across the Lalo writing paper, I felt that he was methodically pushing back the boundaries of a domain on which he had already cultivated every inch of ground. He was expanding in the way that an artisan or a landowner expands. The pages he turned as he went along were new acres.

His posture expressed a combination of attack and precision in which his knowledge was endlessly subject to a possible duel. Of all the signs that brought his writing to life, the crossing of his «t»’s is the most moving, the most sensitive to his changes of tempo and mood. When the tension is too great, his writing weakens. The words are strung out, torn apart, struggling against an overwhelming current. They recall the times when the solitude of his political fight made him face adversity with more fury than calm. On the verge of irreconcilability. Something was always beginning and ending, in his life and in his writing. Polyphony and irreconcilability. Mozart and Strauss. The two extremes.

The journey from the 18th century to the 20th century. The two composers he wanted us to listen to, one after the other, when we met. Mozart’s Divertimento in D major and Strauss’s Metamorphosen.

In a letter of December 1981, he sent me an extract from the poem Mozart 1935 by Wallace Stevens, of which he had chosen to copy out the following two verses: That lucid souvenir of the past, The divertimento; That airy dream of the future, The unclouded concerto . . .

The snow is falling.

Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice, Not you. Be thou, be thou The voice of angry fear, The voice of this besieging pain.

More than thirty years later, I should like to finish with these final lines, which he deliberately left out: We may return to Mozart.

He was young, and we, we are old.

The snow is falling And the streets are full of cries.

Be seated, thou.

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Mark R. Cohen

Jews in the Muslim World in the Middle Ages1 This text is a revised version of the author’s lecture given on the 2nd of March 2015, as the opening lecture of the Saladin Days 2015.

Read some of the books published in the last fifty or so years about Jews in the Muslim world in the Middle Ages, and you will find a gloomy refrain. The Jews, these authors claim, have been persecuted by Islam from the time of the prophet Muhammad. The Qur’an states that the Jews are «sons of apes and pigs». Muhammad punished the Jewish tribes of Medina, even massacred the male members of one of them, setting a precedent for centuries of Muslim violence against Jews and eventually against Israel. The Jews were forced to adhere to an oppressive canon of discriminatory regulations, severely limiting their freedom and exposing them to Muslim violence. In short, life for Jews under medieval Islam was as painful as it was for Jews living under Christendom.

This Islamophobic theme, in all its variations, which I have called a counter-myth, represents a radical reinterpretation of history. In the nineteenth century, a very different story prevailed.

There was nearly universal consensus that Jews in the medieval Muslim world

—taking al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain as the model— lived in a «Golden Age» of Jewish-Muslim harmony, an interfaith utopia of tolerance and coexistence. From a literary and cultural point of view, this conviction rang true. Jews were indeed immersed in Arabic-Islamic culture, including the language, poetry, philosophy, science, medicine, and the study of Scripture. Furthermore, Jews could —and many did— ascend to the pinnacles of political power in Muslim government.

This idealized picture of Jewish integration in Islamic society went beyond Spain to encompass the entire Muslim world, from Baghdad to Cordoba, and extended over the long centuries bracketed by the Islamic conquests at one end, and the era of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) at the other.

The interfaith utopia reflects a wistful yearning by Central European Jews in the 19th century for similar integration into their own society, following their unfulfilled civil Emancipation. But it was in many ways another kind of myth because

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it ignored, or left unmentioned, the legal inferiority of the Jews and periodic outbursts of persecution. Yet, when compared to the gloomier history of Jews in the medieval Ashkenazic world of northern Europe and late medieval Spain, and the far more frequent and severe persecution in those regions, it contained a very large kernel of truth.

The exaggerated image of the «Golden Age» remained dominant among scholars and in the general public throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews in Europe confronted a new, virulent strain of political anti-Semitism, reinforcing a much older feeling of alienation and persecution in Christian lands. The contrast between tolerant Islam and intolerant Christianity endured well into the twentieth century, as the flames of Jew-hatred burned ever brighter in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust.

In the twentieth century, as Arab nationalism clashed with Zionism, Arab and pro-Arab Western writers adopted the well worn Jewish myth of the interfaith utopia, wielding it as a weapon against Zionism. Zionism. and ultimately the State of Israel, were blamed for ending centuries of Islamic tolerance. Like the Jewish devotees of the interfaith utopia, these Arab and pro-Arab authors glossed over the legal inferiority of the Jews, and minimized or ignored episodes of violence that call the Judeo-Islamic interfaith harmony into question. This is the narrative to which the Jewish counter-myth is a response. But the counter-myth of Islamic persecution flies in the face of historical evidence that Jews were better treated in Islamic society than in the lands of medieval Christendom.

If, however, Islam seems to have been more tolerant than Christianity, this is true only in a qualified sense. In the Mid-

dle Ages, tolerance, in the liberal sense of full equality, was not considered a virtue to be emulated. Monotheistic religions were by nature mutually intolerant. Adherents of the religion in power considered it their right and duty to treat the others as inferiors rejected by God, and, in extreme cases, to treat them harshly, persecute them, and even encourage them (in some cases by force) to abandon their faith and join the faith of the rulers. Though the religious minorities ( Jews living under Christian rule; Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule) were hardly happy with their second-class status and legal inferiority, let alone the occasional maltreatment, for the most part, they accepted their inequality and subordination with resignation, so long as they were allowed to live in security and practice their religion without interference. This was «toleration» in the medieval sense of the word. For the Jews of Islam, as for their overlords, the Muslims, the hierarchical relationship between chosen religion and rejected religion, between superior and inferior, between governing and governed, was part of the natural order of things.

The Jews may have dreamed of a reversal of the hierarchy, in history or in the Messianic era, but for the time being, generally speaking, they bore their fate with a certain amount of equanimity.

The Prophet Muhammad Let us consider, for a moment, the career of the Prophet Muhammad in relation to the Jews, particularly the Islamophobic idea that contemporary Muslim hatred of the Jews and anti-Semitism in the Islamic world stems from the Prophet’s harsh treatment of the Jews. It seems clear that Muhammad was familiar with Judaism even before he migrated with his companions from Mecca to Medina, where

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several Jewish tribes were settled. Arabia was pagan at that time, though seeds of monotheistic belief seem to have been planted there even before Muhammad entered the scene, and the presence of Judaism in the Arabian Peninsula may have had something to do with this. Even before his move to Medina, Muhammad is likely to have come in contact with Jews; either merchants trading in Mecca, or during his own commercial travels to the north. From these people he would have been exposed to some Jewish beliefs and practices. Doubtlessly, he met Christians, too, whether merchants trading in Mecca, hermits living in the desert, or Christian members of other Arabian tribes. From them, he would have absorbed ideas of Christianity as well as of Judaism filtered through Christian eyes.

