Laila Lalami

Very interesting commentary from William Dalrymple in the Guardian yesterday, in which he challenges the received profile of suicide bombers, and, in particular, the assumption that madrassas are breeding grounds for terrorists. While he concedes that Pakistani madrassas were instrumental in training the Taliban, he also argues that:

But it is now becoming very clear that producing cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing the kind of technically literate al-Qaida terrorist who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks on the World Trade Centre. Indeed, there is an important and fundamental distinction to be made between most madrasa graduates – who tend to be pious villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds, possessing little technical sophistication – and the sort of middle-class, politically literate, global Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaida operations around the world. Most of these turn out to have secular scientific or technical backgrounds and very few actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.

The men who planned and carried out the Islamist attacks on America were confused, but highly educated, middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was a town planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s chief of staff, is a paediatric surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, is the product of the same British public school that produced the film-maker Peter Greenaway.

Peter Bergen of Johns Hopkins University recently published the conclusions of his in-depth study of 75 Islamist terrorists who had carried out four major anti-western attacks. According to Bergen, “53% of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52% of Americans have been to college.” Against this background, the backgrounds of the British bombers should not come as a surprise.

That’s an interesting hypothesis, but one that will be small comfort to Moroccans–all the bombers involved in the Casablanca attacks of two years ago were unemployed young men from a huge slum just outside the city. It could be that what Dalrymple is getting at is that the cadres in these terrorist cells are college-educated, and have the technical know-how, but the execution of the horrendous acts is left to the “cannon-fodder,” as he calls them.

Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building comes to us sheathed in the kind of hype that is reserved for Da Vinci clones: the bestselling novel in the Arab world for two years running; the screen adaptation is the highest-budget Arabic-language movie ever made; the real-life residents of the Yacoubian have threatened lawsuits; and so on. It isn’t the kind of book one would expect to see translated into English (Lord knows we have enough commercial fiction in the States). Which is why it’s such an interesting book.

The ten-story building of the title, like its namesake in Cairo, was built in 1934 by an Armenian businessman. It’s a beautifully designed building, we are told, with balconies “decorated with Greek faces,” marble corridors, and a Schindler elevator. It became home to Cairo’s rich and powerful when it opened. Things changed after the revolution, however, with the storage sheds on the rooftop being rented out to poor families–a sort of sky-high slum. The Yacoubian became the sort of place that housed both squatters and bigwigs.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the residents of the Yacoubian building in Alaa Al Aswany’s novel are meant to represent different players in modern Egyptian society, from the old guard to the new. Zaki Bey El Dessouki, for instance, is an aristocrat and an incorrigible womanizer who is nostalgic for the days of King Farouq. He cannot abide what Nasser’s revolution has done to Egypt, and he merely wants to live out his days in peace and comfort while seeking refuge in whiskey and the occasional bit of opium. His neighbor, Hagg Azam, is a self-made millionaire with political ambitions. He made money from a chain of clothing stores that cater to “modest women.” Now the Hagg wants to run for a seat in the People’s Assembly, not out of political ambition, but out of a desire to belong into the rarefied circles of the powerful, where real money is to be made. In other words, Hagg Azzam is the nouveau riche to Zaki Bey’s aristocrat.

Then there’s the young generation. Taha El Shazli, the doorkeeper’s son, is a straight A student with loads of ambition, but when he applies for the Police Officer’s Academy, his candidacy is dismissed with one question, “What does your father do?” His social class prevents him from getting ahead, and despite his entreaties to the highest level of government, he has to turn to Plan B: majoring in Political Science. At the university, he finds kinship with a group of religious students, and is soon taken in with their right-wing imam. Meanwhile, Taha’s girlfriend, Busayna, the sole breadwinner for her family, struggles to make ends meet. She is sexually harassed at every job she gets and soon realizes that the only way she can make it is if she puts up with her bosses’ advances. Egypt’s young men are easy preys to religious extremism while the country’s young women are victims of sexual exploitation.

In the world Al Aswany has devised, there are also elements of a multicultural society. The brothers Abaskharon and Malak are Coptic Christians who save every penny they make, by legal and illegal means, in order to finally afford a room on the roof. The Yacoubian is also home to Hatim Rasheed, a half-French gay intellectual and brilliant editor of Le Caire newspaper. Hatim has a fondness for Nubian men, those who remind him of his first homosexual experience, with one of his servants. All these characters are forced, at one point or another, to make choices that ultimately result in either their downfall or redemption. In at least one case, the outcome will be interpreted entirely differently depending on the political and social persuasions of the reader.

The Yacoubian Building is reminiscent of the large-scale melodramas so often produced by Egypt’s huge film industry–young idealists, desirable ingenues, old predators, and so on. The novel wallows in manipulative emotion: Countless scenes end in cliffhangers that are not resolved for another thirty pages. In fact, the writing style itself is reminiscent of the visual language of the movies. Each section is introduced with a paragraph or two of exposition, a sort of establishing shot for the action that is about to unfold. The narrator in these introductory sections is omniscient, and he is given to sweeping and rather infuriating generalizations. He tells us, for instance, that women “all love sex enormously,” that miscegenation produces children who are “confused,” that the faces of homosexuals are marked by “miserable, unpleasant, mysterious, gloomy, look[s],” that gays, “like burglars, pickpockets, and all other groups outside the law” have developed a secret language of their own, and so on. Such pronouncements make it difficult to inhabit the world of the characters and to experience their lives in the way one expects from a novel.

