Ali Al Muqri is a novelist from Yemen and is interested in exploring the accumulated conflict behind identities, in a world where a monolithic identity is no longer possible… Excerpts from an email interview with Subash Jeyan.
(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on September 24, 2011.)
Could you tell us about the literary climate in Yemen, about the Yemeni Writers’ Association? What are some of the concerns of Yemeni writers today?
I have no relationship anymore with the institutions that you mention, but what these institutions are trying to do is initiate cultural activities. The literature movement in Yemen is part of the literature of the Arab world, although Yemen is going backwards compared to the cultural transformations taking place in Lebanon and Egypt. We don’t have cultural institutions interested in publishing books or promoting cinema and theatre. Literary creativity is still limited to individual effort.
What are the impulses behind your exploring the Arab past? Your book on wine and Islam seemed to have stirred a controversy….
I think that the value of research, any kind of research, lies in changing the mind’s complacencies and inciting it to move beyond closed opinions [on prohibition], and to invent new solutions and answers to contemporary questions. My book questions the dominantly held view of Muslims on prohibition by digging out and projecting other opinions and facts concealed in the heritage which is the other face of prohibition; there are many issues we think have been satisfactorily resolved but the truth is not that, because what we have done is select texts and evidence that support the prevailing view and omit texts and other evidence contrary to this view.
This book deals with the issue of alcohol and wine in Islam, through Qur’anic texts, sources, and historical references, exploring what different scholars and researchers have said on the issue of prohibition of alcohol. I’ve shown that there is no penalty in the Quran and Sunnah for drinking alcohol, that there is an agreement in Islamic references that drinking wine was permitted. I have demonstrated the existence of many levels of texts, ranging from decisive prohibition to tolerance to acceptance. As this was a topic nobody had explored till now, the clergy attacked me with all the means at their disposal though I have cited references prudently from known books.
What was it like, writing your novel on the Yemeni Akhdam community, Black Taste, Black Smell….
Before and during the writing of Black Taste, Black Smell, the one pressing question I had was: How to write this book from the world view of Al Akhdam (Yemen’s coloured people). They live a marginalised life, outcast in Yemen. Yet, despite suffering racial discrimination and social exclusion because of the colour of their skin, they live an open and free life, like the gypsies, not bound by (restrictive) social traditions, including religious and cultural values. That’s why I wanted to write a book about them, a book as open, with no boundaries or framework as their world. I do not know to what extent I succeeded.
I was not interested in the form of this book, and in its description, when I started writing the first lines. I wanted the Al Akhdam’s world, spawned from various narratives, historical, social, realistic and imaginary, to be its own rhythm. With this world, we cannot follow the enshrined narrative paths and concepts. Love, for example, is no longer an engine or motive to act rebellious, but it’s the body, a string of its smell that leads to antagonism and thus the move to freedom..
I remember when the novel was published in 2008, Reuters said that it reminded the readers of the world of the untouchables in India. Is it so? I guess I’ll see for myself when I come to India. Of course, the novel also refers to a point of view that the origin of Al Akhdam is India, but it is not certain.
You are very much concerned with identity and its relation to cultural and political life, aren’t you…
There is nothing to be anxious about identities or differences. I do not see that the problem lies either in identities or multiplicities, ethnic, ideologies or nationalities. The problem lies in the history of the accumulated conflict to determine these identities and its impact on livelihoods in the present, when it becomes difficult to talk about a single identity. We no longer have an identity apart from the identities of others. The other, in the old sense no longer exists, and may be the other is us.
You have said that you wrote The Handsome Jew “to reveal a memory in the form of an intimate love story that goes beyond dislike and class hatred between two religions.” What exactly are you trying to do by writing about the Jewish past of Yemen given the current political context vis-à-vis the Arabs and Israel…
The love story was not a means to a message, but is itself a problem; Love, believe the sons of the two, is impossible between a Muslim woman and a Jew. The novel is not about the possibility of coexistence between the two religions, but about the plight of the co-existence, the beauty and cruelty. The inheritance of ideological struggle is part of the text of The Handsome Jew, but the ideology is not its base, or its goal. The text does not begin from the ideological, or partisan political position. I think the novel tests concepts and problematic issues such as the authority of religious ideology on social life, and the reproduction of the conflict in extreme political and social practices.
There is also a test of two concepts, the Sacred Homeland and the Holy Land and their references. What’s a home? Why the home? And also love at the height of its manifestations, when formed under the religious barriers between Muslim and Jew. The conflict has other aspects, not just among the followers of the two religious ideologies, but also within each ideology, especially in its manifestations as an authority. If Imam Mutawakil Ismail bin Qasim did not persecute the Jews in Yemen, in the middle of the 17th century, in reaction to their longing for Jerusalem, and their quest for religious/ mundane power, it was also to benefit from the expanded geographical tax/ jeziah, also practised against the violators from the other doctrines of Islam in the south and east of Yemen.
Muslim Fatima and the handsome Jew were not far from the ideological power, but they tasted it, tried to live it, and went to the maximum extent in exploring the possibility of dismantling its authority. Were they able to achieve this, despite authority hunting for them, even to their graves? Is their story a questioning or a search for a way out of the conflict? I can not answer.
What is the third novel you are working on about?
My new novel is about a woman facing the body in the community, of the plight of repressed wishes; struggling with sexual stimulus, and resorting to religion for salvation. Later, the frustrations accumulate and in spite of all the instructions and moral values, is unable to face the upheaval of the body.
There are dogmas everywhere irrespective of one’s politics and ideology. Would you say that as a writer, your concerns are with exploring the dogmas in your own community? And has that sometimes led to the perception of you as an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sometimes?
Taboos in Arab culture and Muslim communities have increased more than ever before. There is a narrow view of the other which we need to review, as Muslims are an extension of the social and cultural ancestors of the Jews and Christians, and pagans before them and Zoroastrians, Hindus, Babylonians, Assyrians, Pharaohs and others. I’ve found everyone under the same sky and common ground, before they are divided by ideologies and illusions produced by breeding the “Sacred”. Thus everything has become haraam (prohibited). And instead of living together in a common homeland, and free ideas, we are seeing them living in a kind of illusion, the illusion of the sacred land, the sacred homeland, and the true religion. I do not know where they are going.
Quick facts
Ali Al Muqri was born in Taiz in North Yemen in 1966 and began writing at the age of 18. He has been the editor of various literary journals in the past like Al Hikma and Ghaiman. His controversial book on wine and Islam was published in 2007 followed by the novel Black Taste, Black Smellin 2008 and The Handsome Jewin 2009. He lives in Sanaa.
Tales I tell myself 