Muhammad saw himself as standing in continuity with Judaism as well as with Christianity.

From the Jews of Medina, the Prophet would have learned much more about Judaism, about their reverence for their «book», the Torah, their multiple daily prayers, which they recited while facing Jerusalem, their dietary laws, their fasts, their Sabbath and of course stories about their own prophets, most importantly Moses. There is little doubt that, by assuming the moniker «seal of the Prophets», Muhammad saw himself as standing in continuity with Judaism as well as with Christianity, and that he expected the Jews to acknowledge him and become part of the new ummah, the community of believers.

It is also clear that, apart from several individual Jews who heeded the Prophet’s call, the majority did not, especial-

ly the members of the three main, large Jewish tribes; the Banu Nadir, the Banu Qaynuqa’, and the Banu Qurayza. Muhammad’s natural response was disappointment and anger. As his power and following in the peninsula grew, he retaliated against the recalcitrant Jews. First, he exiled the tribe of the Banu Qaynuqa’, later he banished the Jews of Banu Nadir, and finally, he sanctioned the massacre of the male members of the Banu Qurayza, subjecting their women and children to slavery.

This violent confrontation between Islam and the Jews, coming at the very birth hour of the new religion, has been taken by counter-mythologists as a harbinger of subsequent Islamic policy toward the Jews. Some have even gone so far as to depict the slaying of the Banu Qurayza as a warrant for genocide. As several scholars have argued, however, we need to contextualize Muhammad’s actions. When the Prophet arrived in Medina, and before his reckoning with the three tribes, he had relatively little power. He wanted to unite the tribes in a new social order, an ummah, based on monotheistic faith rather than on tribal allegiance. Rather than constantly fighting each other, the tribes in the ummah were to unite in the battle against the common enemy, the pagans of Mecca and in the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

We possess, in two versions, an authentic document, dated to shortly after the Prophet arrived in Medina, which helps illuminate the Prophet’s attitude toward the Jews. Called the «Constitution of Medina», the document defines the new ummah, and the place of the Jews in it. It declares that the believers are «one people (umma wāh.ida) to the exclusion of others». Jewish tribes are mentioned as well, and in one clause, they are declared to belong to the ummah without aban-

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doning their religion. Problematically, the three large tribes, the Banu Nadir, Banu Qaynuqa‘, and Banu Qurayza, are not singled out by name. Scholars have suggested that those tribes appear either under a different name, or that the Prophet had made separate non-belligerency pacts with the three.

Whatever the case, as Muhammad’s mission in Medina progressed, the Jewish tribes failed to support him and the ummah. They refused to follow him into battle, or to maintain their neutrality.

The Muslim sources, even discounting some likely exaggeration, accuse the Jews of outright treachery, or breaking their promise of neutrality. In the context of contemporary laws of war, this would have provided justification for retaliation. Yet —and this is of critical importance— the harsh punishment inflicted on the Jews of Medina did not determine policy towards Jews elsewhere. At the battle of Khaybar, where Jewish refugees from Medina had settled, Muhammad accepted their surrender in return for a portion of the town’s annual produce. The Jews were allowed to remain in their religion. This, rather than forced conversion, expulsion, or execution, defined the policy of Islam during the subsequent conquest of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires.

In the Qur’an What about the Qur’an? What does it tell us about the relationship between Islam and the Jews? Counter-mythologists search the Qur’an for verses expressing negative feelings about the Jews, and claim to have found the seeds of contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism in Islam’s holy book. In fact, the Qur’an contains a mixed message about the Jews, mirroring the ambivalent feelings of the Prophet, and reflecting the gulf between his high

expectations and the Jews’ disappointing response.

Nonetheless, reading the Qur’an and other sources emanating from the time of the Prophet, notably the Constitution of Medina, the historian Fred Donner argues that originally the new religion —which he calls the «community of believers»— was meant as an ecumenical community open to Jews and Christians. This, Donner understands, explains Muhammad’s initial conciliatory approach to Jewish practices and holy texts. Apart from religious motives, there was a more mundane reason for reaching out to the Jews; he needed the militarily powerful and wealthy Jewish tribes of Medina as allies against his enemies in Mecca. His disappointment and frustration at their lack of allegiance are reflected in many unfriendly verses in the Qur’an, including the verse, spoken three times in the text, about apes and pigs, and helps explain his harsh punishment of the Jews of Medina.

The Qur’an’s position on the status of the Jews, however, was in many ways tolerant. One of the most important Qur’anic policies regarding the Peoples of the Book is summed up in the oft-cited verse, «There is no compulsion in religion» (lā ikrāha f ī dīni) (Sura 2:256). It gives voice to a realistic pluralism in early Islam. In context, as one scholar has persuasively argued, the verse seems to have been meant simply as a statement of resignation, acknowledging that people are not likely to give up the faith into which they were born. Nonetheless, later on, the verse came to be understood as a strict prescription, forbidding Muslims to compel others to accept Islam against their will. Historically, when a zealous or angry ruler decreed that non-Muslims must become Muslim, his actions were seen as contrary to the law and were eventually annulled.

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The «no compulsion in religion» verse should be seen in conjunction with other statements in the Qur’an that illustrate the pluralistic attitude of the nascent Islamic ummah. This pluralism is enshrined, for instance, in the ninth Sura, in a verse that establishes the basis for Islamic policy toward the Jews and other People of the Book. Verse 29, like the Constitution of Medina, allows the People of the Book to retain their religious identity in return for payment of tribute, jizya in Arabic, and conceding, through their humble behavior, the superiority of Islam.

The «no compulsion in religion» verse should be seen in conjunction with other statements in the Qur’an that illustrate the pluralistic attitude of the nascent Islamic ummah.

When the Arabs took possession of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, they adopted local taxation systems, and converted the jizya tribute into a personal poll tax paid once a year by every healthy, adult, male Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, and, in India, every Hindu. In return, the followers of these religions were permitted freedom of religion and protection by the Islamic state. Religious pluralism was the earmark of the Muslim polity.

The dhimma policy This religious pluralism was enshrined in the dhimma system, canonized in the pseudepigraphic Pact of ‘Umar, which guaranteed non-Muslims protection for themselves, their families, and their communities in return for jizya and for submission to a canonical code of conduct designed to ensure their inferiority in respect to Islam. Religious pluralism

meant more than just freedom of worship; it meant that the religious communities could govern themselves, which, in the case of the Jews, meant a whole range of administrative autonomy, including the all important license to follow their own laws, which meant the laws of the Torah, the Mishna, and the Talmuds.

