How Fiction Explains the World
Start with this article. It’s about British-born Muslims who used to wage war against their government. But something changed their minds, and now they’re working to convince other British-born Muslims to give up the jihad.
Go on, read it. It’s a good article.
Now let’s talk about texts, beliefs, and interpretation.
The article introduces Usama Hassan, a British cleric who was raised in a strict Muslim household where he did a lot of reading—mostly the Koran.
“We weren’t allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex,” he says. “We were very sheltered. I didn’t go out a great deal.” By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.
After fighting in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and recruiting other young Muslims to fight in Afghanistan and Bosnia, Hassan came to question the absolute righteousness of his cause.
He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bomb in his mind. “How can this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually a metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia.”
Keep that in mind, and let’s consider another person from the article.
Maajid Nawaz was the victim of anti-Muslim violence as a kid in Britain. He started recruiting other Muslims for an extremist group, and eventually converted almost an entire college campus. He oversaw the killing of a Nigerian Christian who tangled with his students. Then he went to Pakistan and Egypt to recruit more fighters. But in Egypt he ended up in jail. And in jail he found something that surprised him.
Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat […] had recently been moved to this dank cell. “This is like meeting Che Guevara—these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from,” he says. But […] “they told me I had got my theology wrong.”
After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. […] Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. “It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow,” he says. […]
Maajid’s ideology crumbled.
Finally, at the end of the article we meet a notorious, unrepentant British-born Muslim extremist, Anjem Choudhary.
When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits: “This is heresy … The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of his life. If I start to say things like, ‘I don’t believe the sharia needs to be implemented,’ then that’s tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed … To say that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement of apostasy.”
Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. “I can’t pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there’s something that you don’t like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they’re in line with the sharia.”
Of those Muslims who don’t read the Koran literally, Choudhary says:
“After they’ve been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they will suffer the same punishment again and again and again.”
The issue for all three men is whether the Koran is a sacred document that should be taken literally, or a living document that its actively interpreted by its readers.
Quick—let’s define fiction. I think of fiction as any narrative that has been crafted for a purpose and thrives on actively engaging its audience. That’s an awfully broad definition. It includes idle gossip, journalism, recipes, political campaign narratives, highway signs, etc. But it does not include the so-called instructions of a sacred, untouchable text. That’s not fiction; it’s dogma. One is the social and intellectual fabric of life; the other is an inhuman set of rules.
What this article captures is how some British-born Muslims have begun to think of the Koran as a work of fiction—something to be questioned and actively interpreted in light of personal experience—and how doing so has turned them away from violence, toward a moderate form of Islam that can co-exist with the rest of British society.
This isn’t just a Muslim thing. Christians, too, are susceptible to a strain of extremism that treats the Bible as a literal document. From there it’s not hard to imagine a moral imperative to bomb abortion clinics, or mandate prayer in public schools.
And this isn’t just a religious thing. There are plenty of Americans—some of them sit on the Supreme Court—who believe the Constitution is essentially infallible, something fixed and impervious, and that we should revere the language of the founding fathers.
(Psst. As this insightful piece from The Onion reminds us, even if you find yourself in possession of a sacred, literal, infallible document, you aren’t necessarily qualified to comprehend it.)
The great struggles of our age—this is how fiction explains the world—are often described as conflicts between fundamentalists and liberals. But we might as well talk about the struggle between narrow readers, who take things literally, and broad readers, who recognize that everything we discuss is, in a way, fiction, and that we owe it to ourselves to stay actively engaged as readers.
Sometimes I get pegged as a “book nerd,” someone who gives too much importance to language and articles and novels. But the more I read—and the more widely I read—the more I realize how utterly mortal and fallible narratives are; how we all participate in the day-to-day story-making process, through news and emails and short stories and dreams, to such an extent that fiction is a terribly common thing. Meanwhile, people who read exclusively from one book—like the Koran or the Bible—seem to adore it so much that it becomes cold and unapproachable, fearsome and almighty. Who’s the book nerd now?