Still, Al Aswany manages to mine his material for satirical purposes. For instance, God is invoked countless times, both by the righteous and by the corrupt. In a particularly humorous scene, a group of government officials who are discussing the price for a bribe to fix upcoming elections repeatedly call on God to bless them. They even conclude the agreement by reading the Fatiha (the first Sura of the Qur’an). Similarly, the Prophet’s hadith are cited both to encourage patience and to justify preventing a young man from having an education. Al Aswany also does a good job of portraying the tough choices faced by Egyptian youth in the face of a corrupt, repressive regime: Join the (Islamic) opposition or leave the country and go work elsewhere, never to return. It is in his commentary on Egyptian politics that Al-Aswany (a frequent contributor to local newspapers) really hits his stride.

The Yacoubian Building is an ambitious novel, but ultimately a flawed one. As a portrait of a country in crisis, however, it is a worthwhile read.

In a guest column at Mobylives, Renata Dumitrascu questions Ismail Kadare’s right to call himself a dissident.

In accepting this year’s Man Booker International Prize, Albanian writer Ismail Kadare criticized people from ex-communist countries who claim they were not allowed to be writers by the repressive system. He contemptuously declared “The people entitled to speak about that period are the people who did something and not the people who kept silent and have retrospective nostalgia.”
There is a lot of similarity between Kadare’s rhetoric and that of other self-styled “dissident” writers from the communist period in Eastern European countries: a need to cast themselves into false roles of national anti-totalitarian heroes, when in fact, most of them led lives of privilege during the worst repression and continue to do so.

Michael Orthofer, of the Complete Review, disagrees:

These words [as quoted by Dumitrascu] are not — as implied — from the speech he made accepting the prize, but rather from comments made to the press (see, for example, this report) — and they don’t appear to target actual silenced writers, but rather poseurs.

Orthofer concedes that Kadare sounded a bit full of himself on accepting the International Man Booker Prize, but he says:

His insistence on a focus on literature rather than politics is obviously the only way for him to go (given his all-too-regime-friendly behaviour and privileged status). Given the alternatives — exile or silence (imposed, one way or another, by the all-powerful regime) — the path Kadare chose doesn’t seem the worst alternative. Sure, he’s not a poster-child for opposition to a horrible wrong, but as far as fellow-travelling goes, there’s an argument to be made that his form was justifiable.

As of July 13, more than 500,000 Moroccans have returned to the kingdom for annual vacation from their places of residence in Europe. I wouldn’t want to be working the freeway toll booth, man.

Over at Slate, April Bernard doesn’t spare the latest John Irving:

Incest, mutilation, orphans, wrestling, prose only a mother could love–yes, it’s another John Irving novel. And Until I Find You–full of the author’s characteristic storytelling drive, macabre imagination, and lumpy sentences–arrives with an added frisson: the pre-publication announcement of its autobiographical roots. Jack, the hero, is sexually handled and molested by older girls and women by the age of 10; he longs for a father who left before he was born; he joins the wrestling team at a New England prep school; his eventual fame is compromised by a sense of vacancy and abandonment and a search for sexual and personal security that eludes him. These basics will be familiar to readers of Irving’s earlier novels, so it is not surprising–though it is clearly meant to be titillating–to learn they are autobiographical in origin. In fact, one suspects that the PR release of this “confession” (and the news that, while he was writing the book, Irving did at last find out who his father was) is designed to forestall the criticism such a dreadful, though clearly heartfelt, mess like this deserves.

“Wright Morris published more than thirty books and won a National Book Award before he died in 1998, yet his work was never widely read and now seems–alas–in danger of slipping entirely from sight. The Works of Love was my introduction to Morris, and it remains my favorite among his novels,” Arvin says. “It is a strange novel, although strange in a manner that is not currently in fashion. Its protagonist, Will Brady, is a Midwesterner, gentle, quiet. He is lonely, but has little bitterness. The book has almost no plot–which usually I cannot bear in fiction, but in Morris’s beautiful, descriptive prose, as the novel drifts on the intense but curiously disengaged observations of Brady, it attains a unique power. Brady rarely knows quite what to make of the world around him or how to react to it, which has a tragic aspect, but it is also unexpectedly liberating, and it allows the novel to explore that extraordinary emotion–difficult to write about and often neglected in fiction–called wonder.”

Nick Arvin is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War, which was published in February.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Morocco Times: 10 Questions For JK Rowling.

Over at the Guardian, Robert McCrum wonders whether book reviews matter. He asks the question mostly from the point of view of authors: should they bother reading their reviews? And then trots out a few anecdotes.

The WSJ’s Vauhini Vara reports on publishers’ attempts to create fake websites and blogs to promote novels.

Abdallah Al-Ryami, an Omani poet and playwright, was jailed last week for “criticizing human rights violations” in his country. Reporters Sans Frontieres has a little background on the case.