Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  In Mahfouz's youth, Islam had been largely sidelined as a political ideology. In Turkey, Ataturk, with the power of the army behind him, appeared intent on pushing everything religious into the wings. During Mahfouz's college years in the late twenties and early thirties, the principal intellectual influence on him was a group of nationalists who had set themselves the task of creating a national culture for Egypt that would be distinctively Egyptian. The path they took lay in emphasizing Egypt's pharaonic and Hellenistic roots, to the point of disavowing all connections with the Arab and Islamic world. It was a time when everything was thinkable in Egypt and nothing was blasphemy.

  If Children of Gebelawi had been written in those years, it would probably have passed without comment: every writer in Egypt, it would seem, was writing an allegory of some kind. But the book was written in the late fifties, when the political and religious climate in the Middle East had been profoundly altered by the establishment of Israel and then by the Nasserite revolution in Egypt. In Egypt, Islam acquired a new vitality and assertiveness, and the religious establishment was keen to remind everybody of that fact. But even then the 'ulema followed procedure in condemning the book. There were no calls for bloodshed or retribution, just a clear message that those who persisted in the intellectual habits of the thirties would now have to contend with the doctors of religious law and their followers.

  But now even the learned doctors are being slowly consumed by the fires that were kindled at that time. They have not the remotest connection with the bearded young men who now speak in the name of Islam in Egypt; they have themselves been declared unbelievers, pagans—even the most learned of the sheiks at Al-Azhar, for centuries the theological center of Sunni Islam. In 1977 one of their number, Mohammad al-Dhahabi, a religious scholar and a minister of the government department in the Ministry of Religious Endowments where Mahfouz worked for much of his life, was kidnapped and killed by a fundamentalist group called the Society of Muslims. At the subsequent trial, conducted by the army, the presiding general in so many words declared the 'ulema incompetent.

  The scholars' only recourse now is to call the preachings of the fundamentalists un-Islamic, as indeed they are by scholastic standards. The Society of Muslims have effectively scorned Muslim history: they have rejected all of medieval Muslim scholarship, including the great jurists who set up the four major schools of Islamic law, and they have also claimed the right to interpret the Koran. A century ago it is they who would have been counted the blasphemers, and any one of their current claims would probably have cost them their lives. They have, in effect, vacated the whole concept of Islam as we know it, for Islam is a history as well as a doctrine and a practice. Yet today, for millions of Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere, it is they, and not the sheiks of Al-Azhar, who are the true Muslims.

  The power of the fundamentalists has grown so phenomenally in Egypt over the past few years that they are now in a position to fight pitched battles with the police. Every so often they even claim to have "liberated" parts of Cairo and some other cities. Why, then, should these fundamentalists revive the charges brought against Mahfouz by their enemies, the learned doctors of religion? It must be the first matter on which they have been in agreement with them in several years. Mahfouz's book is evidently a pretext: their hostility almost certainly stems from his public support of the Camp David accords.

  In responding to the threats against him, Mahfouz has shown an exemplary courage. Despite the ominous drift of the political life of his city, he has turned down the government's offer of bodyguards and has refused to change his life in any way. For the time being he appears to have faced down his enemies and shamed them into leaving him alone. In doing so, he has demonstrated the kind of heroism that is both the most necessary and the most rare in his volatile corner of the world: the quiet kind.

  TIBETAN DINNER 1988

  IT WAS A WHILE before the others at the table had finished pointing out the celebrities who had come to the restaurant for the gala benefit: the Broadway actresses, the Seventh Avenue designers, and the world's most famous rock star's most famous ex-wife, a woman to whom fame belonged like logic to a syllogism, axiomatically. Before the list was quite done, I caught a glimpse of something, a flash of saffron at the other end of the room, and I had to turn and look again.

