Wasafiri

ISSN: 0269-0055 (Print) 1747-1508 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwas20

A Correspondence With Ahdaf Soueif

Jamal Mahjoub

To cite this article: Jamal Mahjoub (2009) A Correspondence With Ahdaf Soueif, Wasafiri, 24:3,
56-61, DOI: 10.1080/02690050903019822

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02690050903019822

Published online: 27 Aug 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 139

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rwas20
 A Correspondence
with Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif is the Egyptian-born
Jamal author of the bestselling The Map of
Love which was shortlisted for the
Mahjoub Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. She is
also a political and cultural commentator. She has published
numerous novels, short story collections and essay collections,
the most recent of which is Mezzaterra: Fragments from the
Common Ground (2004). She has also translated works,
including a translation (from Arabic into English) of Mourid
Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, which was published in 2004.
Ahdaf Soueif writes in both English and Arabic and has written
various essays and reviews published in Akhbar al-Adab, al-
Arabi, Cosmopolitan, Granta, The London Review of Books,
Nisf al-Dunya, The Observer, Sabah al-Kheir, Times Literary
Supplement, Washington Post and others. She has made many
programmes for Arab, American and British TV and radio
stations. She is the founder and chair of Engaged Events (UK)
PALFEST, is on the board of the Caine Prize for African
Literature and has received numerous awards including one
from the Lannan Foundation in the USA in 2002 and an
Honorary DLitt from Exeter University in 2008. Ahdaf Soueif
lives in London and Cairo.
Jamal Mahjoub was born in London and was educated in the
Sudan. He has published seven novels, including Navigation of
a Rainmaker (1994) and The Carrier (1998). His work has been
awarded a number of international prizes, among them the
Guardian/Heinemann Short Story Prize. The novel Travelling
with Djinns (2003) won the Prix d’Astrolabe at the prestigious
Etonnants Voyageurs festival in France. His most recent works
are The Drift Latitudes and Nubian Indigo (2006). He is
currently writing a non-fiction book on the Sudan. Jamal
Mahjoub is now living in Barcelona.
Jamal Mahjoub Young women in the Arab world today still face
the same challenges as you did when you started out, but their
tactics have changed. Instead of demanding their liberty by
going against tradition and revealing themselves, today
woman are burying themselves inside older dress norms from
within the most conservative parts of Islamic history; hiding
Wasafiri Vol. 24, No. 3 September 2009, pp. 56
61
ISSN 0269-0055 print/ISSN 1747-1508 online # 2009 Jamal Mahjoub
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/02690050903019822
their hair, bodies and even their faces. This seems to me to be
not only an affirmation of religious faith but also a rejection of
certain assumptions about Western notions of emancipation.
It is also a challenge to previous generations, including the
intellectual class. How do you relate to this development and
do you feel a connection to this new generation?
Ahdaf Soueif Well, Jamal, we were together at the Cairo Book
Fair and you saw that some of the best questions came from
young women who were wearing the niqab, the complete face
covering. I think it’s
/ as ever
/ a mistake to generalise. Some
of these people are empty-headed, others are thoughtful and
committed. I think you have the whole spectrum there. And,
yes, I do relate to them. There is always the unspoken fact that
they cover their heads
/ or faces
/ and I don’t, but it seems to
me that if it doesn’t bother them, it shouldn’t bother me; after
all it is me who professes a belief in personal choice! So I
respect their choice to cover and I don’t make assumptions
about their motivation other than the very broad assumption
that they find it fulfilling, or they find that it expresses
something about them */ whether that ‘something’ is
religious, ideological, political or social. I believe that people
always have a need to belong to something, to serve
something even, larger than themselves. The covering-up is
the current manifestation of that need.
JM I agree, personal freedom must be respected */ but there
seems to be a remarkable consensus, a meeting of hearts and
minds that surpasses the mere fact of physical appearance, as
we saw in Cairo, where the niqab is increasingly prevalent.