The conquering Arab tribesmen were ill-equipped to oversee their own new state apparatus. So, in addition to controlling their own internal religious and communal affairs, dhimmīs, who, it must be remembered, formed the numerical majority in the Muslim domains until probably the tenth century, were retained in the administrative positions they had held under Greek and Persian rule. Even when Muslims began to assume bureaucratic control of the Empire, dhimmīs continued to serve in positions of authority, some of them rising very high at court, even, in rare cases, to the office of vizier.

This put them in situations where they exercised power over Muslims, much to the consternation of Muslim clerics and other pious figures, who chastised Muslim rulers for sanctioning this wanton violation of the right order of society engraved in the Quran. Many of the episodes of Islamic persecution of dhimmīs, including Jews, occurred when they were deemed to have risen above their proper, lowly place in the social hierarchy.

A pragmatic policy of live and let live thus governed relations between the Islamic state and its numerous non-Muslim subjects. The tolerated autonomy of the non-Muslim communities, alongside religious freedom, allowed the Jews and other dhimmīs to maintain their separate identity and to flourish.

In parts of Christian Europe, Jews were restricted to a few, problematic walks of life, for instance moneylending as of

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the twelfth century, which became a frequent source of anti-Jewish hatred and violence. Unlike this practice, Jews in the medieval Muslim world, particularly during the first six centuries of Muslim rule, sought their livelihood in every conceivable corner of the Islamic economy. This economic pluralism, we may call it, mitigated against the prejudices and violence suffered by Jews in medieval Europe. We possess hundreds of actual letters written

by Jewish merchants. Like the Arabic papyri, they were preserved in Egypt thanks to the arid climate. They were discarded in a room, a geniza in Hebrew, in a medieval synagogue in Fustat, or Old Cairo. These documents portray Jews as fully integrated into the Middle Eastern marketplace, interacting with Muslim traders and travelers, ship-owners, and caravan leaders without prejudice. When, after about the twelfth century, Jewish economic circumstances declined, this was not a confessional phenomenon alone, but one that Jews shared with the Muslim majority, though as a minority group they naturally experienced greater hardship.

Religious pluralism and economic integration were not dictated simply by pragmatic considerations. Sociological factors also played a role. The heterogeneous mixture in the Islamic Empire of non-Muslim peoples professing a variety of religions —a veritable pluralism of infidels— was complemented by a mixture of ethnic Muslim or Islamized groups: the Arabs, Muslim Iranians, Islamized Berbers in North Africa, and, in Muslim Spain, Islamized Slavs, Christian converts, as well as vestiges of Hispano-Romans and Germanic Goths. Turkic peoples began to arrive in Iraq as military slaves as early as the ninth century. These and others created a richly hued mosaic of peoples and religions, in which the Jews consti-

tuted just one group out of many. In this pluralistic society, different religions and ethnic groups lived side by side, aware of their differences, but coexisting in a more or less live-and-let-live atmosphere, each recognizing its designated place in the hierarchy.

For all these reasons, the Jews of Islam had substantial confidence in the dhimma system. If they kept a low profile and paid their annual poll tax, they could expect to be protected and to be free from economic discrimination, without fear of being forcefully converted to Islam, massacred, or expelled. During the rare episodes of persecution—exceptions to the rule that they were, Jews felt the impact of violence no less than the oppressed Ashkenazic Jews of northern Europe, but, importantly, they did not preserve these events as part of a collective memory of suffering the way their Ashkenazic brethren did. They recognized these as temporary lapses of the dhimma arrangement, and trusted that forced conversions, a violation of Qur’anic law, would be reversed after the initial zealotry faded. When forced conversion persisted, as it did for two generations in the twelfth century under the Almohades in North Africa and Spain, Maimonides saw this as atypical. That, I believe, explains, contextually, his harsh statement about Islam, that «no nation has ever done more harm to the Jews; none has ever matched it in debasing and humiliating us», in his famous letter to the beleaguered Jews of Yemen. Taken out of its historical context, Maimonides’ comment is regularly cited by counter-mythologists as proof of the severity of Islamic mistreatment of the Jews throughout the Middle Ages.

Judaeo-Arabic culture Muslim-Jewish coexistence and the pluralism of religions and peoples that prevailed

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in Islamic society laid the foundation for the remarkable Judeo-Arabic cultural renaissance of the Middle Ages. Prior to the arrival of the Arabs, Jewish culture consisted primarily of Talmud study, of elaboration of the midrash, of Biblical exegesis and commentary, and of liturgical poetry.

Muslim-Jewish coexistence and the pluralism of religions and peoples that prevailed in Islamic society laid the foundation for the remarkable JudeoArabic cultural renaissance of the Middle Ages.

As part of the general Arabization of the new Empire, Jews adopted Arabic as their spoken and written medium, abandoning Aramaic, which had long ago replaced Hebrew as the medium of communication, verbal and to a certain extent also written. Arabic was the key to an entirely new way of thinking. Arabic functioned both as the language of high culture and the common tongue of both Jews and Arabs in everyday exchange. It was at the same time linguistically akin to Aramaic and Hebrew, with morphological forms and cognates that facilitated transcribing Arabic into Hebrew letters and reading it —the form of Arabic linguists call Judaeo-Arabic. Arabic, the language of the Islamic faith, like the faith itself, was less repugnant and less threatening to the Jews than the Latin language and doctrine of the Christian Church was to Jews living in Europe. By the tenth century, therefore, some two and a half centuries after the rise of Islam, Jews had made a total and largely effortless transition from Aramaic to Arabic and now used Arabic, not only in daily speech, but for nearly everything they wrote. This prepared them to share

lock, stock, and barrel in the high culture of Islamic society.

Islam came into contact with the science, medicine, and philosophy of the Greco-Roman world centuries earlier than European Christendom. Translated early on into Arabic under the patronage of Islamic Caliphs, these works gave rise to what the German scholar, Adam Mez, famously called «Die Renaissance des Islams». Jews of the Fertile Crescent, the heartland of the Islamic Empire and the first center of the new Arabic science, medicine, and philosophy, had both access to and interest in the translated texts read

by Muslim intellectuals. This facilitated the cultural Convivencia, the co-existence period, of the Judaeo-Arabic world, which began in the eastern Islamic domains and spread from there to the Mediterranean and to the Muslim West. Arabization facilitated Jewish adoption of philosophy, science and medicine —philosophy serving as handmaiden of religious truths, as it did for most Islamic philosophers themselves.

The Arabic and Islamic «renaissance» laid the groundwork for other Jewish cultural innovations. The Bible was translated into Arabic. Hebrew as a language was studied «scientifically», so to speak, using linguistic tools in vogue among Arab grammarians. But nearly everything Jews wrote, they wrote in Arabic, and this was not limited to philosophy, for which Hebrew lacked the vocabulary entirely. Poetry, the major exception, was composed in Hebrew, but it, too, bore the stamp of Arabic culture.