  Peering through a thicket of reed-necked women, I saw that I'd been right: yes, it was a monk in saffron robes, it really was a Buddhist monk—Tibetan, I was almost sure. He was sitting at the head of a table on the far side of the room, spectral in the glow of the restaurant's discreetly hidden lighting. But he was real. His robes were real robes, not drag, not a costume. He was in his early middle age, with clerically cropped hair and a pitted, wind-ravaged face. He happened to look up and noticed me staring at him. He looked surprised to see me: his chopsticks described a slow interrogative arc as they curled up to his mouth.

  I was no less surprised to see him. He was probably a little less out of place among the dinner jackets and designer diamonds than I, in my desert boots and sweater, but only marginally so.

  He glanced at me again, and I looked quickly down at my plate. On it sat three dumplings decorated with slivers of vegetables. The dumplings looked oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite place them.

  "Who were you looking at?" said the friend who'd taken me there, an American writer and actress who had spent a long time in India and, in gratitude to the subcontinent, had undertaken to show me the sights of New York.

  I gestured foolishly with a lacquered chopstick.

  She laughed. "Well, of course," she said. "It's his show—he probably organized the whole thing. Didn't you know?"

  I didn't know. All I'd been told was that this was the event of the week in New York, very possibly even the month (it wasn't a busy month): a benefit dinner at Indo-Chine, the in-est restaurant in Manhattan—one that had in fact defied every canon of in-ism by being in for almost a whole year, and that therefore had to be seen now if at all, before the tourists from Alabama got to it. My skepticism about the in-ness of the event had been dispelled by the tide of paparazzi we'd had to breast on our way in.

  Laughing at my astonishment, she said, "Didn't I tell you? It's a benefit for the Tibetan cause."

  More astonished still, I said, "Which Tibetan cause?"

  "The Tibetan cause," someone said vaguely, picking at a curl of something indeterminately vegetal that had been carved into a flower shape. It was explained to me then that the benefit was being hosted by a celebrated Hollywood star, a young actor who, having risen to fame through his portrayal of the initiation rites of an American officer, had afterward converted to Tibetan Buddhism and found so much fulfillment in it he was reported to have sworn that he would put Tibet on the world map, make it a household word in the United States, like Maalox or Lysol.

  "The odd thing is," said my friend, "that he really is very sincere about this; he really isn't like those radical chic cynics of the sixties and seventies. He's not an intellectual, and he probably doesn't know much about Tibet, but he wants to do what little he can. They have to raise money for their schools and so on, and the truth is that no one in New York is going to reach into their pockets unless they can sit at dinner with rock stars' ex-wives. It's not his fault. He's probably doing what they want him to do."

  I looked at the Tibetan monk again. He was being talked to by an improbably distinguished man in a dinner jacket. He caught my eye and nodded, smiling, as he bit into a dumpling.

  Suddenly I remembered what the dumpling was. It was a Tibetan mo-mo, but stuffed with salmon and asparagus and such-like instead of the usual bits of pork and fat. I sat back to marvel at the one dumpling left on my plate. It seemed a historic bit of food: one of the first genuine morsels of Tibetan nouvelle cuisine.

  The last time I'd eaten a mo-mo was as an undergraduate, in Delhi.

  A community of Tibetan refugees had built shacks along the Grand Trunk Road, not far from the university. The shacks were fragile but tenac
ious, built out of bits of wood, tin, and corrugated iron. During the monsoons they would cover the roofs with sheets of tarpaulin and plastic and weigh them down with bricks and stones. Often the bricks would be washed away and the sheets of plastic would be left flapping in the wind like gigantic prayer flags. Some of the refugees served mo-mos, noodles, and chhang, the milky Tibetan rice beer, on tables they had knocked together out of discarded crates. Their food was very popular among the drivers who frequented that part of the Grand Trunk Road.

  In the university, it was something of a ritual to go to these shacks after an examination. We would drink huge quantities of chhang—it was very diluted, so you had to drink jugs of it—and eat noodle soup and mo-mos. The mo-mos were very simple there: bits of gristle and meat wrapped and boiled in thick skins of flour. They tasted of very little until you dipped them into the red sauce that came with them.

  The food was cooked and served by elderly Tibetans; the young people were usually away, working. Communicating with them wasn't easy, for the older people rarely knew any but the most functional Hindi.