People assume that it is Muslim in origin, but it is actually
secular. Sura twenty-four of the Qu’ran famously reads: ‘Enjoin
believing men to turn their eyes away from temptation and to
restrain their carnal desires. This will make their lives purer.’ In
other words, the burden of responsibility clearly lies on men.
So it should in theory not be necessary for women to cover
themselves. Like so many modern manifestations of pious
duty, it can be turned around and be described as un-Islamic.
The fact remains that social pressure forces women within. To
a place where they can study, they can read and write, but all

of their inner life remains hidden from the world, only coming
to the surface on rare occasions, such as for example the
woman at the book fair.
AS I don’t agree that ‘social pressure forces women within’.
Most women are not ‘within’; the economics of life won’t permit
it. Most women are out there working. And I mean at every level.
In Egypt more than half of the people working in media, the arts
and education are women. Thirty-three per cent of Egypt’s
diplomats are women. If you look at the billboards advertising
physicians and lawyers you’ll find that a great many of them are
women. Women are well represented in the banking and
business sectors. Among the very poor it’s estimated that eighty
per cent of families have women as sole breadwinners. The
latest labour strikes in the textile mills of Mahalla el-Kobra were
led by women. This is not to deny that there are pressures on
women
/ but there are terrible pressures on men too and when
societies have critical economic and political problems, as we
are having now, there is pressure on everyone and it takes
different forms. As for what is Islamic and what is un-Islamic,
that question is being argued about constantly in all its
minutiae */ women’s clothing is only a tiny fraction of that hot
debate. Is it Islamic to speak out against injustice and
corruption? Or is it Islamic to obey the ruler? Is it Islamic
behaviour to cleave to your sect? Or is it Islamic to preserve the
cohesion of the larger group? Etc, etc.
JM The hijab, not even the niqab, is taken as emblematic of an
East that is backward-looking and isolationist. In the West it is
taken as symptomatic of an immigrant population that refuses
to integrate. Before the 11 September 2001 attacks, the West
showed very little curiosity or interest in Arab culture, yet we
have been exposed, even bombarded, by Western culture for
centuries. At least as far back as Napoleon’s ill-fated
adventure in 1798 the East has been absorbing Western ideas,
including the modern novel, and adapting them. The notion of
a monolithic irreconcilable East came to a head in the notion
of a ‘clash of civlisations’. And yet while the invasion of Iraq
could not have happened without a strong dose of ignorance
and prejudice, so much else indicates that more binds us than
separates us. And while the West had, for various reasons (the
lack of good translations etc), little access to Arabic literature,
the same is not true the other way. We know them, but they
know astonishingly little about us. We need more
communication; more writing, more translations. Today, kids
in the Middle East (and elsewhere) are exposed to mind-
numbing doses of low-brow Western culture through television
and it seems to me that the real crisis lies not between
civilisations, but within the very notion of civilisation itself.
AS I think you’re completely right. I have always questioned,
for example, the whole ‘developed/developing’ paradigm as a
descriptor for countries. I think there are better indications of
‘civilisation’ than how many people own laptops. I guess the
thing is to insist that ‘development’ is merely a term to do with
A Correspondence with Ahdaf Soueif 57
technology and economics, while ‘civilisation’ is to do with
values and behaviour.
As for the ‘clash of civilisations’, I will quote Egyptian
novelist, Gamal el-Ghitani, in his recent address at
‘Arabesque’, the Kennedy Centre’s three-week-long
celebration of Arab art and culture in Washington DC:
‘Civilisations do not clash,’ he said, ‘they interact.’ And he
went on to lay claim to the American novel: ‘Hemingway,
Baldwin, Mark Twain, Faulkner belong to me as much as to any
American writer,’ he said.