Hebrew poetry before the Arab conquests — the piyyut — was liturgical, composed for recitation in the synagogue, and sung by cantors as part of the worship service. It differed from Biblical poetry and language, replacing the parallelism

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of words with the repetition of rhyme syllablest, and substituting a relatively straightforward Biblical Hebrew style and vocabulary for the difficult, post-Biblical and allusory style of the piyyut.

The Hebrew poetry of the Islamic period imitated its Arabic model, displaying several novel features. It introduced metrics based on the quantitative patterning of syllables, mimicking the metrics of Arabic poetry. Arabic rhyme schemes were also adopted. The themes, too, were new; secular subjects like nature, love, wine, panegyric, the beauty of women and young boys, even, in the case of Samuel ha-Nagid ibn Naghrela (d. 1056; see below), the famous Jewish Talmudist and politician, the glory of war— all borrowed from the Arabic poetic arsenal. Even the choice of Hebrew was imitative. Arabic poets prided themselves in writing in the language of their holy scripture, the Qur’an, believing Arabic to be the most beautiful of all languages. Jews followed suit by choosing Biblical Hebrew for their poetry, asserting the wonderment and uniqueness of the language of their own scripture.

The social setting for this new poetry also mimicked the Arab model. Hebrew poems were recited and sung in gardens, like the gardens of the caliph’s palace or of private homes, the physical setting for Arabic poetry. Jews continued to compose religious poetry for the synagogue, but it, too, employed Biblical Hebrew and Arabic meter and borrowed themes from Islamic pietistic thought. Some Jewish poets suffered compunctions about writing poetry in the Arabic mode and about the palpably non-Jewish way of living that accompanied it— what we today would call assimilation. In contrition, the famous Andalusian Jewish poet, philosopher, and physician, Judah ha-Levi, abandoned his

native Spain and embarked on a pious pilgrimage to the Holy Land toward the end of his life.

The interfaith utopia reflects a wistful yearning by Central European Jews in the 19th century for similar integration into their own society.

In the Middle Ages, tolerance, in the liberal sense of full equality, was not considered a virtue to be emulated.

One of the greatest rabbis of the Middle Ages, Saadya Gaon (d. 942), rightly called the «father» of Judaeo-Arabic culture, also wrote poetry. He served as head of the great yeshiva, a Jewish school of religious study, located in Baghdad, one of the two most important religious and administrative centers for Jews living in the Islamic domains. He composed the first comprehensive Jewish prayer book, writing the directions for the worshiper in Arabic (the prayers, of course, remained in their original Hebrew) and including poems of his own. A sign of the assimilation of Islamic ways of thinking, in his introduction, Saadya referred to the Torah as shari‘a , to the Hebrew Bible as qur’an, to the cantor as imam, and the direction of prayer as qibla. Saadya also compiled monographs on Jewish law in Arabic, as did other Geonim, or heads of the yeshiva in Iraq. This represented a radical departure from Jewish precedent. For the sacrosanct realm of Jewish law, Jews had always reserved Hebrew or Aramaic. Now, under the influence of Islamic legal scholarship taking place in Iraq, where the yeshivas were located, Jewish legists adopted the systematic style and terminology of Islamic jurisprudence to organize and systematize the law of the Talmud. The entire

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structure of Jewish legal discourse was altered in accordance with Islamic categories, while some of the content of Islamic law influenced Jewish legal thought as well.

Saadya referred to the Torah as shari‘a, to the Hebrew Bible as qur’an, to the cantor as imam, and the direction of prayer as qibla.

Saadya Gaon was also a pioneer in applying Greco-Arabic rational philosophical categories to Jewish thought in a systematic way, adopting current methods from Islamic Mu‘tazilite theologians. The acme of Judeo-Arabic philosophy came with Maimonides (1138-1204), who strove to make Judaism compatible with the then popular neo-Aristotelian philosophical school.

The Arabic language gave Jews entrée to the corridors of Muslim power, and made possible the remarkable careers of such luminaries as Samuel ha-Nagid in the eleventh century, head of the Jewish community, poet, Talmudist, and vizier of Granada. In the politically fragmented Spain of the eleventh century, scores of Jewish courtiers found employ in Islamic administration in the different principalities (taifas), while at the same time acting as intercessors on behalf of the Jewish communities to which they belonged.

Other dignitaries, as well as merchants, less well known because they did not leave books behind, but whose quotidian lives are described in minute detail in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, are no less important as Jewish exemplars of the Jewish-Muslim co-existence that reigned for several centuries during the Islamic high Middle Ages. For such illustrious figures

in the Jewish elite, those centuries were indeed a «Golden Age».

The earlier mentioned counter-mythologists of Islamic persecution have done much to obscure the picture of Jewish life under Islam in the Middle Ages, including the cultural immersion of the Jews that could hardly have occurred if the Jews were being regularly persecuted. This kind of abuse of history may satisfy people’s search for an explanation of the sorry state of Muslim-Jewish relations in today’s world, both in Israel and in Europe.

The demonstration of Muslim support for the Jews of Oslo a week ago is heartening. History, properly and dispassionately understood, supports Jewish-Muslim coexistence more than Jewish-Muslim conflict. As a historian, I have always fought against the abuse of history that seeks to cover up, even outright deny, the moments of harmony. At the same time, we should not idolize the Jewish-Muslim relationship in the past as an era of complete toleration in the modern, post-Enlightenment sense. Perhaps when both the myth makers and the counter-myth makers abandon their diametrically opposed interpretations of history it will be possible to revive some of the harmony that existed in the past.

The lecture is based on the authors book Under Cresent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; new edition 2008). For additional details, see the For additional details, see the encyclopedic, one volume History of Jewish-Muslim Relations from the Origins to the Present Day, ed. by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); French edition: Histoire des relations entre juifs et musulmans des origines à nos jours (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013).

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Yemen Blues An Israeli of Yemeni heritage, Ravid Kahalani is the leading figure of the band Yemen Blues, belonging to a generation of Israeli artists that have started questioning the prevailing notions of Israeli identity in various ways.

Kahalani believes music to be the universal language in which all differences are suspended, an opinion he both expanded on during the Saladin Days, in discussion with the poet Almog Behar and historian Orit Bashkin, before demonstrating it in the best manner possible, with his band on stage. In Yemen Blues, Kahalani and his band kick off from his Yemenite Jewish musical roots, adding a rich mix along the way, including the best of jazz and West African music.

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94 • Orit Bashkin

Orit Bashkin

Iraqi Jews: Bilingualism, nationalism and racism, 1921-1967 The Saladin lecture 2015 This lecture, given on March 3, 2015, is based on the author’s book New Babylonians.