As a postscript, it’s interesting to note that some of the teenagers interviewed for the article eventually found themselves drawn to a different kind of Islam—Sufism—which emphasizes the beautiful, unknowable aspects of religious life, and sounds almost like literary fiction in the way it attempts to evaporate into the ineffable.
They had to go looking for other Islams – and often they found it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. “Wahabi Islam is totally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” Usman says. “It lays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment of the day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separate and spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It is accessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence.”
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Veterans Day
I wasn’t expecting to stand on the front lines of the Veteran’s Day parade yesterday. But that’s what happened. I left the office for lunch, and a formation of Vietnam vets stopped me at the curb. They were followed by a high school marching band from Michigan City, Indiana.
I saw an infantryman swallow a hot dog in Madison Square Park. I saw two kids from the Morris High School ROTC fiddle with a digital camera and swat each other flirtatiously. I saw a van for the handicapped meander down the parade route with a single passenger inside, his forehead pressed to the glass, his face obscured by the tinted windows.
A matronly woman at the police barricade whooped every time a soldier went by. She whooped and flicked an American flag in the gray weather. Her whooping was loud and indiscriminate. One of the marchers, a bearded man in a camouflage jacket, saw her, threw his fists in the air, and whooped. There was a lot of whooping, there at the police barricade. I didn’t quite understand what it meant. I saw banners, insignia, and tassels, but I couldn’t tell what they stood for. The only clear message at the parade was, Here are our soldiers.
The soldiers looked very much at ease.
At one point I stood next to a vending machine for the New York Post. Its cover quoted Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday at Fort Hood: “This is a time of war. And yet these Americans did not die on a foreign field of battle. They were killed here, on American soil.”
I get my news from the Times. I think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mostly as questions of national policy. Should we send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan? Can we trust Pakistan to safeguard its nuclear weapons? Have we done enough to rebuild Iraq as a Western-style democracy? Hanging over these questions is an icky awareness that we never should have gone to Iraq in the first place, and for the past 8 years our strategy in Afghanistan has been at cross-purposes with our country’s best interests. I don’t much like the wars. I don’t believe we should be fighting them—at least, not in anything like their present form.
So the whooping—echoed by spectators up and down the parade route—caught me off guard. I believed in it right away. I saw people my own age, men and women, walking under the banner of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I saw children in the back of an Army jeep, beaming as they waved to the crowds. The people in the parade have dedicated their lives to putting our country’s decisions into action. They seemed proud. I felt proud of them.
How do we even begin to talk about the wars when A) serving in the military is honorable and good, but B) the wars we’re fighting are wrong, or at best poorly managed? That a gap exists between these two realities is a national tragedy.
The parade celebrated something we don’t put into words. Words are for newspapers, pundits, and press conferences at the Rose Garden. Words are egoistic and literal. The parade was something else—something collective and ineffable. It was our shared morality on display, a common set of instincts about what is right, and what is wrong, that gives 300 million of us an identity.
We tell ourselves stories about how the wars are going, and what they mean. But our stories are just a speck on a ribbon of humanity that unfurled on 5th Avenue yesterday.
The parade shamed me. I was reduced to cheers.
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The Russians Were Coming
In Arthur Koestler’s famous 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, a leader of the Communist Party is awoken in the middle of the night and thrown in prison by his own comrades. They torture him until he confesses to crimes of treason and sabotage that he did not commit. That’s pretty much the story. But the manner of the torture is unusual. Rubashov, the protagonist, has a reputation for being philosophical and stubborn. So instead of using physical torture, the Party breaks him down psychologically. He is isolated in his cell, deprived of sleep, and subjected to endless rounds of harsh interrogation. The interrogations make up the substance of the novel, combining a fierce political and philosophical debate with a final look at Rubashov’s career as a Party higher-up.
