RAMADAN is a time of forgiveness and reprieve. Many prisoners are freed and many more forgive their private grievances. Is it too much to hope that books receive such treatment? While the world sheds its chains we have censorship offices in town and on our borders and airports that live in pre-industrial times.
They are petty dictators who rule according to their own whims. The citizen does not know what is allowed and what isn’t. And neither do they; but they will pass judgment and make life miserable for anyone who brings in a book picked up at the airport somewhere.
Doesn’t the minister in charge of this apparatus understand that no one brings in anything anymore? Who would bring a CD of pornographic movies and risk detention when it can be downloaded on the Net? Direct links to the web are there and no one can censor them. If sedition or “anti-Saudi” material is the stuff we are looking for, why bother when Aljazeera station is in every house?
There is another sad reason why censorship should be removed altogether: it is the tragic fact that not many in this country read. Trust this painful phenomenon to take care of your censorship.
There are offices in the ministry in charge of non-Arabic books where not a single person understands the English idiom let alone a French one. For example, they allow D.H. Lawrence’s “The Peacock” in when it was banned in England when it first came out, but ban a history book that has the portrait of Marie Antoinette with a particularly low cut dress. Worse, they allow in a book in English yet ban the Arabic translation.
Are we such an infantile nation that needs constant protecting? If so, the protection is utterly redundant and completely useless. Satellite television and the Net have rendered all sorts of censorship null and void. At four in the morning you can watch the live newscasts from American networks. Very early in the evening, however, you can watch some rather lewd and unsavory films on the French channels.
Who, in such circumstances, would care about a book on French history or a novel by a coy and timid Saudi? Better yet, who in his right mind would bring in a book that is glaringly offensive? I know someone who, in days gone by, used to bring in books that were anti-Saudi or simply “banned” in the country. He used to put them in his den and show them to his visitors. He never read a single one of them.
We ask the minister to put the book’s case to His Majesty and explain the plight of the written word in this country. Our desire is to liberate ourselves and our books from this tyranny. We cannot claim that we are starved of information as we used to be, but it would be honorable to put an end to this useless yet harmful practice. It does not do us any good and it certainly does not do our country’s image any favors.
Those petty tyrants at airports who will allow certain things in if carried by a certain type of people yet hold the rest of humanity hostage to their position should be fired. Worse, they should be made to read books, especially the ones they confiscate.
An open mind is a sign of maturity and self-confidence. An open heart is the hallmark of Ramadan. I plead the case of books and hope that the annual pardon includes them too.
