No, I think the absolutist emotive mentality of Islamism is simply wrong for this kind of reflective, critical, writing. Most of the adherents to violent Islamism, unlike the Western secular Communist intellectuals of yore, do not come from nations deeply steeped in a culture of literacy or intellectual inquiry. Debates are sharply circumscribed by governments and religious authority and treading around the margins of acceptable discourse can involve not a risk of criticism or public ostracism but of violence or death. They believe hermetically and do not have the cognitive framework to imagine other alternatives. Or those few that do ” fall away ” from the cause keep their mouths shut fast and they do not pick up pens to write elegant essays or grim memoirs. Even if they did, who would publish it ? Or read it ?
We are not likely to see such powerful and introspective works about Islamist terror for some time. If at all.
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collounsbury:
September 29th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
You mean, where are the books in a language you know.
That is a rather different question.
Of course the other item is asking, to what degree Arab authors write about such topics in the book/novel form.
Or restated: your questions begin at the wrong point with the wrong assumptions.
mark:
September 29th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Hi Col-
A good question. How many such novels are there ? And of what caliber is the writing ? Not everything unhappy Russians put out is worth reading, believe me. A big gap exists between Nobel-prize winning lit by Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn and mundane defector books hacked out after the CIA completes its debriefing
Frankly, I’d like to see such Arab ( or Farsi) novels transliterated the way the work of Russian ( and even Chinese or Cuban) writers have been.
collounsbury:
September 30th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
I can not speak to Farsi, but in Arabic the novel is simply not a terribly influential or important form of expression (regardless of what the literary types invested in it might claim).
Now, I am not much of a novel reader, lost the taste years ago, but overall I think most honest commentators would acknowledge that the novel is not a literary form that has seen natural success in Arabic. Some authors such, as Mahfouz have seen success, but it/s not the norm. Overall, having a passing familiarity with the Russo-Radical literature you refer to, and to this world, my simple opinion is that you’re asking why Oranges don’t have Apple skins. The Russo-Eastern European (or for that matter European) literary environment was such that these books were important, and not just among the arch-literary types.
The Arab world just does not have that dynamic, novels in large part are not a meaningful part of the equation.
Media which I might expect you would find such things emerging would be perhaps short stories, more likely plays and similar media.
As for translation of Arab novels into English, it’s fairly rare but the novels themselves are not a popular medium (most novel readers I know in the region are in fact Euro type educated and as often read in French or English as Arabic).
For that I think some of things you noted towards the end are real issues, but you started at the wrong point with novels.
mark:
October 1st, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Hi Col –
“Media which I might expect you would find such things emerging would be perhaps short stories, more likely plays and similar media.”
Hmmm. What about poetry ? Or would the locus of new cultural and political influence in the Arab world still be primarily oratorical ? ( or visual-oratorical in the case of TV)
If so, then that’s a tremendous psychological gap in terms of perception of events between the Arab world and the West. Far wider than West and East ( whether we mean old Soviet bloc East or Confucian East Asia).
collounsbury:
October 2nd, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Poetry, yes poetry. Blindspot of mine, I don’t like poetry, but it is an important medium.
I should think quasi religious commentaries as well.
I have known a handful of people who travelled from Islamist neo-Salafi extremism to ‘rejecting’ the same. They all seemed to lapse into religious quieticism. I have no idea, however, if that is generalisable or not.