What makes the novel scary—like, “all human civilization is inherently doomed” scary—is why the Party is torturing Rubashov. It’s not to punish him, and it’s not to get information out of him. They’re torturing him so he’ll agree to publicly condemn himself as part of the Moscow Trials. The Moscow trials were a sham, staged by the Party, in which former Communist officials were forced to make false confessions and subsequently executed. The idea was to convince the country that Stalin and the Communist Party were infallible and/or omnipotent. Stalin himself, who was once a close friend of Rubashov’s, is a vicious and overwhelming force in the novel, but he never actually shows up, and is never referred to by name. They call him “No. 1.” Darkness at Noon is the story of how Rubashov succumbs to the sinister logic of the Communist Party, and realizes that he must lay down his dignity, his beliefs, and his life—all for a cause he knows is evil.
This is a good book.
In fact, it’s #8 on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. But I don’t know anybody who’s read it.
Today people are describing President Obama’s plan for America as “socialist,” calling White House appointees “czars,” and generally saying that we have become Russia. (To believe this you have to imagine that a lot of different things—Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, Karl Marx and Mikhail Gorbachev, czars and Bolsheviks and nuclear weapons—are synonyms for each other.) I’m guessing these people don’t understand the extent of the brutality and fanaticism of the Communist Party under Joseph Stalin. If they did, they’d know there is only one possible response to the comparison:
Ha.
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Random Awesomeness
– Esquire offers a helpful guide to men who want to get more mileage out of their everyday speech. Start by talking about cloning the mammoth more often. And watch how you use the following words. Bro? Never. Douchebag? Retired. But dadgum? Yes. Sumunabitch? Always.
– Colson Whitehead, our true love, explains how to build a dartboard that will inspire a novel.
– Tao Lin nails this review of Werner Herzog in a very Tao Lin way.
– This album—kind of a mindblower—is based on the speech patterns of a group of neighbors in a multicultural part of downtown Toronto. You can listen to it free. Does anyone want to see this performed live in New York with me on November 28 or 29?
– On the spread of English across the globe, and the possible fate of endangered languages.
– Philip Roth says the novel is going to die. But he’s really old. He might be projecting.
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Special Moves in “Street Fighter IV: Nobel Peace Prize Winners”
Albert Schweitzer
Unsterilized Needle Jab
Forward + Forward + Punch
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Chokehold with Shackles
Up + Forward + Punch
Elie Wiesel
Holocaust of Knuckles
Punch + Punch + Punch
The 14th Dalai Lama
Karma’s a Bitch Flip Kick
Down + Forward + Kick
Mikhail Gorbachev
Bruising Skull Slam
Forward + Punch
Nelson Mandela
Righteous Prison Shank
Back + Forward + Punch
Jimmy Carter
Peanut Harvest Piledriver
Up + Forward + Kick
Barack Obama
Automatic Victory
Up + Back + Down
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REVIEW: Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, by Eliot Weinberger
Over at Hipster Book Club my review of Eliot Weinberger’s new essays has gone live.
If you want to know more about this rather fascinating writer, he gave a long interview to BOMB Magazine, and he’s profiled in a recent issue of The Nation.
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Whee!
Today is the six-month anniversary of the Fiction Advocate.
1. WHAT WE’VE DONE
We defined an entire age in history and literature. We made bookmarks. We swooned over certain fiction writers. We ran some excellent guest posts from Jessa Lingel and Dan Gonzalez. We feuded with friends, and we put out a hit on somebody. We showed you how to be a man. We switched from secondary colors to primary colors, and from first person plural to first person singular (except right now, but this is a special occasion). Some of our favorite writers found us and linked to us. Others called us out. We wrote stories. We perpetuated a number of myths about a fictional character named Robert Repino.
– What’s your favorite post so far?
– Least favorite?
2. WHAT WE’RE DOING NEXT
Chapbooks! And new bookmarks. We’re going to interview published writers here on the blog. We’ll define the new generation of fiction writers, just like we defined the previous one. Does anyone know how to design a colophon? We want to have more guest posts. Why aren’t you writing a guest post right now?
– Any suggestions for the Fiction Advocate?
– Do you want to hear more frequent book recommendations on this site?
