| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Tariq Ali Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 3 of 6
You've raised two interesting points. One is this link between consciousness and activism. Let's talk a little about changing political consciousness. You have done that in many formats -- in film, in television, but especially in writing. Let's talk a little about writing and the link between writing and making known a radical perspective on the way things are. You've written fiction; you've written nonfiction. What does it take to do that kind of work, and which of the two do you prefer?
It's a difficult one. I decided to write fiction in the late eighties, early nineties, when politics was in the doldrums and very little was going on in reality. I wanted to pose a question, which had become important already in the late eighties and early nineties, which was, "Why didn't Islam have a Reformation like Christianity?" I thought I would go to the roots of the problem, where the answer lay, and I went to Spain, which was under Islamic rule for four or five centuries. What happened there? As I traveled around Spain -- and I spent months there, going to all the towns, imagining things -- I felt I didn't want to write a history, I suddenly wanted to write a novel. So I wrote Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, about the decline and fall of Islamic civilization and how it was defeated. And that process I rather liked; I enjoyed it. I finished doing that, when and the book came out, it was well-received. Edward Said said to me, "You can't stop now. You've got to chronicle the whole damn thing. Don't just stop at Spain. Do it all."
So that's how [I began] this set of novels I've been working on since '89. It's now known as the Islam Quintet -- three of them have been done; two more left. It's a very different way of writing, because when you're writing a novel, you have an idea. I write stories within stories, and I go for the narrative. Yet often, when you're writing, characters come out of you, somewhere within you, whom you were not even thinking about, and there's a danger, sometimes, of them taking the narrative away from the way you've conceived it. So you have to control it a bit. But it's very exciting at the same time; completely different from writing nonfiction.
It was all the work I'd done on that Islam Quintet which enabled me to write
The Clash of Fundamentalisms. 
And
some of that mode of writing came into this book as well, because I'd done so
much research on early Islam, the creation of dissent and diversity in it, that
putting it down in this book wasn't that much of a problem. I enjoyed writing
The Clash of Fundamentalisms, because it was the first nonfiction I'd
written for about twenty years, and I wondered whether I'd be able to. But it's
different from the nonfiction I wrote prior to the period I started writing
fiction.
In what way is it different?
My nonfiction prior to this, because of the period in which it was written, the late sixties, the seventies, the early eighties, tended to be very ... how should I put it? Very polemical in tone, very ideological, reflecting the period I was writing in and reflecting the ideas that dominated that period. And I guess the arrogance -- that is the other thing which the sixties generation had, a certain political arrogance which was reflected in our writings, because we hadn't suffered any defeats. In fact, we'd scored. The Vietnamese had actually won that war, and that victory had also formed our consciousness that it was possible to win. That informed the way we wrote; we were always looking for victories. Now I think it's more reflective.
It's interesting, because in The Clash of Fundamentalisms, you will be making a point and then you go to the poetry of the period. Tell us a little about that. Is there in the poetry an insight that allows you to make a point in a more compelling way? That was the case for this reader.
This is absolutely the case. And, more importantly than that, poets have played a very big role in the culture of the Islamic world, and also the non-Islamic world. If you take the role poetry played in Russia, both prior to the Revolution, during it, and after it, when Stalin had poets executed, the poets who survived said, "The one thing we cannot say about this regime is that it underestimates our craft!" In the West, poetry had become quite anodyne. There were very brilliant poets, but they didn't have that central role in the culture. Well, in the Arab world, they did. In the world of India and Pakistan, poets had a very important role. I think it grows out of the fact that the oral cultural tradition was very strong in that world. The written word obviously predominated, but large numbers of people couldn't read or write. When they went to hear a great poet recite, even if they couldn't read or write themselves, that poem left a deep mark on them. Often these poems were sung by famous singers, so they had a very deep impact.
The poetry of Nizar Qabbani, which is in that book, is quite stunning. It's funny, but just after the United States and the occupation armies occupied Baghdad, I had a message from one of the greatest living Arab poets, Sa'di Yusuf, who is an Iraqi poet who's been in exile. He rang me and we met in London, and talked. His poetry used to circulate throughout Iraq, even though Saddam banned it. It never stopped circulating, as did the poetry of two other Iraqi poets, [Muhammad Mahdi] Al-Jawahiri and Mudhaffar Al-Nawwab. And he said, "Saddam understood the importance of poetry and would often say to us, 'Come to Baghdad and there will be a million people to listen to your poems. The blood on my neck guarantees your safety.'" And Saadi Yousef said to me, "When a head of state says that the blood on his neck guarantees your safety, it's not exactly reassuring!"
That's right!
So he said, "We didn't go." But, you know, he hates the new occupation. He's writing more poetry, and it's already been published in Iraq.
