Books

Lost In Transmission - by Jonathan Harley

     Most interesting book on an australian foreign correspondent experience in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He doesn't get the religious side exaclty right (or rather, he doesn't delve too deeply into it, contenting himself with sometimes unadequate generalities), but the rest is very good, informative but above all, it makes you discover the experience of a journalist who tries to do things the right way in impossible circumstances. It's especially interesting on the personnal level : no one is a hero, and the ones who are die very quickly and those who only appear to be are the worst of the lot.

     Also a good book to be read when you start forgetting, as a sheltered westerner (sheltered from wars and such), what the rest of the world looks like. As he rightly says, we are not the norm, we're just lucky. The last pages on the death of his friends, on this subject, are moving and disturbing.

     And once again, the experience of someone who is "hooked up" by Afghanistan. This terrible and beautiful country seem to have this effect on so many people who ever managed to go there, capturing their minds for ever.

City of Veils - by Zoë Ferraris

      Good thriller, good crime story set in Saudi Arabia. This is the reason, as always, that made me buy the book, since anything on this country interests me, but in the end, the book in itself is really good, as any good thriller I read before. 

      It's the first book from her that I read, and I'm quite happy to have ordered the other two, that seems to take up the same characters in the same place (mainly Jeddah).

      The author obviously knows stuff about the place and the country, even though you might detect, through the characters (what they say of the islamic veil, etc), that the author knows very well the religion as practised in Saudi Arabia in hard-line milieus, but not really, if at all, how it is percieved and practised elsewhere. As if she knew islam only through the lense of hard-core Wahhabism, and so sometimes I would have wished so feel the texture and deepness of the rest of the islamic world, if only the neighbouring countries, and its past ... Since wahhabism is only a recent phenomenon there.
        So the plot is good, the writing is ok, but if you want to learn anything on the religion or the culture, it's not really the book to buy. It still relies too much on the usual clichés, and it doesn't have the deepness you could expect from someone who researched the subject. Though I don't know anything about the author, I would say it's the sort of book written by someone who lived there for a short time but whose experience didn't end well.

       Well, you can't blame an author for giving the western reader what life is like sometimes there and giving into the cliché to grip a usually ignorant western audience, but even in this country there are other forms of living and religious practise and understanding that have yet to be described (after all, like every Gulf country, Saudi Arabia has a lot of migrants from the arab and non-arab world). But then, I haven't read the other books, maybe it gets more "real" in the others ... !

Impossible Man - by Michael Muhammad Knight

      Most interesting autobiography. I don't want to comment much on it as I haven't read what seems to be the follow-up "journey to the end of islam", but I would say that I enjoyed his novels more that his autobiography, thus far. 

     It explains how he got to know so much about islam, but also why he is locked, always, in a patriarchal vision of everything, despite islamic feminism or any other phenomenon producing other discourse. I would have thought that with everything he had studied, he would have at least seen the huge roles of women both in history and nowadays in the middle east, but he seems to see islam only through a patriarchal lense, to mix up the cultures where it is practised with the religion that is practised (well, most of people do, but still, it's not an excuse). Maybe because he was confronted since the start to a near "hardcore" version of the religion. (We can understand this it to an extent ... These are times where, in any country and any culture, you only hear about the hardcore part of politics and ideologies, the "quiet majority" keeps to itself, hidden).

       Anyway, more than the religion, it's a story of a quest for absolutism, what any and every teenager is after, a quest that fails since life doesn't give much into absolutism of any sort ... He was looking for perfection and found a religion practised by most imperfect humans, like any religion or anything else. He expected religion to stand the test of science, and there too many people, in my opinion, fail to get that science has nothing to do with religion. One explains the rational part of the human being, the other tackles the irrationnal one. And the danger begins when you want to wipe off one of these two ...

      Anyway, I've been a bit carried away. Back to the book : the real hero is his mother, and the book's key sentence is something his insane father told him "Woman is the  nigger of the world". (Something that is only true if you keep seeing the world, like the author, as a classic-style patriarchy. Because my experience of so-called patriarchal societies shows something much more complex ...)

American Dervish - by Ayad Akhtar

     Beautifully written, great narrative, and a very interesting central character (Mina, the narrator's aunt). Character who, rare enough to be noticed, sums up at the end of the book what I always felt like : striving to make one's decision the same that what some call God's will. Freedom of choice being the same than destiny, two things seemingly opposite that always looked to me like two sides of the same coin, one not understandable without the other.

     The story of a young boy trying ot understand the people around him : his nice but desperate father and mother, his aunt he adores but whose life is awful, and all the others guys - stereotyped but greatly rendered here so that they sound very real - you can find in the american-pakistani community.