3. WHAT WE’RE DOING RIGHT NOW
You probably want this recap to end so you can get back to our original content. Okay, scroll down. We posted a brand new story for you. It’s about haircuts, Chicago, abusive relationships, and totally misapprehending a situation. It’s not bad.
There are two fascinating n+1 articles online. One is about utopia, gay marriage, abortion, and straight marriage. It’s infuriating. Check it out, and then read Matthew Gallaway’s spot-on response to it. The new issue also has a sharp and (in retrospect) overdue takedown of something that we’re apparently calling the “neuronovel.” As soon as you read it, you’ll wonder how you ever loved Ian McEwan. It’s a good article.
Finally, everyone has been jizzing buckets over a new magazine called Electric Literature. And yeah, it’s pretty darn good. We just want to mention that the glowing description of the magazine in the New York Times matches, pretty closely, our glowing description of the poets Matthew and Michael Dickman. The future belongs to good writing, in combination with savvy and relentless marketing. We could have told you that. In fact, we did. In our very first post. Which was six months ago! Can you believe it?
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FICTION: The Barber’s Spy
I chose my barber shop for its brick storefront and the model train set that chugged along an electric rail in the window. You don’t see that kind of thing anymore. I’m a young guy, so I appreciate a bit of history.
My barbers knew what I liked: high in the back, swept across the sides, wavy on top. Angelo, Carlo, and Vito. They were brothers, I think. Although Vito carried his weight differently, like a sack of laundry clutched to his stomach, and he didn’t have the same arched forehead and wispy moustache as the others. So maybe they weren’t brothers. But they could have been. They tousled my hair, and dusted a washcloth with baby powder to wipe behind my ears. You don’t see that kind of care and affection among men anymore. Unless they grew up together, like a litter of puppies, always shadowboxing. I loved my barbers. But I never spoke more than six words to them, and they never asked my name.
The bell clanged.
A chubby guy in sneakers walked in, his sleeveless blue T-shirt stained with sweat. “You hear Domino’s bought the corner lot?”
Angelo stopped snipping my hair. His scissors clicked behind my head. “Who’s Dominoes?”
“Don’t tell me you never heard of Domino’s,” said Chubby. “Big pizza chain? You call up, they bake a whole pie, anything you want, and deliver it to your door. With the red and blue baseball caps.”
Angelo dropped his wrist on my shoulder. “You can’t just sit down and order a slice?”
Chubby spread his hands. “It’s not that kind of place.”
Vito, reclining in a chair next to me with a Sports Illustrated, said, “Never last. I don’t care how big they are. People want to sit down and order a slice. They move in now, they’re gone by Christmas.” Vito had this way of shrugging and chuckling at once. “What corner did you say?”
“Fifth and twelfth.”
Angelo laughed from his belly. “That’s practically Gowanus!” Scissors grazed the back of my head.
Chubby didn’t say anything. Leaning on the door frame, he stretched his quads. He glanced out the window, over the tiny steeples and plastic trees of the electric train set. On his way out, he saluted Vito.
“Bambini,” Angelo muttered, even though I was right in front of him, and I’m a young guy, too. But I’m shy, and terrible at making conversation. I always tried not to laugh when Vito told Angelo to shut the fuck up, and I never tipped so big that anyone would notice.
Sitting in the barber’s chair, I made up stories. Like how the medicine cabinet was a relic from the Red Cross in World War II, and the reason Carlo sang along with the jazz tunes on the radio was because he used to play the clarinet in a traveling band, until his lungs gave out from smoking.
Vito said, “Where’s Carlo?”
Angelo said, “In the back. On the phone.”
Vito said, “What about?”
Angelo shrugged.
A moment later the coat rack lurched as Carlo stumbled out of the back room. “I’m going to kill that guy, I fucking swear to God.” He untucked his brown shirt and fanned the tails to get some air. His face was pale. “You spend your whole life trying to raise your kids, and then some fucking…”
Carlo collapsed in Vito’s chair. Vito rubbed his shoulders. Angelo poured a glass of cold water from the sink.
