The Daoud Affair By Paul Berman and Michael Walzer
NB: This is a cogent argument. For those interested in another side of Berman, here's an exchange between him and Ian Buruma on Berman's support for the 2002 Iraq war. DS
'Everyone who remembers the history of the 20th century will recall that, during the entire period from the 1920s to the 1980s, one brave and articulate dissident after another in the Soviet bloc succeeded in communicating a message to the Western public about the nature of Communist oppression—valuable messages because the dissidents could describe with first-hand accuracy the Soviet regime.. And, time after time, a significant slice of Western intellectuals responded by crying: “Oh, you mustn’t say such things! You will encourage the reactionaries!” Or they said: “You must be a reactionary yourself. A tool of imperialism.” The intellectuals who responded in these ways were sometimes Communists ... and sometimes fellow-travelers… But sometimes they were merely people who worried that criticism of the Soviet Union was bound to benefit right-wing fanatics in the West.…
'Everyone who remembers the history of the 20th century will recall that, during the entire period from the 1920s to the 1980s, one brave and articulate dissident after another in the Soviet bloc succeeded in communicating a message to the Western public about the nature of Communist oppression—valuable messages because the dissidents could describe with first-hand accuracy the Soviet regime.. And, time after time, a significant slice of Western intellectuals responded by crying: “Oh, you mustn’t say such things! You will encourage the reactionaries!” Or they said: “You must be a reactionary yourself. A tool of imperialism.” The intellectuals who responded in these ways were sometimes Communists ... and sometimes fellow-travelers… But sometimes they were merely people who worried that criticism of the Soviet Union was bound to benefit right-wing fanatics in the West.…
But that was a
mistake. By denouncing the dissidents, Western intellectuals succeeded in
obfuscating the Soviet reality. And they lent the weight of their own prestige
to the Soviet regime, which meant that, instead of being the enemies of
oppression, they ended up as the allies of oppression. The progressive
intellectuals were not foolish to worry about right-wing fanaticism in their
own countries, but they needed to recognize that sometimes political arguments
have to be complicated. They needed to learn how to defend the Soviet
dissidents even while attacking right-wing fanatics in the West. They needed to
make two arguments at the same time… Too many progressive
intellectuals today are falling into the pattern of those fallacies of long
ago. They are right to worry about anti-Muslim bigotries in the Western
countries. But in turning themselves into the enemies of an entire class of
liberal writers from Muslim backgrounds, they are achieving the opposite of
what they intend. ..'
Last month the
Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud astonished the readers of Le
Monde in Paris by threatening to renounce journalism, not because he
is afraid of Islamists at home in Algeria, though a fatwa has been issued
against him, but for another reason, which is still more dismaying. He has been
severely condemned by people from the Western intellectual class, and silence
seems to him an appropriate response.
The denunciations of
Daoud are a distressing development. And they are doubly distressing because
they conform to a pattern that has become familiar. It goes like this: A writer
with liberal ideas emerges from a background in the Muslim countries, or
perhaps lives there now. The writer proposes criticisms of Islam as it is
practiced, or of sexual repression under Islamic domination (a major theme), or
of the Islamist movement.
The criticisms seem blasphemous to the Islamists and
the reactionary imams, who respond in their characteristic fashion. In the
Western countries, intellectuals who mostly think of themselves as progressive
make their own inquiry into the writer and his or her ideas. They hope to find
oblique and reticent criticisms of a sort that they themselves produce. But
they find something else—criticisms that are angrier and more vehement, or more
sweeping, or more direct.
The Western
intellectuals, some of them, recoil in consternation. And, as if liberated from
their reticence, they issue their own condemnation of the offending writer, not
on grounds of blasphemy but on grounds that purport to be left-wing. The
Western intellectuals accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of being a
racist against Muslims, or an Islamophobe, or a “native informant” and a tool
of imperialism. Sometimes they accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of
stupidity, too, or lack of talent. This was Salman Rushdie’s experience in the
years after he came out with The Satanic Verses, back in 1988,
which he has described in his memoir Joseph Anton. The experience
of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somalia, offers probably the most widely
discussed example after Rushdie’s.
But the pattern of Western condemnation can
be observed in many other cases as well, directed at liberal writers of
different kinds and views—the authors of political essays, memoirs, literary
criticism, journalism, and novels, from backgrounds in countries as diverse as
Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Kamel Daoud’s Algerian colleague, the
novelist Boualem Sansal, last year’s winner of a prize from the French Academy,
has come under this kind of condemnation. And now the pattern has reemerged in
regard to Daoud himself.
Daoud stands high on the world scene because of his novel, The
Meursault Investigation, which adds a philosophical dimension to the
affair. The book is an homage to Albert Camus, and a rebuke. In 1942 Camus
published a novel titled The Stranger, which tells the story of a
French Algerian named Meursault, who gratuitously murders a nameless and silent
Arab on the beach. Daoud in The Meursault Investigation tells
the story of the murdered man’s younger brother, who contemplates what it means
to be rendered nameless and silent by one’s oppressor. In France, Daoud’s reply
to Camus won the Goncourt Prize for a First Novel in 2015, among other prizes.
In the United States, it received two of the greatest blessings that American
journalism can bestow on a writer not from the United States. The New
Yorker published an excerpt. And the New York Times Magazine published
a full-length admiring profile.
These triumphs created
a demand for Daoud’s journalism, as well. For 20 years he has written for the
Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, but, in the wake of his
novel’s success, his journalism began to appear prominently in Le Monde and
other European newspapers. He was invited to write for the New York
Times. And he responded to these opportunities in the way that any
alert and appreciative reader of his novel might have expected.
He offered insights
into the Islamic State. He attacked Saudi Arabia, with a side jab aimed at the extreme
right in France. But he also looked at the mass assault on women that took
place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by a mob that is thought to have included
men from the Arab world. He dismissed a right-wing impulse in Europe to regard
immigrants as barbarians. And he dismissed a left-wing, high-minded naïveté
about the event. He pointed to a cultural problem. In the New York
Times he wrote: “One of the great miseries plaguing much of the
so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick
relationship with women.” More: “The pathological relationship that some Arab
countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.” In Le
Monde he wrote that Europe, in accepting new immigrants and refugees,
was going to have to help them accept new values, too—“to share, to impose, to
defend, to make understood.” And now his troubles began.
A group of 19
professors in France drew up a statement accusing Daoud of a series of
ideological crimes, consisting of “orientialist cliches,” “essentialism,”
“psychologization,” “colonialist paternalism,” an “anti-humanist” viewpoint,
and other such errors, amounting to racism and Islamophobia. Le Monde published
their accusations. A second denunciation came his way, this time in private. It
was a letter from the author of the New York Times Magazine profile,
the American literary journalist Adam Shatz. In his letter Shatz professed
affection for Daoud. He claimed not to be making any accusations at all. He
wrote, “I’m not saying you’re doing it on purpose, or even that you’re playing
the game of the ‘imperialists.’ I’m not accusing you of anything. Except
perhaps of not thinking, and of falling into strange and potentially dangerous
traps”—which amounted to saying what the 19 professors had said, with the
additional accusation of stupidity... read more:
