A blank slate

Editor Reza Aslan justifies his exclusion of Hebrew literature from his Middle Eastern anthology, but his explanation is only partly satisfactory.

By AKIN AJAYI
Reza Aslan 521 (photo credit: Hilary Jones)
Reza Aslan 521
(photo credit: Hilary Jones)
‘Literature,’ says Reza Aslan, “offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.”
It’s an interesting, if not wholly original, hypothesis, one that Aslan seeks to demonstrate with a new volume of writing drawn from the Middle East.
Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East – commissioned by the international literature-in-translation magazine Words Without Borders – is an ambitious attempt to show how literature both shapes and reflects identity in the region, by presenting an unvarnished and unedited exposition of life as actually lived. The anthology is timely, given recent upheavals in the region; one thing the Arab Spring has demonstrated is just how little we know about the Middle East beyond the cant of undemocratic and unrepresentative demagogues.
“The one place to hear the truth, truth spoken to power, is from writers and poets,” Aslan tells me down a faint telephone connection as he drives to work.
An associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, Aslan seems always to be on the move.
We agreed to conduct the interview by mobile phone because it was the only free time he could spare before a full day of teaching; the next morning, he was flying to the United Kingdom on a speaking tour.
His perpetual motion characterizes an intellectual restlessness. The Iranian-born Aslan moved to the United States with his family at the age of nine, following the Iranian revolution. A PhD in the sociology of religion serves as the base for his prolific writing and lecturing about the place of Islam in the modern world, including the best-selling No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam.
He also has an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop; at one point, he was simultaneously the university’s first visiting professor on Islam and a Truman Capote fellow at the Writers’ Workshop.
Organized chronologically, the first two sections of Tablet & Pen explore the influence of literature in the formation and assertion of Middle Eastern identity. The first part is concerned primarily with the decline of empire between the turn of the century and World War II; the second focuses on the gradual aggregation of a post-colonial identity afterward. The third part explores the globalization of Middle East literature – and Middle Eastern identity – in the last 30 years. Taken as a whole – and the clear intent is for the anthology to be consumed as a lineal whole, rather than piecemeal – it is an impressive work of scholarship and research. (The preparation of the book involved the participation of three regional editors and 77 translators.) For many, familiarity with the canon of writing from the Middle East is tentative at best. Even so, a few names are immediately recognizable – Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, for instance, or the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. There are other names that resonate; Khalil Gibran – the famed author of The Prophet – opens the anthology with a startling essay on language, invention and creativity, “The Future of the Arabic Language.” But the real strength of the volume lies with the unfamiliar, the unknown – to us – writers who wrote for domestic rather than international audiences, intimately concerned with how they perceived themselves rather than how others shaped their identity to suit their needs.
ASLAN TELLS me that he started to pull the anthology together without preconceptions, his immediate objective being to find pieces with literary merit rather than “important” works with primarily political resonance.
“The focus, first and foremost, was that of literary qualities,” he says. “Because there wasn’t initially an overreaching narrative, quality shone through first, that of the neglected literary history of the region.”
But a theme does emerge, ultimately.
“The literary landscape of this vast and eclectic region has been shaped by a common experience of Western imperialism and colonial domination,” Aslan writes in the introduction. “What binds together the writers in this collection... is neither borders nor nationalities, but rather intention, circumstance and setting.”
Which brings one to a curious omission: the absence of any literature of Hebrew origin in the collection. Not surprisingly, this has proven controversial – the American critic Adam Kirsch, for example, penned a stinging rebuke in The New Republic – but it seems only fair to allow Aslan to explain the exclusion himself.
“The term ‘the Middle East’ is a nonsense term, used to group together a mosaic region,” Aslam opines. His intention, he continues, was not to use it as a geographical designation, but “rather as a cultural, social, even civilizational designation – in a sense reclaiming the term.”
In his introduction, Aslan writes that Hebrew literature “reflects certain social and historical realities that do not align with the themes of imperialism, colonialism, and Western cultural hegemony which occupy so much of the literature of the modern Middle East.” Which sounds like an extremely polite way of suggesting that Israel is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
Not at all, Aslan replies.
“For much of the earlier part of the 20th century (the ground covered in Part 1 of the anthology), the locus of Hebrew literature was not in the Middle East, but Europe and Russia,” Aslan asserts. “By mid-century, the locus shifted, but the problem was that a lot of the literature strayed from the theme of anti-imperialism.”
There were a few potential candidates, he acknowledges; but to have included them, he felt, would have run the risk of being accused of tokenism – as problematic in its own way as being accused of willful exclusion – and after extensive discussions with his co-editors and publishers, he came to the decision not to include Hebrew literature. (It is only right to note that he also recommends a couple of excellent anthologies dedicated to Hebrew literature, for readers who choose to explore this lacuna.) This rationale does not entirely convince, however. For one thing – irrespective of one’s political orientation – the very existence of the modern State of Israel plays an important, if not integral, role in the dynamics of the modern Middle East, a central part of the “mosaic,” to borrow Aslan’s words. To excise Israeli literature strikes one as manifesting a political rather than social agenda, contrary to the anthology’s stated objective.
It seems hardly worth observing that Mandate-era Palestine was characterized by a struggle for the self-determination of a people against a colonial overload; no doubt the antecedents and consequences are complicated, but to exclude this history only makes sense if one reads “Middle Eastern” as a synonym for “Muslim,” a construct that Aslan rejects.
Yet for all this, one accepts that either approach – to exclude or to include – is fraught with difficulties.
“I do not agree that Israel can be seen as a part of the wave of anti-colonialism,” Aslan says. “Some might agree with me, some might not...”
As an aside, he mentions that he received lots of angry e-mails from Turks, annoyed at their inclusion in his definition of the modern Middle East.
Some arguments just cannot be won.
Despite these objections, it would be a shame if a reader were discouraged solely by this issue from perusing what is an excellent – if perhaps abbreviated – primer on the literature, the social concerns and the identity of a diverse region. The anthology is dedicated to the people of Iran, acknowledgment of the role the Green Movement played as a precursor to the Arab Spring; the epigraph to the volume serves as a reminder of this:
“Whoever keeps you and me
 from being we let his house cave in.
If I don’t become we, I’m alone.
If you don’t become we
you are just you...”