FROM THE ASHES OF FUNDAMENTALISM
Sharif Nashashibi

The Guardian, UK
Oct 15 2007

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury sees a way forward through
separation of religion and state, and acceptance of diversity.

About Webfeeds October 15, 2007 7:30 PM | Printable version The first
time I read about Elias Khoury, I was surprised to find that this
award-winning Lebanese novelist had not only espoused the power of
the pen (literally – he does not use keyboards), but also that of
the bullet.

One does not readily associate eloquent, fantasy novel-writing
with real-life militancy. When I interviewed Khoury at a public
meeting in London last week it was hard to believe that this quiet,
silver-haired man of such a small frame had enlisted in Fatah – the
largest resistance group in the Palestine Liberation Organisation –
in the 1970s, and fought in the last Lebanese civil war.

In view of the current volatility in the Middle East, I must admit
that I was more interested in hearing about Khoury’s political views
than his renowned literature, and the audience seemed to agree. In
particular, I found his background take on pan-Arabism intriguing,
deeply cynical and yet somehow hopeful.

The Arab national movement seems to have died multiple deaths,
according to Khoury. The first was due to the Sykes-Picot agreement
that resulted in the British and French division of the Arab
world after the first world war. Then there was the 1948 Nakba
("catastrophe") – when Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine
– and the Arab military dictatorships that followed. He also cited the
failure in 1961 of the union between Egypt and Syria, "because this
type of military Arab nationalism based on dictatorship couldn’t work".

The final death knell of the pan-Arab national movement was the
military defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967. What has filled the
void since then is fundamentalism, "a very complicated phenomenon"
created by "the Saudis, Americans and Pakistanis with oil money
to fight the last battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan,"
he added.

Fundamentalism is taking the region to "a new catastrophe, the worst
one," which is a Sunni-Shia war, said Khoury, a Christian who describes
himself as having an Islamic background, who used to go to church and
read the Qur’an at the same time. He warned "our Israeli cousins"
not to wish for such an outcome, for this would lead the region,
including Israel, to self-destruction.

The Arab media is among the victims of fundamentalism and dictatorship,
according to Khoury. "The pan-Arab newspapers are Saudi, and the
pan-Arab satellite TV stations are either Saudi or Qatari, which means
that all the media is under the control of a fundamentalist ideology,"
he said. "And the media is under the service of regimes."

The Arab world is in a deep darkness, Khoury added, due to several
factors: "Israeli occupation and humiliation of the Palestinian
people, mainly"; "dictatorships that are becoming more and more
savage" (citing Syria’s current role in Lebanon, and the Egyptian
republic’s transformation "into a kind of monarchy"); and the US
invasion of Iraq, "which is leading to a total chaotic system in the
Middle East". Describing the invasion as not an error but a crime,
he continued: "This is not the way to get rid of a dictatorship. This
is the way to create from one dictator hundreds of dictators that
you are seeing in Iraq nowadays."

Khoury even called into question the viability of the region’s
nations. "The idea of the nation state can’t work in our societies
because the nation state needs a kind of ethnic purification," he
said, citing Turkey’s massacres of the Armenians and Israel’s ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinians. He said the kind of problems being
seen in Iraq and Lebanon could occur at any time in Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain, and North Africa between Arabs and Berbers.

The only solution for the region is "a rational, secular, democratic
approach towards politics and culture," according to Khoury, who has
put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, with his involvement
in the establishment of the Democratic Left Movement, one of the few
political parties in Lebanon calling for a secular state.

"We have to invent a political system that separates religion and
state, accepts diversity, and goes back to the idea that Arabic
culture was never one-dimensional," he said.

Current Arab literature is going some way towards this, whereby one
can pick up an Arabic novel and tell from its style and content where
the author is from, according to Khoury, who has written 11 novels.

"This is a very important step towards accepting and promoting
diversity in Arabic culture." Such diversity must be the basis for
unity, he added.

Khoury says his prescription, which "might have been popular 30 years
ago," is now "totally unpopular in the Arab world". He believes,
however, that the experiences of fundamentalism will bring about a
resurgence in his way of thinking. "This is a long struggle and my
feeling is that we have to begin again from scratch, but we have no
other choice."

And the prospects for this struggle? "I’m hopeful, but history is
hopeless."