A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012), in which the sources reffered to in the lecture can be found.

In 1947, Iraq’s beauty queen was a Jewish woman called Renée Dangoor. In 1947, it was clear to everybody in the Middle East that the conflict in Palestine was going to be long and bloody. And yet, in this very precise moment, the Jewish woman holding the statuette of Ishtar, Aphrodite, was chosen to symbolize the beauty and splendor of modern Iraq and Baghdad. So why was that? What were the conditions that enabled Renée to become the queen of beauty of the entire state of Iraq in 1947?

Iraq is interesting because it is a country that is marked by ethnic and religious divisions, between Sunnis and Shias, between Arabs and Kurds, and between various communities of Christians. But these divisions meant that Jews were not the minority, like they were in many places in Europe. They were rather one minority amongst minorities. The interwar period is an era where Baghdad rose as an important center, and Baghdad was the center where many Jews lived; In 1951 the Iraqi Jewish community included something like 150 000 people, and 90 000 lived in Baghdad.

Iraq was established as a constitutional monarchy in 1921, and it was under British control in the form of a mandate from the League of Nations during the 1920s.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the British very much remained involved in Iraqi political affairs. This meant that an anticolonial and antiimperial discourse was very important to young Iraqis, influencing Jews as well. In the 1940s, the left in Iraq, the social democrats and communists, became very strong as well, again something that influenced Jews to a large degree.

Processes of modernization started in the Ottoman period, especially after Jews began attending a French school opened in Baghdad in 1869, called Alliance Israélite Universelle. They were integrated into world trade, especially with India. The rise of these Baghdadi Jewish upper middle classes continued into the 20th century and all the way through the 1940s and the 1950s. An interesting case, of a Jewish woman who rose from the urban poor to the upper classes, was that of Salima Murad. One of the most famous singers of Iraq in this period, Murad sang

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songs that encapsulated the Iraqi popular spirit.

Not all Jews belonged to the urban middle class or upper middle class. The Jewish urban poor lived in exclusively Jewish neighborhoods in Baghdad. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Jews were mostly rural, and spoke Arameic. There were very important differences between them and the Baghdadi Jews. I merely wanted to mention this, because in the following I will be focusing on the middle class and the intelligentsia.

In the period I focus on in this lecture, we see the growth of nationalism in Iraq, and a pride in its Assyrian and Babylonian heritage, which unfortunately these days is destroyed through horrendous acts of iconoclasm. We see a pride in being Arab, and calls for Arab unity, as part of a Middle Eastern anticolonial strategy. And interestingly, Arab culture, rather than Arab religion, became very important. So in this framework, even Christians and Jews could identify with the Prophet Muhammad, not because he is a religious figure, but because Muhammad was an Arab hero who established an ethical state. They could identify with the Arab conquerors of Iraq, because they established an Arab empire. They could identify with Saladin, not necessarily as a leader who conducted the jihad, but as a leader who defended the Middle East from foreign powers, who, at that time, were understood as the precursors for modern colonizers.

These processes influenced the Jewish community. First of all, the Jews took heart of the fact that they had been in Iraq for a long time. As good patriots, they argued that the Jewish roots in Iraq date back to the destruction of the first Jewish temple; that Abraham, the father of both Jews and Muslims, or Jews and Arabs, came from Iraq, from the city of Ur. When Faysal

I, the first king of Iraq, came to Iraq, the Jews gave him a Talmud, one of the most important books of Jewish law, produced in Babylonia.

Iraqi Jews […] witnessed violence, explosions, and, not knowing who were behind it, they decided to leave.

Similarly, Jews were proud of the Arabo-Islami culture. The argument that they were making at the time was that the Jews lived a happier life under the Islamic empires than in Europe, where Jews suffered from pogroms and persecution, and religious hatred towards Jews. Jews believed they lived in a society which had declined following the Ottoman conquest, and which was now reviving; they progressed together with Arab society.

This is a very different condition from Jewish views in modern Europe, where modern Jews were asking why Christian society progressed, while they somehow remained at the back. The ways in which Jews thought about themselves, and the majority society in which they lived, in Iraq, was quite different then. In their writings, they highlighted Jewish contributions to Arab culture, especially using an image of As-Samaw’al ibn Adiya, who was an Arabian Jewish poet writing in Arabic before the rise of Islam, and was considered one of the founders of the Arab literary canon.

To give you an example, here is a quote from an autobiography, written by a Jewish Iraqi by the name of David Nejjar: I greatly love the Arabic language, which is the language of the Qur’an. [...]

My love for the Arabic language probably originated from the fact that I was born and raised in a mixed neighborhood of Jews and Muslims [in Baghdad] and I

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used to hear the mu’azzin’s call for prayer several times a day.

This quote illustrates another important point, which is that in the twentieth century, Jews left the exclusively Jewish neighborhoods in Baghdad, and started living together with Christians and Muslims. What that actually meant, is that they spent their time with non-Jews, loved their language and wanted to know more about their religions.

The Jewish elites at the time, who really wanted to be part of the Iraqi state, were very fearful of Zionism.

Living in mixed neighborhoods, learning Arabic in school, and becoming part of the Arab middle classes, had political ramifications. And the Jewish elites at the time, who really wanted to be part of the Iraqi state, were very fearful of Zionism. They were afraid that the deterioration of the relationship between Jews and Arabs, in Palestine, would reflect on them; that people in Iraq would say that they were not loyal citizens. Indeed, accounts, especially from the British, show that Jews, at this time, wrote petitions to distance themselves from Zionism. Here is a petition written in 1938, in a journal called al-Mustaqbal: We, all Arab-Jewish youngsters, who work on behalf of Palestine, our Arab sister-nation, pronounce our determination to preserve the Arab nature of Palestine and the rights of her Arab sons. We support with our hearts and souls those who defend a strong Arab Palestine.

It is important to note that this attachment for Arabic, Arab culture and Arab politics did not come out of the

blue, but was connected to education and urbanization. Jews learned Arabic at the time, even at private Jewish schools like the French school Alliance, or Shamash, a bilingual Arabo-English school. The state sent teachers, mostly Muslims, to teach Jews Arabic, and this enabled them, in many ways, to play such a role in the Baghdadi public sphere.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a formidable challenge to this vision of Arab-Jewish relationship came in the form of German influence. Certain Muslim and Christian elites in Iraq thought that collaborating with Nazi Germans would be a good idea, because it constituted a front against British and French colonialism in the region. In April 1941, a coup took place, led by pro-German sympathizers. The British defeated the coup after two months, but in the first days of June, just as the coup’s powers left Baghdad, two days of anti-Jewish riots, known as the farhud, literally «looting», broke in the city, and more than 180 Jews were killed, mostly those living in exclusively Jewish neighborhoods. This was the worst moment in Arab-Jewish relations, as far as Iraqi Jews were concerned. Anti-Semitism, paranoia and chauvinism broke out in the worse fashions possible. However, there were also dozens of heroism cases during these days, with Muslims risking their own lives in order to save their neighbors, with Muslim neighbors hiding Jews, or wearing military uniforms to stop the mob from getting to them. In one case, a Muslim went to his Jewish neighbor’s house, pretending it was his, so that the looters would not enter the house. The farhud shocked the Jews, but Zionist emissaries who came shortly after the farhud to Iraq, trying to convince Jews to emigrate, were rejected quite fiercefully.