I waited, hands folded in my lap, beneath a blue sheet, as Carlo told them, for what must have been the millionth time, about his daughter, Isabella, and how she had married the wrong man. Isabella lived in Chicago. She called home every night, to cry about her husband and what a mistake she’d made. He cheated on her. Screamed at her. Wouldn’t share his money. They had been married in a fit of passion, and now their passion was ripping Isabella apart.
When my barbers put their heads together, they sounded like a gang of street kids. Like they were deciding whether to break out the slingshots and take a run at the local bully. Angelo said Isabella should run away from this asshole. Vito said Isabella should take a butcher knife to the asshole’s balls. Carlo wanted her to move back home. I loved my barbers because sometimes they were so perfect I didn’t even have to make up stories about them.
Last night the asshole nearly broke Isabella’s skull with a golf club. She called her father to say she was leaving him. She had thrown him out. She had taken off her ring and changed the locks.
Carlo wasn’t so sure. He didn’t trust the asshole to stay away, and he didn’t trust his daughter not to have a change of heart. So it was killing him: how long before the asshole comes back and ruins Isabella’s life?
If only he could sit on a stoop, across from the house in Chicago, and see his daughter with his own eyes.
Angelo said, “What’s a plane to Chicago cost?”
Carlo scratched his neck. “Too much, too much.”
“I’m going to Chicago in a few weeks,” said a voice I recognized as my own. “For a business trip. They’re giving me a hotel, a rental car, the whole thing. I could stop by the house, if you want. See who shows up.”
Seconds later we were all talking about Chicago: where to find a decent slice of deep dish, and how to stake out a house. Carlo looked at me with moist eyes, like I would be a great son-in-law. He wrote the address on a scrap of receipt paper from his pocket. When I left, each of my barbers shook my hand, embracing me up to the elbow.
“Let us know what you find,” Vito said. “Your next haircut is on me.”
***
At the airport I realized my hair was growing faster than usual. I felt it swish against my neck as I strode toward the departure gate. I should have gotten another haircut before I left. But I was afraid my barbers would think I was cashing in before I had finished the job. Or worse—that I never intended to help in the first place. Going to another barber shop was out of the question. So I had no choice. I let my hair grow long and scraggly.
***
Each night after the conference, I drove to Isabella’s house. She lived on a block lined with sycamore trees. I parked under their broad leaves, in the shadows of the street lamps. Snacking on Funyons and dried apple chips and coffee, I listened to an Oldies station and kept the volume low.
All three nights, I heard raised voices in the house. The front door would burst open, and a young woman ran down the brick steps. She hit the sidewalk and turned right. She had the same arched forehead as her uncles, but she was curvy and blessed with a cascade of black satin hair. Her heels stabbed the pavement as she rushed past the sycamore trees. But each night she slowed down. She never got farther than the sixth tree before a voice shouted from the house.
“Isabella, come back!”
On the first night, she spun around.
The second night, she paused near a black iron fence.
Third night, she took out a cigarette and smoked.
Eventually she obeyed the voice and sauntered back to the house.
I never saw the man inside—only a curtain blowing in the open window.
The story I made up about Isabella and her husband—whose name, I far as I cared, was Ronny—went like this. Ronny had some friends in prison, including a felon named Angel Cabrera. Angel called in a favor. He asked Ronny to track down the names and addresses of his prison guards. For insurance, Angel said.
Ronny didn’t want to know what Angel planned to do. But Isabella wasn’t going to stick around and find out. She said Ronny could either tell Angel to burn in hell, or give back his wedding ring.
But every time they fought about it, Ronny told her how much trouble he’d be in if Angel ever made parole, and Isabella’s love for her husband won out. She couldn’t ask him to put himself in danger.
On the third night, as she was stubbing out her cigarette, Isabella caught my eye through the windshield.
***
After the conference, some of my coworkers decided to stay in Chicago until Sunday, and I did the same. But instead of going to the Magnificent Mile or a boozy dance club, I drove to Isabella’s house. I brought some Thai food from a takeout place, and a cold six-pack. It was Saturday night. I cranked up the Oldies station. I wondered what I would say if Isabella came outside and talked to me.