I do very much believe in commonalities, in the ‘common
ground’. The following is taken from my introduction to
Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004). The
common ground was
a territory imagined, created even, by Arab thinkers
and reformers starting in the middle of the nineteenth
century when Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt first sent
students to the West and they came back inspired by
the best of what they saw on offer. Generations of
Arabs protected it through the dark time of
colonialism. A few Westerners inhabited it too: Lucy
Duff Gordon was one, Wilfred Scawen Blunt another.
My parents’ generation are still around to tell how they
held on to their admiration for the thought and
discipline of the West, its literature and music, while
working for an end to the West’s occupation of their
lands. . . . This is the stance that Edward Said speaks
of when he describes how ‘what distinguished the
great liberationist cultural movements that stood
against Western imperialism was that they wanted
liberation within the same universe of discourse
inhabited by Western culture.’
They believed this was possible because they
recognised an affinity between the best of Western and
the best of Arab culture. Ideals of social justice, public
service and equality, identified in modern times as
Western, are to be found in the Qur’an and the
traditions of the Prophet. If science flourishes in the
West now, it flourished in the Arab and Muslim lands
from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. The
principles of objective scientific enquiry described by
Roger Bacon in 1286 are the same as those expressed
by al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham in 1020. Taxation and
philanthropy produced free health care in Baghdad in
the tenth century as they did in London in the
twentieth. In both cultures a system of patronage had
been the midwife to great architecture, literature and
music. And as the European Renaissance had
blossomed in the sixteenth century out of the mix of
Europe’s availing itself of Arab science while
discovering its own classical heritage and enjoying an
economic boom, so the Arabs looked to build their
twentieth-century renaissance on their adoption of
Western science and their rediscovery of their classical
heritage. This was precisely the creative fusion behind,
for example, the extraordinary innovative revival in
Arabic poetry in the second half of the twentieth
century.
58 A Correspondence with Ahdaf Soueif
Generations of Arab Mezzaterrans had, I guess,
believed what Western culture said of itself: that its
values were universalist, democratic and humane.
They believed that once you peeled off military and
political dominance, the world so revealed would be
one where everyone could engage freely in the
exchange of ideas, art forms, technologies. This was
the world that my generation believed we had
inherited: a fertile land; an area of overlap, where one
culture shaded into the other, where echoes and
reflections added depth and perspective, where
differences were interesting rather than threatening
because foregrounded against a backdrop of affinities.
(Ahdaf Soueif. Mezzaterra: Fragments from the
Common Ground. London: Bloomsbury, 2004, 6
/8.)
JM This East versus West issue brings me to the matter of
language. It’s a question that comes up all the time. Why write
in English? It is usually framed as if one had a choice. This was
not the case for me and I know it wasn’t for you. When it
comes to writing, I think it is less a rational choice than
instinct which decides. I grew up with Arabic as a second
language. All of my education was in English language schools
and my reading, in particular of fiction, was largely dictated by
the books on our bookshelves at home. Since it was my
mother who was the reader, most of the novels were in English
with a few exceptions in Arabic. When it came to begin writing,
the words were already forming themselves in my head in
English. In your case, despite both your parents being
Egyptian, you actually had a pretty similar experience.
AS Yes. We went to London when I was four because my
mother was doing a PhD in English Literature. In Egyptian law,
if you worked in a public institution, it automatically gave the
partner and family the right to accompany someone who was
sent abroad, so my father and I went with my mother. We were
there for three years. This meant that when I started to read, I
read in English. When we went back to Cairo
/ and this is very
much like your experience
/ I was surrounded by mother’s
library. I must have read all of English Literature before I was
sixteen. I started reading Arabic fiction and poetry and so on in
my teens, but I think my literary language had already chosen
me by then.
JM Your work paints a vast and complex canvas of Egypt’s
history and culture, from the romantic poetry of Ancient Egypt
to tracking contemporary events in Nasser’s Egypt. You do a
tremendous amount of research and often unearth remarkable
things. It makes reading your work a reminder of how rich
human culture is and how little we really know about it. The
past seems to hold a fascination for you. You wrote your
doctorate on Medieval English poetry. And now you are very
interested in the figure of Ma’at in Ancient Egyptian mythology.