However, young Jews were attract-

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ed to radical ideologies, to communism and, to some extent, Zionism. There was a general shift to communism in Iraqi society. Communism gave Jews a sort of anti-sectarian vision, a way to be anti-Western and still be loyal Iraqi patriots.

One of the effects of this was the establishment of a society called Usbat Mukafahat al-Sahayuniyya, or The Society for Combating Zionism, which was led by a Jew, Yusuf Harun Zilkha. For the illegal Iraqi Communist Party, this was a way of establishing a legal organization, because they thought no Arab government would persecute an anti-Zionist society. However, the society was actually persecuted.

The communist Jews in this society were strongly anti-Zionist, believing that fighting for social justice in Iraq would end anti-Semitism.

This communist vision did not survive, however. Especially after 1948, the state initiated a violent campaign against the communists. Two Jewish secretaries of the Iraqi Communist Party were publicly executed in Baghdad in 1949, while many others were arrested and jailed.

Others responded by joining the illegal Zionist movement. At the height of its activity, however, it counted something like 1500 from a community of 150 000 people. Jews were attracted to Zionism at this point, whose activists promised them socialism, feminism and social justice in the land of Israel. Here is a letter from a communist, Violet, in Baghdad: I thought all Jews in the world are like the Baghdadi Jews, egoist and weak. I’m certain that not only I felt this way, but all Baghdadi Jews, whose self-honour had not died yet. Then came the brethren from the land of Israel to save us from slavery, and explained to us the Zionist ideal, and the difference between the Jew in exile, and the Jew in the land of Israel.

For these young people, Iraq became an exile. This was the political vision of a minority, but, unfortunately, after the 1948 War with Palestine, Zionism became a major challenge to Iraqi Jews. After the war, Israel wanted to get the Jews from Iraq to Israel, and started negotiating, secretly, with Iraqi leadership, on the fate of Iraqi Jews, whose property and living conditions all of a sudden became part of the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the Iraqi side, a wave of arrests of Jews took place, under false pretense, claiming that they were either Zionists or communists, or both; the state used this also to defame communism as a Zionist movement. In addition, more than 700 Jews were fired from public office. These conditions created a situation where Iraqi Jews did not know where they wanted to live. They witnessed violence, explosions, and, not knowing who were behind it, they decided to leave.

The European Jews treated the Arab culture of Iraqi Jews with great suspicion.

When Iraqi Jews left Iraq for Israel, they arrived to a state that was virtually broke. Along with Iraqi Jews, close to 700 000 people arrived to this country; Holocaust survivors, Jews from other Arab countries who had experienced similar conditions, all flocked this land that had no financial means to absorb them. To meet this challenge, the state built transit camps in the vicinity of big cities, where most Iraqi Jews lived. They faced racism.

Iraqi Jews liked the Arabic language, Arabic music and theatre, and came to Israel with other Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon, whose cultures were likewise influenced by Arab culture. The European Jews treated the

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Arab culture of Iraqi Jews with great suspicion. This is a letter written by an Iraqi Jew who lived in a kibbutz: Arab, ignorant, blacks. Did you ever see a movie? Do you eat with a knife and fork? And others such expressions, Jews from the lands of the East hear from the member of the kibbutz and its children.

Whereas in Iraq, Jews wanted to integrate to Arab culture, now, being an Arab was actually equated with someone who cannot eat with a knife and fork.

A community that once played a major role in the middle class [in Iraq] was suddenly impoverished, living in tents, and wooden shacks in Israel.

Iraqi Jews in Israel faced a variety of problems. The community was impoverished. The middle class Jews from Baghdad were allowed to leave Iraq if they denounced their Iraqi citizenship. And after they did that, in 1951, the Iraqi government passed a law that froze all their property. A community that once played a major role in the middle class was suddenly impoverished, living in tents, and wooden shacks in Israel. When they arrived to the state, many were offered work in agriculture. For Labor Zionism, whose elite were in power, the notion of working the land, of being connected to the land, was very important. For Iraqi Jews, however, most of whom were merchants and clerks, living like peasants or tribesmen was a sign of incredible humiliation. The living conditions in transit camps were horrible. Education, sanitary and health services in their camps were poor; there were cases of women who lost babies, because ambulances could not get to these

camps. Within the camps, these Jews also met Jews from Kurdistan, India, and Jews from Europe, mainly Holocaust survivors, and ethnic tensions ensued. Generally, there was a sense of being neglected by the state, which seemed to have remembered them only during election time, as all Jewish migrants were given the time to vote.

However, there were actually debates in Israel over whether the Arab Jews should be allowed to vote, with some arguing they lacked the capacity to understand the Israeli society.

The Iraqi Jews had various options, and one, which I would like to highlight – which today is quite forgotten, but was an important one, at least to the Iraqi Jewish intellectuals at the time – was to join the Palestinians. Today, this seems almost implausible, but in the 1950s, this was definitely an option for the intelligentsia.

The Israeli Arab leadership at the time, the ones that survived 1948 War and remained in the Palestine that became Israel, gathered in the Israeli communist party.

It was an Arab-Jewish party, a party which was sometimes a-Zionist, and sometimes specifically anti-Zionist. Importantly, it was a party which, especially in the city of Haifa, was the cultural hub of the Arab community. It produced newspapers; a daily called al-Itihad, and a cultural weekly called al-Jadid. Some young Iraqi Jews joined this party, and its Arabic publications allowed them to play a part in the Arab culture of Israel, because they could write in Arabic. Sami Michael, an Iraqi Jew and a very prominent communist, wrote this in a Hebrew newspaper about his experiences in Iraq: As a Jew who lived twenty-two years in Iraq, I saw […] that the oppressors of the Jews [in Iraq] were not the people.

This thing is not possible at all, because the enemy of the very same people are

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the ones that oppressed the Jews. I lived in Iraq, worked with Iraqis, and fought together with the Iraqi people. I know them. Iraq’s sons are good and brave. In their bitter and difficult life they yearn for peace, brotherhood, bread and democracy.

Writing to a European Jewish audience in Israel, he was simply saying: your enemies are not the Iraqis.