A door slammed. Isabella ran down the steps. I didn’t hear what she was screaming, because I was blasting the #4 Billboard hit from 1967, “I Think We’re Alone Now,” by Tommy James & the Shondells. She picked up speed, racing past the last sycamore tree.
I fumbled for the door. Thai food spilled over my lap. By the time Isabella rounded the corner, she was flying.
I chased her.
Chicago is a broad, majestic city, and I liked what I saw of it. In particular I liked Isabella’s neighborhood, with its sycamore trees, its vaulted fire stations, and a barber’s pole spinning in the distance, red white and blue. But I saw most of this in a blur. I tailed Isabella for about a mile before she pulled up, wheezing, in front of a hardware store.
Sucking down every breath, I said, “Don’t go back there. It’s not safe. I’ll drive you to the airport. You catch a redeye. Stay with your father for a while. He loves you very much.” A strap had fallen loose on Isabella’s burgundy tank top, exposing her soft left shoulder. She must be using a special lotion for her skin, I thought. Something in a tall green bottle that smelled like cream and honey. It rested on the edge of her bathtub, and caught a spray when she showered.
She backed into the entrance of the hardware store, which was closed. “Tell me who you are, right now.”
“Okay,” I said. “My hair grows, right? I need a haircut every now and then. Who doesn’t? I wanted a barber shop that felt like the Old World, you know? A place with a sense of history.”
“Stop!” Isabella scanned the cars on the road. “You have five seconds.” She stuffed a fist inside her jeans pocket, and I watched her fingers tighten around a ring of sharp keys.
“Your uncles run my barber shop,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t have any uncles.”
“What?”
She pulled out the keys and slashed the air between us. “Get away from me, right now!”
***
When I returned to my car, there was a big man, as broad as a mailbox, shining a flashlight on the driver’s seat. The domestic beer and the pad thai had congealed into a sticky mess on the rented fabric.
“Hey,” I said. Because, really, there was nothing else to say. “Hey, you!”
The silver badge he flashed me looked real. “License?”
I sat on the curb and fumed about my barbers—how they misled me into thinking they were brothers, and how Isabella couldn’t see that I was only trying to help her. The cop beamed a light in my face. “We’ve heard about a stalker in the area. Business man, dressed for work, but with crazy hair. Sits in a black car all night and spies on people. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
“Not me.” I touched my scalp. “It’s just a bit long, is all.”
As the cop holstered the flashlight and raised the handcuffs, I studied his hair. It was the color of roasted almonds. He wore a full moustache beneath a pair of aviator glasses, and his leather jacket was scuffed in all the right places.
“I hope you don’t have a flight to catch,” he said. “Because you’re not making it. And I’m impounding this car.”
A good story would have gotten me off the hook. But the best story, for why I was staking out a stranger’s house in a city where I had never been before, was the truth. And I knew the truth would sound like the worst kind of lie. So I smoothed my hair and shut my mouth.
Still holding my wallet, the cop fingered my cash. “Unless you want to work this out now.”
At first I didn’t realize what he was saying. Then I wanted to vomit on the asphalt. That’s how disgusting it was. “You want money?”
The cop looked away, and his bouncy hair trembled.
“And this is how you ask for it? Are you fucking kidding me?”
The cop fixed me with an aviator stare.
I said, “What’s next—are you going to introduce me to your wise-cracking sidekick? Are you going to start munching a doughnut? Are you going to call the Chief and say to hell with your badge?”
“All right.” The cop exhaled, running his fingers through his luxurious hair. “What do you wanna do, here?”
***
Riding back to the airport on a city bus, knowing I couldn’t afford any magazines or candy because I had maxed out the company credit card and given all my cash to the cop, I wasn’t angry at my barbers, or Isabella, or even at the cop, really. But I was angry that he played his part so predictably. Anyone could have made up that shit. Why are people such hacks?
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