Your most recent books are Bush in Babylon and The Clash of Fundamentalisms. The Mail & Guardian called the re-election of United States President George W Bush ”truly frightening”. What’s your view?
It’s created a great deal of despondency everywhere. The general feeling in Latin America, the Arab world and large swathes of the world, is that a defeat for Bush would have been a small step forward.
But let’s forget that. Bush won fairly and squarely. So we have to find ways to combat the situation. The Democrats are allowing the Republicans to define the playing field. You can never win like that.
Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 was released here recently and dismissed by some as ”propaganda”.
That line came from the Republican Party, and was picked up by their supporters and those who should know better in different parts of the world.
It forgets the fact that the bulk of the news that’s manufactured on Western TV networks these days is little else but crude propaganda.
Twenty years ago Mike Moore wouldn’t have needed to make it: you would have had some investigative team doing it and putting it on TV.
The TV trend is: don’t provide TV that could be conflictual in any way; and have lots of third-rate wallpaper doled out cheaply by American corporations (or free to some parts of the world).
What readerships did you have in mind for your novels The Islam Quintet and The Fall-of-Communism Trilogy, and for The Clash of Fundamentalisms?
The novels have a different readership: literature is read by a minority — and a minority within the reading public if a novel tries to say something and isn’t airport reading.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms was addressed to the West: I live and work there [London], and the West is completely ignorant about Islam, its history and so on.
But also, I wanted to say to young Muslim people: ”The history of your religion and culture is far richer than you realise, and far, far more diverse and critical and sceptical than the Islamic fundamentalists either are aware of or would ever admit in public.” I’ve called the currently dominant version of the religion ”petrified Islam”.
You’ve referred to ”the bulging vein of dissent and eroticism in the history of Islam”.
Dissenters were many in Islamic history. They proclaimed the superiority of reason against divine truth and that everything could be questioned; and they challenged the authenticity of the Qur’an as a divine work and said it was a man-made work.
And then the eroticism. One classic, The Thousand and One Nights, reflects stories from the Arab world, and almost everything is discussed. It has people drinking and poems in praise of wine; it has homosexuality and adultery: every single commandment of the Qur’an is defied. That work is far from an exception in the history of Islamic culture.
Does blood in the ”vein of dissent” still pulse?
Yes, but underground. The mullahs developed such a stranglehold over the culture that people got scared. But increasingly people are speaking up.
In the January edition of International Socialist Review, you said: ”We have a very large movement against global injustice but there’s no vision as to what should replace it.”
Since the World Economic Forum in Seattle, a debate has erupted. It’s fine to attack corporations — but they’re all part of the state system. So we have to go back to the nature of the state.
The debate is especially vigorous in Latin America — which has probably the strongest social movements — in countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. One example of the failure of genuine alternatives to emerge is Argentina. For 15 years it did all the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury asked — and then it imploded.
There were strikes, but these — such as a doctors’ strike — were supported largely by the middle classes. So shantytowns, for example, were left unattended. Then [President Hugo] Chavez called Cuba. Within one month, 10 000 Cuban doctors were in Argentina, clinics were built and cheap Cuban medicines provided.
It was the first time anyone had thought of the poor. Utopian possibilities are nice to think of, but one’s got to think very concretely about the here and now.
You live and write in London. But you travel a lot and speak in many countries.
These days I’m more often in the US, on the grounds that it’s better to win support in a place run by the organ-grinder than by the monkey.
In Johannesburg you are being hosted by the Anti-War Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. What do you think will be the impact on Palestine of Bush’s election victory?
Whoever had won the US election, the position of the American rulers on Israel and Palestine wouldn’t have changed. From the US’s point of view, Israel can do whatever it wants.
And media treatments of Israel and Palestine?
There are very critical articles about Israel and Palestine in the Israeli press, but the US media don’t ever reflect those. And elsewhere in the world, Jewish people often stand with pro-Palestinians in support and protest.
For a while after 1994, the African National Congress government was vociferous in support of Palestine. Now it seems much more muted.
That’s also echoed around the world. We should think very seriously about two things. First, the US gives billions of dollars to Israel: if that stopped, it would concentrate the minds of the Israeli elite very rapidly. Secondly, the rest of the world should impose sanctions on Israel — as happened with the apartheid state.
Please speak about your depictions of Muslim women in your fiction, and of Saudi Arabian women in The Clash of Fundamentalisms.
That country is under peculiar rule — by the Wahabi sect. They are literalists: for them every word in the Qur’an is true. If you take that line, there’s no way out: women are inferior — the Qur’an says it.
In practice, among firm believers in Islam, behaviours are different. In Istanbul, I’ve seen boys and girls embracing and kissing on the beach. In Cairo, you find women wearing on their heads hijabs made by Armani, but tight-fitting jeans and T-shirts below. I’ve said to them: ”Who the hell will look at your heads when you dress like that?”
In combatting ”petrified Islam”, I think the country that will surprise us all is Iran. It has a huge population, 65% of whom are under 25 years old. They’ve grown up under clerical rule and they hate it for the social restrictions. So it’s there, I think, that we’ll see the first big upheaval against religious dogma.
Some are saying there have been distressing changes in South Africa during its first decade of democracy — changes in macroeconomic policy, for example.
It’s a general trend worldwide. Neoliberal economics has weakened public accountability and democracy itself. The West keeps claiming that democracy and capitalism flourish together. That’s a dubious amalgam. After all, capitalism flourished for 200 years without democracy.
Samuel Huntingdon has been writing about ”democratic paradoxes”. There are many. In the US, lots of corporate leaders drool when they look at China. They think: ”God, if only we had that power! Who the fuck needs democracy?”