Living cultures and their dead certainties

“In Jordan,” we recently read in the news, “one thing has not changed over many decades and that is government censorship of books. Authorities continue to ban the sale and import of some books they consider sensitive or challenging on a wide range of topics.”

When I read this news I recalled an earlier article published in Los Angeles Times in which we were told about a bookstore in Amman devoted to forbidden titles. “Banned books — on sex, politics, religion — are a specialty at Sami Abu Hossein's shop in Amman. 'We have them,' he says

Old and dying ideologies are fading from the scene and the need and urge for a new regime of self-knowledge is dawning.

with a grin, 'but don't tell anyone.'”

Among these banned books available at Abu Hossein's bookstore in Amman, according to this Los Angele Times article, was “23 Years,” by the Iranian scholar Ali Dashti, “which,” as the author of this Los Angeles Times article described it, “questions miracles ascribed to Muhammad in the Koran.”

The name of Ali Dashti and banned books in an Amman bookstore reminded me of a memorable incident a few decades earlier.

Cultures, texts, marginalia

Years ago while loitering idly in an old bookstore in a backstreet of Cambridge (UK), with a colleague whom I was visiting at the university, I found a copy of Ali Dashti’s Tasviri az Nasser Khosrow/A Portrait of Nasser Khosrow (1983). I picked it up and started thumbing through it.

Ali Dashti (1894-1982) was quite a character on the twentieth century Iranian literary and political scenes. He was born and raised in a learned religious family and at a very young age was sent to Shia seminaries in Iraq to study theology and jurisprudence. Upon his return, however, Dashti decided against a clerical career, and instead opted for a life in journalism. Hegradually emerged as a notable literary and political figure, with a penchant for an appeasing and relaxed prose that appealed to a wide range of bourgeois readership.

Dashti’s Tasviri az Nasser Khosrow/A Portrait of Nasser Khosrow is a posthumous book on the iconoclastic Persian poet, philosopher and Ismaili revolutionary who lived from 1004-1088, based on a collection of notes an editor put together a year after Dashti’s death and then published in Tehran.

But it was neither Dashti’s prose, of which I am not particularly fond, nor what he had to say about Khosrow, about whom far better books have been written, both in Persian and in European languages, that persuaded me to purchase the book: what interested me was the fact that on most pages of this particular copy, there were handwritten notes by an anonymous reader who had read the book very carefully and made copious notes on its margins.

A cursory look even there in the old Cambridge bookstore showed that this anonymous reader had a running feud with the author of that book on Nasser Khosrow, and that the feud—verbal, emotive, political, and written on the pages of a book on a medieval poet and philosopher long since dead — spoke of far fresher wounds and of far more recent historical skirmishes. The author of those notes was quite markedly a Tudeh (Communist) Party member or sympathizer, while Dashti was a monarchist politician and literati. The twain could never meet.

The critical comments on the margin of Dashti’s book on Nasser Khosrow were in fact mostly targeted against Dashti himself, while their indexical and descriptive comments were mostly about Nasser Khosrow — things that the author of these notes had learned form Dashti’s book and was making a note about them to himself.

The commentator was quite a learned man, a careful reader, and quite obviously widely read in Iranian history and culture — not a professional scholar to be sure, but quite cultured and firmly opinionated about issues. A Marxist by politics, and staunchly against the Islamization of the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979, the author of the marginalia had an abiding grudge against Dashti, and was mostly after finding contradictions in his various points. The fact that Dashti was a senator in the Pahlavi period was particularly troubling to the commentator.

But most of the anger and biting criticism in these comments was launched against Dashti via Khosrow. What fascinated me most about these comments on those pages was the fact that the ideas and the poetry of Khosrow, almost one thousand years before the time of this author and that reader had become the battlefield between the two in the quiet and hidden pages of this book I now held in my hand and purchased from an old bookstore in Cambridge for a few English pounds.

Dead certainties override living cultures

It is only apt and perhaps even inevitable that the quiet pages of a book on Nasser Khosrow — collected from the scattered notes of its author and criticized by even more scattered comments of an anonymous reader — should become a battlefield between two contemporary Iranians, two at least nominally Shia Muslims far removed from their ancestral pieties and convictions.

A learned Marxist reader and a prominent literary nationalist’s debates on the text and the margins of a book on a prominent medieval Shia poet, philosopher, and revolutionary activist are all indications of a living cultural tradition that has not yet collapsed into its dead certainties. That is the rambunctious reality of any living culture.

But now look at the headlines: From the rise of anti-Muslim Hindu fundamentalism in India to the ruling Islamist regime in Iran to the mercenary gang of murderous adventurists of the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria to the wide spectrum of European and American Islamophobia those dead certainties surface to conceal the fact and phenomenon of those living cultures.

Islam, Shia, Sunni, Shariah, the life and message of the Prophet, among a host of other similarly seminal lexicons of a living culture have now all degenerated into the knee-jerk terminologies of a global warfare that is robbing Muslims of their moral and intellectual heritage. And for this calamity Muslim public intellectuals are as much responsible, if not more, as those who hate Muslims. The living pulses of robust intellectual debates have yielded to dead and deadening certainties.

Today the Muslim world at large is experiencing seismic historical changes. Old and dying ideologies are fading from the scene and the need and the urge for a new regime of self-knowledge is dawning. Muslims of various shades living in the shadow of a rich and justly proud worldly culture see the sacrosanct terms and metaphors of their faith bandied about by raging bulls stampeding through their china shops, however. Sunnis are this, Shia are that, Muslims are the other thing, and “Shariah” has collapsed into a four letter word. There is no containing or diverting these bulls — flanking from left and right, from the criminal thugs of IS to mass murderers (Anders Breivik) and illiterate Islamophobes (Maher & Harris and Co.).

These noises and the dust clouds they routinely kick up, however, pale in comparison with the fertile soil from which the new generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists will retrieve the unresolved traumas of their past to rethink them as the allegorical syntax of their future liberations. Shia are not monolithic, nor are Sunnis, nor a fortiori are Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Pakistanis and Indians. We are humans, with all our follies and failures, hopes and despairs, range of abilities and points of purpose. We thus remain positively unpredictable.

The catastrophe of the bureaucratic banning of books by an insecure state apparatus in Jordan or anywhere else in the world is that the books thus banned assume undeserved legitimacy, power and authority without the test of a public conversation about their content. The mere fact of being banned gives them uncritical legitimacy. They assume the status of dead certainties against the grain of a living culture.