      But it was nonetheless a bit disapointing in the end : a coming of age book, the sentiments of the narrator sounds truthful, and all the characters are very realistic, but in the "american-muslim" area, it's rather poor. You have the choice between the alcoholic non-believer and the stupid or fanatic believer who interprets religions as he/she likes or sees fit. Only the central character brings some nuance, and her former jewish lover Nathan, but their story are so sad that this interesting middle ground is killed off from the start. So you're left with the lost nice alcoholics and the stupid fanatics. Too bad because the world has so much more nuance to offer than these clichés about believers and non-believers and "muslim men". The narrator mother's is left ranting about "muslim men" and all their faults (machismo, etc) and if all other men were exempt of them ... It leaves the false impression that any other man is better than these "muslim men", and I don't think (I hope) it is what the author wanted to convey. But in the end, you're left with this view that is, needless to say, very untrue (you only need to look at some UN statistics or whatever to be convinced).

       Really too bad for a book that is so good on so many other points. The character-narrator finds freedom only when discarding religion, and even though I recognize the reality of this for many people, what about the other ones, who find freedom and self-empowerment with religion, and in another manner than the terrible and sad destiny of Mina ? What about all the normal people, who have some degree of religion and belief, leading normal lives, with no fanaticism, happily juggling with their differents identities (american/something else for example) ? After reading this book, it seems you can only pick hard-line sides, the intelligent middle ground reduced to dust, like Mina and Nathan. The best you can hope is ending up as a tolerant non believer (which I wouldn't mind if they weren't so rare !). It is very pessimistic, and so, rather disappointing. Great potential at showing nuances throughout but ending up very black and white.

      Not that I want to read fairy tales, but real life is so much less depressing than this, yes the middle ground exists, it can be shaky on the borders, but it's big and shared by so many !

Osama Van Halen

And Why I Like Michael Muhammad Knight's books so far.

This book is a follow-up of The Taqwacores*, by the same author, who has since written many more, and I'm in the process of getting them ...

So. After the Taqwacores and the good and strange impressions it left on me, I decided to delve deeper and see what else I could read from this author. This one didn't disappoint me. Light, dark, funny and weird, you can appreciate it even if you're not punk (I'm not, I'm just a free-style convert).

Of course open-mindedness help deal with the recurrent sex themes, the wide variety of critics adressed to religion(s), and references to everything everywhere, of which the american ones usually eludes me, but the muslim ones are numerous, and the authors doesn't bother explaining them, he assumes the readers get it (I usually do, but still, he has a serious and wide knowledge of the arabo-islamic culture). Even though I don't always agree with his point of view on certain subjects, I'm glad that there's someone like him writing these books, and wish it was more known ...  But then it's underground and punk, and by definition traditionnal and mainstream might have a hard time understanding or appreciating that kind of work.

An he has this capacity, always appreciated, of being able to sum up impressions and thoughts in a few sentences that you wouldn't have been able to explain in a few pages, if express it at all. A rare capacity of self-reflection and self-criticism that produce a narratively strange and unusual fiction.

And the after word sets a point to something that has always made me crazy, watching the news : when a muslim woman is killed by her husband, we call it honor crime and accuse the religion of being responsible for this, but if the same stuff happen in a "white christian setting", we call it something else, as the author shows from his own personnal story, and we justly look for responsibilities elsewhere then cutlure and religion.

A few excerpts :

"Basim's own Islam was a cultural thing, and being a fellow immigrant's son, Amazing Ayyub related to that Islam on a level that I couldn't with my convert experience - for the converts, Islam is only books; there's no heart or culture or family tenderness, which is why we often go nuts" (p.69) **

"Fuckin' A," Ayyub replied. Vulgarities peppered taqwacore dialogues to the point of either becoming meaningless, like those constant mash'Allahs insh'Allahs, and subhana'Allahs in conversations of the pious, or effortlesly replacing actuel vocabulary, like the word "smurf" in Smurfspeak" (p.89)

"-(...) This white filmmaker was hanging around for a minute, wanting to do a documentary on Muslim punk bands. So I introduced her to the Kominas, and she asked them, "What's it like being Muslim adn knowing that you have these extremists in your community ?" Can you believe that ?
- That's terrible. What'd the Kominas say ?
- Basim had a pretty good comeback : "What's it like being white and knowing that there's Enron ?" (p.157)

* A fiction taking place in the US, in the muslim-punk scene, adapted to screen in a movie (same title), very good too. But the wikipedia article is much more complete than anything I could say.

** My opinion on that is : 1 - so true, and 2 - some go nuts too because, from what I saw, like many conversions of all kinds (not only religion) is done by people looking for a sense of belonging, a family of sorts, and well, it never ends up being what they want it to be ... I didn't go nuts, even didn't change much at all, because I already had long accepted my sense of not belonging anywhere, and I'm definitely not looking for any kind of make-up family. The pure bookish and spiritual side of the religion are enough for me ... Way before actually converting I already knew I wouldn't find many free style converts like me. But yes, his explanation sounds very good to me.