Why is the past so important do you think?
AS Maybe it’s an Egyptian thing. Or maybe it’s an age thing.
‘Min fat adeemuh tah’ (‘let go of your past and you’ll be lost’).
Or maybe I look for help wherever I can find it. The roots and
reasons of things in the present are always in the past and I’m
always interested
/ obsessed even
/ with trying to work out
why we are where we are, how did it (whatever ‘it’ is) get to be
like this? I’m totally interested in the ‘what if?’ What if he had
not said that? What if she had pretended not to know? What if
the Dreyfus Affair hadn’t happened? What if Nasser had
trusted better the people who loved him? What happens is not
inevitable. How do we learn to nudge history into paths more
beneficial to us? The past is tantalising; it is so there and yet
so not there. It’s in my mind and in my heart and the older I
grow the more laden with the past every thought and feeling
and action in the present becomes. And yet I can never, never,
never ever, be in the past. Even though it is more real to me
than the present. Sometimes.
One of the principles of Ma’at is that you should live in the
present, looking and working towards the future, but always
fully cognisant of the past. That’s pretty ideal, I think, if you
can manage it.
JM I think you put it very well. Being conscious of what has
gone before without falling into trap of nostalgia. Finding in
the past ways of navigating the present. It affects our
understanding of ourselves in history. As novelists we are
drawn to this in another way, which I think is to do with trying
to make the past speak to us. We’ve talked about the new
novel a couple of times and I’ve heard you read some extracts.
It is a very ambitious project, dare I say, more so, it seems to
me, than anything you’ve done before. Just the idea of going
all the way back to the Middle Kingdom is daunting. Yet, as
you point out, there is something incredibly modern embodied
in the figure of Ma’at. The active engagement with the past to
live in the present. You seem to have put your finger on

something. Yet the past, in modern day Egypt, is also
problematic in the way that anything pre-Islamic is, while
being so much a part of what Egypt is.
AS Well, that’s part of what’s interesting and part of what I want
to explore in this coming novel. It seems to me that a certain
spirit, a certain set of attitudes developed in Egypt
/ over a
course, perhaps, of some 2,000 years
/ and was articulated at
about the time of the twelfth Dynasty (around 2000 BC). This
spirit was very connected to the nature and the narrative of the
gods of Egypt
/ and this spirit also is what has saved Egypt so
far
/ in the sense of maintaining a cultural core which has only,
to my mind, grown stronger and richer with every new invasion
of the country and the cultural ‘invasion’ that comes with the
political one.
What makes this pressing for me today is that we are living
in probably one of the worst periods in history, certainly in
Egypt */ perhaps in the world. And every one of us is looking
for ways to withstand this */ looking for ways to hold on to the
things that we value and try to ensure that they are not
destroyed; that when we come out the other end of this
period, they come with us.
JM We’ve talked before about the way that we both came to
literature through reading foreign writers, whose work took us
into other worlds. By being forced to imagine the ‘other’ before
you really have a fully formed notion of yourself has a
profoundly liberating impact on the imagination. It seems
to me that if only more people could read and identify with
people who appear different from themselves, a great deal
of the world’s problems would be solved.
AS I think that one of the things literature does as well is that it
really drills into you the belief that characters are complex,
that people are infinitely varied, and that, at heart, we are all
the same. If I had a wish I would change all school curricula
tomorrow so that by the age of fifteen or so every child had
read two novels from each country in the world and had
attended a ‘history of civilisation’ course that charted human
history from its very beginnings and across the whole world in
terms of cultural and scientific exchange and accretion.