Israel in the 1950s also saw a series of demonstrations by Iraqi Jews trying to deal with very difficult living conditions: they demonstrated demanding houses outside the transit camps, employment, education, and clean water. People would go to the streets with bottles of dirty water, saying, «this is the water that we must drink». There were also demonstrations after tragedies. In the transit camp next to Haifa, three children were burned alive when their tent caught fire. Five thousand people demonstrated the next day. In the transit camp of Holon, a child lost an eye because of a grenade that was thrown in the dumpster. These were not massive demonstrations, and featured between five thousand and three hundred people at each event. Iraqi Jews played a part in these demonstrations, but they were also joined by Egyptian Jews, Lebanese Jews, and sometimes by European Jews. At the same time, right wing parties tried to convince Iraqi Jews that the Arabs betrayed them, the Labor Zionists discriminated against them, and hence supporting an Anti-Palestinian and an anti-socialist agenda would be the solution.

Iraqi Jews had eventually forsaken their Arab culture and adopted Hebrew culture. This is certainly true for the generation of Iraqi Jewish children educated in Hebrew, who arrived from Baghdad with their parents. But in the 1950s, Iraqi Jewish writers were sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. For instance,

in a short story by the aforementioned Sami Michael, about police dogs, the author describes how whenever a crime is committed in the proximity of an Arab village, dogs arrive to the suspected territories, and rule whether all the inhabitants should be banished, or whether the men alone should be exiled. Michael is condemning the police brutality against the Arab citizens of Israel as an Iraqi Jew. I should say that in the end, Iraqi Jews became part of the Israeli state; they did not adopt the pro-Palestinian option.

Many of them belonged to the middle classes. Their social skills and training by the British eventually helped them leave the transit camps, and they were able to integrate into the state. Iraqi children sent to kibbutzim adopted, with much difficulty, the Israeli ideology. In the 1970s and 1980s, Jews of European origin and Jews of Middle Eastern origin began to intermarry; the last thing the young generation wanted was to be Arabs; they wanted to be Israeli Jews. I want to leave you with a poem that is written by the radical third generation, who now try to uncover this lost Arab Jewish past. Mati Schemoelof belongs to a group of young poets, and this is what he writes about Baghdad: Seventy brands of dates were in Baghdad, my grandmother told me.

And added, it was a shame we left.

There, they would not put no medicine in the food. No greenhouses were there. …

And even if my road to Baghdad is ruined, and I do not speak the language, I know that my life is a piece of historical darkness.

Hanging, on a hook, the moonlight story of my grandmother, the memories from Baghdad.

100 • Almog Behar

Almog Behar

My Arabic is Mute and other poems Almog Behar participated in the Saladin Days 2015, where he read from and discussed his poetry.

A Jerusalem Courtyard The night sweetness of her love bites in my flesh, in a Jersualem courtyard between vine and stone between the notes of the ud and Ladino, between the walls of my body.

At the edge of the courtyard fixed against an old metal fence is an old woman with her head covered, drawn out from the alleyway on her way home from the prayer house, tasting the notes, imagining for a moment that she is again the daughter of a king, passing through courtyards. And the ud, a forbidden language to my ears, was let loose in the courtyard from its bounds, and I who taught myself to suckle honey from a stone, learn now to drink nectar from a girl’s mouth. The old woman’s eyes laugh behind the musicians’ backs and the pudgy beautiful singer, and I imagine she looks just like my grandmother who before she died went back to speaking only Arabic, not a word of Hebrew.

Translated by Saul Noam Zaritt

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My Arabic is Mute My Arabic is mute strangled from the throat cursing herself without saying a word sleeping in the stifling air of my soul’s shelters hiding from her relatives behind Hebrew shutters.

And my Hebrew is growling running wild between rooms and neighbors’ porches making her voice heard in public prophesying the coming of the Lord and bulldozers and then converging in the living room thinking of herself revelations revelations on the surface of her skin covered covered between the pages of her flesh one moment naked one moment dressed she contracts herself in an armchair begging forgiveness of her heart.

My Arabic is afraid quietly impersonating Hebrew and whispering to friends with every knock at her gates: «Ahalan, ahalan».

And in front of every passing guard she takes out her identity card and points to the protective clause: «Ana min al yahud, ana min al yahud».

And my Hebrew is deaf sometimes deaf indeed.

Translated from the Hebrew by Alexandra Berger-Polsky

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Grandfathers 1. Yitzhak Behar (1917-2002) When I was a child My grandfather’s body was the breakwater on the beach of Tel Aviv.

And all of his body was memories of leaping over a bridge in Berlin into the frozen river and the broken leg anticipating the broken heart and broken family.

And my eyes when I was a child would look walking along the shoreline from the stones of Jaffa to the smoke of Reading and the Yarkon mouth Many houses Not yet thinking Of all the other cities in my childhood Not breaking over the waves.

2. Ezra Gahtan (1904-1986) When I was a child My grandfather’s hands were held back.

And on the picture with my mother Now in her bed room The suit of his life Sews his body into the longings of a refugee Two and eighty years long was his life’s journey From the palms on the banks of the Tigris And to the old fountain since demolished at the end of the promenade leading To the Netanya beach.

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A memory is a tear in the flesh of the present And in the picture his daughter is smiling Her hand on his shoulder and he keeps his face severe the old fountain is behind them and the horizon is the Mediterranean tub that has no respect for rivers.

In the backdrop, some ornamental palms planted by the municipality and in his flesh the saplings of a white mustachio and a black tie marking him to be of a different world.

And in a moment he’ll open his mouth Say «abroad» And mean Eretz Yisrael.

3.

And I for years have been practicing them Walking with my hands enjoined behind a forever-upright back.

For years, I’ve been practicing to be a wave-breaker for my grandsons.

For years I’ve been practicing Pealing apples with a pocketknife While sitting on benches in public parks And eating them slice by slice.

For years I’ve been practicing drawing flowers With Hebrew words Fearing I’ll lose The colours of all the other languages.

For years I recall All the other cities I didn’t recall as a child Composing prayers and growing upon myself the sinews and skin of memories breaking over the waves.