This tradition is very deep in me, because when I was growing up our house was a venue for poets and writers. They came and went, and, often, as a very young child, I would be sitting on the floor listening to people, very great poets reciting their poetry, so I was privileged. And then you could go to a poetry reading in a big open-air theatre. The poetry reading started after dinner, at 9 o'clock at night, a musha'ira, and it could go on until the early hours of the morning. By the end of it, the poets were reciting their poetry extemporaneously, inventing verses on the spot, and the crowds then made known which was their favorite poet. Often, poets too close to the government of the day were booed and heckled. So it's a very different tradition than has developed in the West.
When I was writing this book, I remembered all that, and I know what part it played, so I inserted it in the book.
That suggests that in some ways our modern capitalist civilization, or whatever you want to call it, is inadequate, because part of the emergence and the consolidation of the American empire is a dumbing-down through a denial of outlets and opportunities for expression. It would be interesting for you to share with us your insights about the applicability of what you're saying about fiction and nonfiction and poetry as an expression of protest and an analysis of reality when that is being dampened down. We're not having those opportunities in the West, not so much as a matter of formal repression, but more a kind of repressive tolerance, as Marcuse would say.
I think this has gotten very pronounced since the nineties, in particular. The nineties of the last century were a decade when dumbing down became the form in most of the advanced capitalist world, including Britain. The BBC is still marginally better than most of the American networks, but I use the word "marginally" because if you live in that country and you see it every day, you see the big decline that has afflicted the BBC. Channel 4, which was set up in 1982 to be an innovative, critical television channel (it was set up by Parliament) -- by the middle to end of the nineties had collapsed. A lot of experimental, very good work was done, but then it came to an end and it's almost as if one can trace this end to the collapse of the communist enemy; that with the ending of that, it's almost as if the rulers of this world, the dominant capitalist world, decided, "We don't need to educate our citizens so much. We have nothing to be worried about. If you educate them too much, give them too many opportunities, make them too vigilant and alert, they might actually turn on us." I'm not saying this is how they thought it concretely, but certainly that's how it seemed to one, that that's what they were trying to do. The dumbing-down seemed sudden, that one day the networks were actually quite intelligent, and then six months later everything had disappeared. There's a very good Hollywood movie about it called Network, with Peter Finch, which describes the dumbing down in American television. But what happened in Britain has been every bit as disastrous.
To be cynical, I really do not believe that they want citizens in this world to think. They don't want that. They want a population which is more or less servile, which listens to them, accepts all they say, a population which is obsessed with consumerism and fornication, and carries on doing that. That they don't mind at all. That's fine. But anything beyond that which challenges them, they more or less stopped. This has affected the way things are under the control exercised now within television -- shocking even in things like theater. I remember in the sixties, seventies, eighties, if you were head of drama at the BBC or Channel 4, you could do what you want. You went with your instincts. In the nineties came focus groups and marketing. You have to do the thing which gets the highest ratings. They assumed that the lowest common denominator is what got the highest ratings, and so they all started doing very similar things. Diversity in television began to die.
Now, in your discussion of the Iranian Revolution, you talk about the emergence of an underground Iranian cinema when the Khomeini Revolution consolidated itself. These systems, whether in the Islamic world or in the [American] Empire, if we can make that distinction, have tendencies toward repression, but there's always still hope. In the case of Iranian cinema, we're seeing the expression of the dissent which the regime is trying to deny.
This is absolutely true. This vibrancy of the Iranian cinema reminded me very much of some of the movies that were coming out of Eastern Europe in the fifties and sixties -- allegorical, very brilliantly done, very intense, saying something which made the viewer think. It wasn't "feel good," it was, "Think: what is this movie trying to say?" So the actual tone of most of them, good or bad, whether they worked or not, was incredibly intelligent because they were pitched at a very high level and wanted the cinema-goer to think, "What is the director trying to say?" The contrast with what was happening at that time here couldn't be more pronounced.
The one big difference for me between, say, life in the United States and life in Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or Damascus, or elsewhere in that world: there you have repressive regimes, but the character of the repression is such that it creates a very vibrant underground life, or even everyday life. If you go into a café in Cairo, or Damascus, or Saudi Arabia, the population, the citizens sitting with each other around the table, drinking coffee and talking, are engaged in discussion of everything -- politics, culture, the latest novel by Moneve, the latest novel by Mahfouz. "What's it like?" "Is it good?" "What is this corrupt politician doing?" That, you do not get in large parts of the West now. It's as if they in the West have a self-satisfied and complacent citizenry. I'm talking about the majority, now, not the minority. And that is very different in that world, where people do talk, whether in the privacy of their homes, in cafˇs, on the streets, they watch, they look. They may be powerless in terms of changing governments, but they are much more alert than many, many people in the West, and that's interesting.
Next page: Modernity and Islam
© Copyright 2003, Regents of the University of California