JM It is perhaps this ability to see things in a broad non-
polarised context that explains why writers like us often find
ourselves caught up in the need to criticise the conservative,
inward-looking tendency currently ruling the Muslim world on
the one hand and, on the other, the grandstanding remarks of
Western pundits who, riding on a wave of fear and ignorance,
back their prejudice up with misunderstandings and very
broad generalisations. And while I feel the need to criticise
both East and West, in recent years the very idea of such a
critical dialogue seems to have been swallowed up by the
hysterical demand that you choose sides.
AS I think we have no option but to NOT choose sides. I should
say, though, that I believe there is a difference between the
A Correspondence with Ahdaf Soueif 59
two. The conservative tendency that governs our countries
today did not come out of nothing; it came about as a reaction
to the (temporary we hope) failure of a national project that
was outward-looking, secular, non-aligned, liberationist and
socialist */ Nasser’s project, in essence. And the failure of that
national project was in very large part due to the West’s
unrelenting war on it. And the elements within the Arab world
that were the West’s partners in defeating this project were the
conservative/reactionary Arab regimes and the Islamists. Well,
they won that round and now they’re in the ascendancy and it
is the most arrant hypocrisy of the West to complain about it.
Look now at the West detesting Hamas because it is a
religious movement and how it seems totally reasonable for
Israel not to deal with Hamas because Hamas is Islamist. But
they had Yasser Arafat for decades */ and they wouldn’t deal
with him either. And now they deplore the Islamist tendency
across the region and fear it. But they hated and feared every
liberation movement across the region and spent their time
and energy fighting and torturing and executing secular Arab
liberationists. I do have a particular aversion, though, to the
‘grandstanding’ pundits who make names and livings feeding
off the mistrust the West feels towards the East. They do
untold harm; in fact, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to put
the thousands of deaths and ruined lives we have in Iraq,
Afghanistan etc directly at their door.
JM Your career has been devoted to changing the way people
perceive the Arab world and Egypt in particular. You have,
literally, mapped the boundary between Britain and its former
colony. Yet you have also had to deal with resistance and
suspicion. A critic once wrote of The Map of Love, that it was a
book for Englishmen (sic) who like their literary pleasures to
be guilty ones, which seems like a perverse reading of the
60 A Correspondence with Ahdaf Soueif
author’s intentions. This theory was disproved by hundreds
of thousands of devoted and satisfied readers. Do you think
times are changing and that perhaps a new generation, no
longer burdened by the need to defend some notion of literary
purity, will be more receptive to what is happening out there?
AS The Map of Love was tremendously fortunate in that it
found its readership. It was given a hard time by the critics
when it first came out. Some, as you say, were uncomfortable
with its treatment of colonialism and Zionism, others
demanded that it make up its mind whether it was a novel of
ideas or a romance! Personally, I thought it was both. And I
think that’s why readers took it to their hearts. Because it’s
about people and how they sometimes have no choice but to
get caught up in the big political events of their time. I think
that literature like yours and mine, placing itself as it does
squarely in the area where cultures overlap, is becoming more
and more relevant to people’s experience and to what they
want to engage with. And the thing is, of course, that it’s
completely genuine; I would not know how to write a story that
was of just one place, neither, I suspect, would you.
JM We do seem to be part of what feels like a growing
community of Arab writers who write in English. This has met
some resistance. There is the purist assumption that it is
somehow not ‘authentic’; a parochial notion supported by, for
example, Arabists who see writers living in the West as
somehow unqualified. It is a classical tactic of
disempowerment. I’ve even heard it suggested that people
choose to write in English do so for reasons of profit. In the
East, on the other hand, the work is often viewed with the
suspicion that, in order to triumph, such writers have to serve
the interests of the West and represent the East negatively. To
me, we occupy a kind of ‘no man’s land’, unclaimed by either
side really, but by the same token entirely unique. Migration is
now a part of everyone’s lives and the quality of the writing
has improved tremendously over the past decade.
