Well, that’s my culinary nationalism post of the day done. Also, one of the most beautiful books you could ever read on Fez, or on Sufi Islam for that matter, is Titus Burckhardt’s amazing Fez: City of Islam. Below: detail from a public fountain in Fez.
In 1992, the Somali-born author of The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, arrived in Holland as a refugee. She was granted citizenship in 1997, and six years later elected to parliament, where she focused on immigration policy. Hirsi Ali collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, writing the screenplay for Submission 1, a film about women suffering from a repressive Islam. When Van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in 2004, Hirsi Ali’s life was threatened and her celebrity enhanced. In 2005, TIME magazine named her one of the ‘world’s 100 most influential people’.
A photograph in the New York Review of Books (October 5, 2006) shows the attractive Hirsi Ali at a TIME-sponsored party chortling with fellow influential person, Condoleezza Rice. In the accompanying review, Timothy Garton Ash notes his ‘enormous respect for her courage, sincerity and clarity.’ The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think-tank close to the Bush Administration, apparently feels the same way. They made Hirsi Ali a fellow following her abrupt withdrawal from Dutch politics. Hirsi Ali’s resignation was owed in part to the controversy surrounding her falsification of personal data when requesting asylum, but also her opposition to Dutch tolerance and multiculturalism on the ground that it perpetuates ‘backwardness’, especially in Muslim immigrants.
‘[Muslim immigrants] only rarely take advantage of the opportunities offered in education and employment’ she writes in The Caged Virgin, and a restrictive Islam is what is holding them back. ‘By our Western standards, Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. If you don’t do as he says, you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniac rulers, Bin Laden, Khomeni, Saddam…..You are shocked to hear me say these things…you forget where I am from. I used to be a Muslim; I know what I’m talking about.”
This credential may have impressed the AEI, but it falls somewhat short when attempting to prosecute a religion and the multifarious peoples that profess it. It’s not that Hirsi Ali says outright that all Muslims are fundamentalists; she just attributes fundamentalist beliefs and practices to all Muslims.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) is highly concerned by the defamation claim filed by a feudal family against an academic, Dr. Sherin Abu El Naga, a political activist, Shahenda Mekled, and the owner of the Dar Merit Publishing House, Mohamed Hashem. HRinfo is also worried about the attempt to confiscate a historical document issued in the form of a book.
Some of the employees of the feudal Aziz Al-Fiki family filed a defamation claim against the two writers and the publisher and demanded confiscation of the book titled “From the Papers of Shahenda Mekled” published by Dar Merit. Dr. Sherin Abu El Naga, the author of the book, recounted some of the feudal practices in Kamshich village, Menoufia Governorate, in the 1950s and 1960s. She documented the murder of Shahenda Mekled’s husband and political activist Salah Hussein in 1966. The book is considered an important historical document about this era. However, the Aziz Al-Fiki family’s members regarded the book as both defamatory and insulting because it discussed some of their violations against poor peasants at that time. Consequently, the Al-Fiki family filed a claim and called for the imprisonment of the two writers and the publisher in addition to confiscation of the book.
Egypt’s patrician regression continues… It is telling that the al-Fiki family is doing this, much like its scion Mustafa al-Fiki, a foreign policy busybody close to the president, shamelessly stole his seat in the 2005 parliamentary elections. And that Merit publishing, one of the best new things on the cultural scene in the past decade, is getting attacked.
Correction: I am told this is a different al-Fiqi family than that of the not-so-honorable MP from Damanhour.
Yesterday Alaa Al Aswany’s new novel, “Chicago,” came out. There was an impressive crowd at the Dar El Shurouq bookstore at the First Mall in the Four Seasons Hotel in Giza. Ibrahim Eissa (editor of El Dustour, where the novel has been serialized in the last months–the last chapter comes out this Wednesday) and Galal Amin (the AUC professor and author of “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?” series, who wrote the blurb on the back of the book) were there, as well as a lot of leftist-leaning writers and intellectuals. There was quite a press to get one’s book signed–TV crews kept interviewing Al Aswany during the signing (causing indignant protests from the queue) and I’m sorry to report that many semi-eminent personages cut shamelesslly to the front of the line.
Al Aswany lived in Chicago when he was studying dentistry and he’s apparently drawn on this experience for his second novel, which (I believe, I haven’t read it yet) focuse on an Arab-American family. It’s also a critique of American society (apparently, some have told the author it’s downright anti-American). One wonders if such a book will be as well received as Al Aswany’s prodigiously successful The Yacoubian Building, which has now been translated into about 15 languages, was a best-selling book in France recently, and is night-stand reading for Middle East diplomats such as Karen Hughes.
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Jack Rose, from the CanStage board — while admitting he has neither read nor seen the script — said that “my view was it would provoke a negative reaction in the Jewish community.”
And philanthropist Bluma Appel, after whom CanStage’s flagship theater is named, concurred. “I told them I would react very badly to a play that was offensive to Jews.”
I saw the play in New York — where it had been moved from the original theater it was scheduled to play to the Mineta Lane Theater — and don’t see what was deemed offensive about it aside from that it brings attention to the plight of Palestinians and the murder of a pro-Palestinian activist.
But of course the power of the “lobby” is a figment of anti-Semitic imaginations.