How was it, I wonder, that we came to such? We allowed our religion to be narrowed down to a set of orders and prohibitions that annihilated life and turned it into a sad ritual, one that closed all doors and windows and prevented any sunshine from nourishing our souls? How is it that we allowed a group of students, lacking qualifications and knowledge, to issue "fatwas" and legislation? How could we have permitted, even encouraged, them to turn the Prophet’s sunnah into logarithms and the tolerant Hadith into multiplication tables? How indeed?
A person reading the "Decree of What Is Forbidden" issued by the Taleban in December 1996 — which the Afghan people were expected to live by — should have sighed with regret at the loss of the infamous European religious courts of the Inquisition. How could a person living in the 20th century imagine that a policeman would have the right to come into his house in the middle of the night to measure his beard and cut his trousers?
Such an event has no historical precedent! Where else and when have policemen turned not only into hairdressers but also tailors? Is the length of a beard a matter worth legal concern? Or the length of trousers or thobes? Those legislative prohibitions also included forbidding the manufacture of chairs as they were a foreign invention and forbade women from using public transportation. Any woman found disobeying the regulation was to be arrested and punished and the door of her house marked as was done in the Middle Ages to indicate victims of the plague!
I am weak with wondering how we can possibly face the world with so distorted an image of Islam in newspapers, books and films as well as on television screens and radio broadcasts.
What shall we say to the West? Even if we cared not one whit what they thought of us, even if we believed they had no right to criticize us — was it not our duty as Muslims to look at ourselves and criticize what needed to be criticized? It is of course easier to criticize others than it is to criticize ourselves but self-criticism is vital if we wish to be a part of modern civilization.
***
WITH the death of Leopold Senghor, the curtain falls on the last poet who was also a head of state. It also falls on what is perhaps the only Third World president to resign his office in order to devote himself to writing. Senghor, president of Senegal, was an accomplished poet, indeed one of the most important in Africa and one of the most accomplished poets to write in French. It is without a doubt a difficult matter for a poet or writer to attain the position of president. For how is it that a man, lost in the world of fantasy and visions, could ever enter that of politics, to triumph and take his place as a head of state? That is why Senghor was a prodigy, a real phenomenon; as is Vaclav Havel, the playwright who is also currently president of the Czech Republic and also an excellent writer.
If we turn to the Arab world, Libyan President Col. Muammar Qaddafi has written two collections of short stories which unfortunately I have never read. Stories furthermore that few critics seem to have read and about which even the colonel himself refuses to talk. Iraqi television has recently made an important announcement: They expect the publication of a second novel by Saddam Hussein which is entitled "The Fortified Citadel". This follows his first novel, "Zabiba and the King". The profits from "The Fortified Citadel" will be distributed among the poor, the orphaned and various charitable organizations. I imagine that the Iraqi leader expects to sell millions of copies of the novel; otherwise why be so generous as to mark the profits for distribution to the needy? Could it have something to do with the fact it will be compulsorily distributed among administrations, organizations and ministries? One can only ask why the muse only visited Saddam after he attained the seat of power?
Were you to ask Naguib Mahfouz, the master of the Arabic novel, about the profits he made from all his novels, you can be sure that he would tell you that he never made enough to cover his personal expenses. That is the reason he never left his job, first at the Ministry of Endowments and then at the Ministry of Culture, until he was pensioned off. In fact, had it not been for the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz would probably still be anxiously awaiting the first of every month.