AS Yes, well, for a start, I think the situation with English is
quite different from French where north African writers started
writing in French quite a while before other Arabs started
writing in English. In English, before you and me, for ‘literary
fiction’, I can only think of Wagih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker
Club. But now the use of English by Arab authors is expanding
at a faster rate than the use of French. And you know what?
Maybe people who are able to write fiction in both Arabic and
English would choose English for profit; to gain access to a
larger reading public, a larger market. I don’t have a problem
with that as long as the work itself is done honestly; meaning
as long as it doesn’t use its Arab credentials to exploit or
misrepresent the culture. I don’t have that choice because
I am unable to write fiction in Arabic.
The Arabists’ objections are understandable; they would
rather we all spent our time galloping round on noble Arabian
steeds in the Empty Quarter or balancing amphorae on our
heads against an ‘unchanging’ background with pyramids and
date palms, or, indeed, squabbling noisily for ‘baksheesh’
with outstretched, grimy hands above which they could once
in a while spot a pair of soulful almond eyes and wonder
whether some of us (female of course) were still not quite
degraded enough to be unsaveable. Their job then, would not
just be to study us, but to interpret and represent us. The
terms of the Arabist’s life work alter radically when we speak
for ourselves in their language, their idiom, their discourse. It’s
natural that they’re floundering.
I think the Arab Americans are in the process of changing
the scene anyway. The second generation are coming into their
own and they’re going to do for Arab Americans what Baldwin
and Morrison and Walker etc did for African Americans. The
poetry, performance and comedy fields are already enriched
by their presence. I think, actually, there could be a
wonderfully creative interaction to come between Arab culture
inside the Arab world and outside the Arab world. I think you
can already see it in cinema with directors like Cherien Dabis,
named a director to watch by Variety and whose debut feature,
Amreeka, was given a standing ovation at Sundance this year.
Maybe this is going to be a wonderful manifestation of
postcolonialism and the most positive historical development
of the last 200 years.
JM You epitomise the modern liberated woman of the Arab
world; successful, independent, you have your own voice and
you speak openly about subjects that would normally be
considered taboo, namely, politics and sexuality, but you also
manage to entertain a lot of readers both East and West at the
same time. Assia Djebar has written eloquently of the woman
who finds her voice and breaks the silence, revealing the
others as not so much silent as imprisoned. While there are
many women writers working in Arabic, their work gets through
much less often, which would appear to put more pressure on
people like yourself, whose work crosses the boundary and
touches a lot of people in the West. Does that give you a sense
of responsibility, as ‘the one who speaks out’?
AS I question the notion of ‘getting through’ */ as though if a
text gets read by Western readers it’s somehow more valid than
if it doesn’t; as though there exists a continuum or a trajectory
and if you only get read by ‘local’ readers in a non-Western
language then you’ve somehow stalled. I think we could say
that texts are born out of a particular culture and, if they reach
those who share that culture, then these texts have been
fulfilled. Having said that, I guess the particular location I’m in
is where more than one culture merges */ or don’t. And it’s
from within that that I write. On the issue of representation I do
feel ‘a certain responsibility’ as you put it */ but not in the
fiction. In the fiction I deal with the big questions that I find
interesting or of the moment. It’s in the non-fiction work; the
journalism and the activism that there is a responsibility that
stems from this same location. But the issues on which I feel a
need to ‘speak out’ are not actually ‘women’s’ issues. I don’t
see what’s to be gained by speaking out on, say, Arab women’s
issues to a Western audience. What concerns me are more

general, and in the main political, issues. Decisions are taken
in the West by English speakers that affect what happens in the
East, to Arabic, Dari or Farsi speakers. Big decisions */ to put
sanctions on Iran, to invade Iraq, to bomb Afganistan, to
support Israel. That is where I feel a duty of intervention.