Translated by Dimi Reider

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A woman awaits a bombing for the Gazan poet Manal Miqdad From her nightly resting place, during the long journey to sleep she considers the library of books she’s collected the travel and nature books should really go to her good friend from class, whose been dreaming to travel next summer, through rivers and deserts, the children’s books that remain on the shelf should go to the orphanage born of the war, the diaries her father should burn, if they aren’t destroyed in the bombing and she should ask the neighbors too, the English books she bought but hasn’t read she wills to her cousin, who confided in her his dream to leave, the borrowed books can stay with her friends if they promise not to fold the pages or write in the margins, and choose someone to leave them to in case of another explosion. behold her bed; it is not surrounded by heroic men, only fear in the night. the books remain silent, they don’t announce to whom they wish to be willed and she prays that tonight she will fall into a dreamless sleep. undisturbed by explosions, undisturbed by the games of the neighbor’s kids whose whole bellies are fright Translated from the Hebrew by Chana Morgenstern

106 • Participants

2009 Tariq Ali • Jan Guillou Tom Remlov • Thorvald Steen David Zonshein 2010 Mustafa Can • Hanan Al-Shaykh Thorvald Steen • Kari Vogt Tariq Ali 2011 Elias Khoury • Ilan Pappé Avi Shlaim • Rabbi David Rosen Imam Yahya Hendi • Gunnar Stålsett 2012 Şener Aktürk • Michael Sells Trond Berg Eriksen • Bruce Lawrence miriam cooke • Åsne Seierstad Lisa Bjurwald • Dick Harrison Inger Elisabeth Hansen • Tove Nilsen Trygve Seim • Jai Shankar Rohini Sahajpai • Jacob Young Nora Eggen • Lars Gule Thomas Hegghammer • Shlomo Sand Øyvind Strømmen • Lena Lindgren

Participants • 107

2013 Eugene Rogan • Samar Yazbek Bassma Kodmani • Ibrahim El-Houdaiby Tariq Ali • Aslak Sira Myhre Amal Wahab • Bjørn Olav Utvik 2014 Dominique Eddé • Olivier Roy Anouar Majid • Karim Miské Tariq Ali • Nils Økland Solo Cissokho • Rolf-Erik Nystrøm Raquel Andueza • Jesús Fernández Baena Petter Nesser • Kristian Takvam Kindt Elisabeth Oxfeldt 2015 Orit Bashkin • Almog Behar Houria Bouteldja • Mark R. Cohen Alain Gresh • Rana Hisham Issa Claudia Lenz • Ravid Kahalani Nadia Kamel • Gideon Levy Marte Michelet • Hanne Eggen Røislien Itamar Doari • Rony Iwryn Shanir Blumenkranz • Mark Taylor

108 • Contributors

Thorvald Steen

Tariq Ali

Elias Khoury

is a Norwegian author of a wide range of novels, plays, collections of poems, books of short stories, children’s books and essays. He has distinguished himself as one of Norway’s leading internationally-oriented writers, he has been translated into more than 20 languages and he was the chairman of the Norwegian Author’s Union from 1991-1997.

is an author, historian and political activist. He has written more than 30 books of non-fiction, fiction and history, amongst which are The Clash of Fundamentalisms.

Crusades, Jihad and Modernity, a series of historical novels known as The Islam Quintet, as well as most recently The Extreme Centre. A Warning. Ali contributes regularly to The Guardian and the London Review of Books, and is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.

is a Beirut born novelist and critic, today one of the leading intellectuals in the Arabic world. His novels are translated into a number of languages. He has been the chief editor of Al-Mulhaq, the cultural weekly supplement to the biggest newspaper in Lebanon, An-Nahar.

His most renowned work is the novel Gate of the Sun, a critically acclaimed and award winning novel about the fate and history of the Palestinian people.

Contributors • 109

Şener Aktürk

is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Chicago, his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting lecturer at Harvard University.

His book, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey received the Joseph Rothschild Book Prize in 2013.

Samar Yazbek is a journalist and author of fiction and non-fiction, from the Syrian coastal city of Jableh. She is a member of the minority Alawi community, of which Bashar al-Assad is also a member – which made her a traitor when she supported the Syrian revolution in 2011. Yazbek was forced into exile and in 2012 she published the book A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries from the Syrian Revolution.

Dominique Eddé

is an author and essayist from the Lebanon who has written about themes such as photography, psychoanalysis, war and cultural differences. Through her work as an editor for the French edition of Orientalism she developed a close relationship with Edward Said and has translated several of his other books. Amongst her recent work are the novels Kite and Kamal Jann.

110 • Contributors

Mark R. Cohen

Orit Bashkin

Almog Behar

is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, and has written a number of books and articles about Jewish history, such as Under Crecent & Cross.

The Jews in the Middle Ages, which investigates the relationship between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages.

is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Chicago. Her latest publication, New Babylonians. A History of Jews in Modern Iraq, tells the story of the Jewish population living in Iraq at the beginning of the 20th century.

is an award-winning Israeli poet, writer and activist, living in Jerusalem. He has published two poetry collections, a novel and a collection of short stories. He is the recipient of, amongst others, the Bernstein Prize for Poetry (2010) and the Prime Minister’s Prize (2010).

The Saladin Anthology Highlights from the International Saladin Days at the House of Literature, Oslo, 2009-2015 Editor: Andreas Liebe Delsett ISBN: 978-82-690097-0-5 Published by Litteraturhuset, Wergelandsveien 29, 0167 Oslo, Norway. www.litteraturhuset.no www.saladindays.com Book design and cover: Gladesigner Print and bound in Norway by Zoom Grafisk AS The Saladin days have been supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since its inception in 2009, including the conference Poet and Activist in 2008, where the idea was conceived. Since 2013, the Saladin days program has been developed with support from the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre (NOREF).

The text «Two men» is copyright © 2012 by Samar Yazbek, Dar al adab, Beirut, Lebanon. This excerpt is published by arrangement with Raya Agency for Arabic literature, France, and Literary Agency Wandel Cruse, France.

The Saladin Anthology In 1187, Saladin reconquered the holy city of Jerusalem from the Crusaders at a time and in a place accustomed to war. But after his victory, Saladin did something unusual – in his times as much as today: he rejected the idea of revenge. He allowed the Christian leaders to leave Jerusalem and opened the city to the three religions for whom it was a holy city. Saladin thus ended the war with reconciliation, not with arms.

It was this story, and not the many battles that Saladin fought, that inspired the International Saladin Days at the House of Literature. Behind the history of the Crusades, the «clash of civilisations» and «eternal war» we find a story worth telling again, eight hundred years later. It is one that asks us to reconsider the idea of eternal conflict between Christians and Muslims, «us» and «them», and gives us the opportunity – and inspiration – to discuss contemporary issues in a new light.

The International Saladin days were instituted in 2009 by the House of Literature. Every year, authors, artists, activists, academics and intellectuals gather in Oslo to discuss the possibility of coexistence and tolerance, instead of conflict and prejudice, in the meeting between people and countries from the so-called Islamic, Christian and Jewish cultures. This anthology brings together highlights from the first seven years, featuring contributions from authors such as Tariq Ali, Thorvald Steen, Samar Yazbek, Dominique Eddé, Elias Khoury and Orit Bashkin. www.saladindays.com www.litteraturhuset.no

ISBN 9788269009705

9 788269 009705