JM It is not only tremendously risky for a writer to take on a
‘cause’ as passionately as you have with Palestine, it is also
unfashionable. Writers today tend to be much more concerned
with avoiding any chance of alienating potential readers. But
in recent years your commitment to the Palestinian people has
found expression in the creation of the Palestine Literary
Festival, which seeks to introduce writers to Palestine who
might not otherwise have thought of going to see for
themselves what is happening there. The festival is apolitical,
in that it is literature which forms the basis for the encounter.
Many of the participants in 2008 were astonished to find
themselves having decent conversations with Palestinians
about Edith Wharton say, or the poetry of Robert Burns. It
seems incredible that something as simple as a conversation
about the love of books should be shrouded by the
complexities of check-points and eight metre high walls,
yet this is the case. It is almost as if the very notion of a
conversation is deemed a threat.
AS This is completely true. The war that’s being waged on the
Palestinians is a war of the image as much as anything else. In
fact, the image component is an essential part of the war.
Israel has from the very beginning predicated its value to the
West on the premise that it is different from its surroundings,
and that it is the West’s ally against its surroundings. When
Theodore Herzl was presenting the Zionist project to the
British Foreign Office at the end of the nineteenth century he
assured them that Israel would provide a ‘civilised bulwark’
against the barbarian hordes of Islam. Therefore, it is not only
essential that Israel be seen as modern, enlightened,
democratic, cultured etc, but it’s also essential that the
Palestinians be seen as the opposite; as backward, fanatic,
extremist, dogmatic, ignorant etc. So a crucial part of this
struggle
/ on our side
/ is to get the world to see the
Palestinians as they really are. And this, of course, is very
much what the siege on Palestinian cities is designed to
prevent. The siege on Gaza is different and more extreme
because it aims at physically starving the Palestinians in Gaza;
the siege on the cities of the West Bank is aimed at making life
difficult and at isolating and ‘hiding’ the Palestinians. Because
when a visitor to Palestine sits in a class in Birzeit University
A Correspondence with Ahdaf Soueif 61
and finds the students cheerfully and intelligently discussing
Milton Friedman’s economics while the settlement of Psagot
glowers down on them, or attends an exquisite chamber music
recital in Jerusalem knowing that one of the musicians has
been detained at an Israeli checkpoint, or is invited to dinner
at Dar an-Nadwa in Bethlehem and learns that Israel’s
‘Security Wall’ is cutting off the church there from its
vineyards, they begin to question the whole portrayal of the
Palestinians and the motivation of the Israelis and the whole
edifice of lies and misrepresentation starts to crumble very
quickly.
It is much more difficult for Israel to get away with its
project of dispossessing, transferring, exterminating a people
who are ‘like you and me’. And so the world needs to be made
to see that the Palestinians are like the ‘you and me’ to be
found everywhere across the globe.
JM It’s fair to say, I think, that the Arab world on the whole has
been hampered by a lack of representation in the West. It is
slowly improving. People assumed that after Mahfouz won the
Nobel Prize there would be a flood of writing; there wasn’t.
What has made it through has also suffered from the poor
quality of the translation. Often these are awful, stilted and
inaccurate at the same time. The kind of thing you wouldn’t
wish on your worst enemy. And then there has also been a
trend of looking for young writers living in the West, as a way
of circumventing the costs of translations. So we had a wave of
really dreadful works that were simply opportunistic. Recently,
though, I am beginning to see a change. There is a new
generation of young Arabs who have lived for a time or are
settled in the West and who are working on equal terms with
their American or European counterparts. Don’t you think this
will help break down the walls and change the way we
perceive one another?
AS I am tremendously excited by this generation, the people
who are now in their twenties and who really do know both the
Arab world and the Western world intimately. They are aware
of the realities and perceptions of both */ about themselves
and about each other. They have their own feelings and
opinions about what is of value in each culture. They are also
very well aware that the world is bigger than both the Arabs
and the West. I feel that they have their feet quite firmly on the
ground and that they are egalitarian and eclectic in where they
draw their inspiration and their values from. I’m only sorry that
we’re handing them a world which is in such bad shape.