  As we drank our jugs of chhang, a fog of mystery would descend on the windy, lamp-lit interiors of the shacks. We would look at the ruddy, weathered faces of the women as they filled our jugs out of the rusty oil drums in which they brewed the beer and try to imagine the journey they had made: from their chilly, thin-aired plateau 15,000 feet above sea level, across the passes of the high Himalayas, down into that steamy slum, floating on a bog of refuse and oil slicks on the outskirts of Delhi.

  Everyone who went there got drunk. You couldn't help doing so—it was hard to be in the presence of so terrible a displacement.

  It was an unlikely place, but Tibetans seem to have a talent for surviving on unlikely terrain. Ever since the Chinese invasion of Tibet, dozens of colonies of Tibetan refugees have sprung up all over India. Many of them run thriving businesses in woolen goods, often in the most unexpected places. In Trivandrum, near the southernmost tip of India, where the temperature rarely drops below eighty degrees Fahrenheit and people either wear the thinnest of cottons or go bare-bodied, there are a number of Tibetan stalls in the marketplace, all piled high with woolen scarves and sweaters. They always seem to have more customers than they can handle.

  Once, going past the Jama Masjid in Delhi in a bus on a scorching June day, I noticed a Tibetan stall tucked in between the sugarcane juice vendors. Two middle-aged women dressed in heavy Tibetan bakus were sitting in it, knitting. The stall was stacked with the usual brightly colored woolen goods. The women were smiling cheerfully as they bargained with their customers in sign language and broken Hindi. A small crowd had gathered around them, as though in tribute to their courage and resilience.

  I found myself looking around the restaurant, involuntarily, for another Indian face, someone who had been properly invited, unlike me. I suppose I was looking for some acknowledgment, not of a debt but of a shared history, a gesture toward those hundreds of sweaters in Trivandrum. I couldn't see any. (Later someone said they'd seen a woman in a sari, but they couldn't be sure; it might have been a Somali robe—this was, after all, New York.)

  When I next caught the monk's eye, his smile seemed a little guilty: the hospitality of a poor nation must have seemed dispensable compared to the charity of a rich one. Or perhaps he was merely bewildered. It cannot be easy to celebrate the commodification of one's own suffering.

  But I couldn't help feeling that if the lama, like the actor, really wanted to make Tibet a household word in the Western world, he wasn't setting about it the right way. He'd probably have done better if he'd turned it into an acronym, like TriBeCa or ComSubPac. And sold the rights to it to a line of detergents or even perhaps a breakfast cereal.

  TiBet (where the Cause is): doesn't sound too bad—marketable, even.

  FOUR CORNERS 1989

  IT BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE to ignore the Four Corners once Route 160 enters Colorado's Montezuma County: chevroned signposts spring regularly out of the sand and scrub, urging you toward it. Even if you had never heard of it before, did not know that it is the only point in the USA where four states meet, you are soon curious; it begins to seem like a major station, a Golgotha or Gethsemane, on this well-worn tourist pilgrimage.

  The size and sleekness of the trailers and traveling homes heading toward it are eloquent of its significance. These are not the trailers you have grown accustomed to seeing in small towns in the South and Midwest—those shiny aluminum goldfish bowls that sit parked in back yards until the ballgame in the next town, when they get hitched onto pickup trucks and towed out to the ballpark to serve as adjuncts for tailgate parties. Not these; these are no ordinary trailers, they are recreational vehicles (RVs)—if not quite palaces, then certainly midtown condos, on wheels.

  You get a real idea of how big they are only when you try to pass one on a two-lane road in a Honda Civic that lost its fifth gear 8000 miles ago. Before you are past the master bedroom, are barely abreast of the breakfast nook, that blind curve that seemed so far away when you decided to make a break for it is suddenly right upon you.

  It teaches you respect.

  Their owners' imaginations are the only limits on the luxuries those RVs may be made to contain.

  Once, on a desolate stretch of road in the deserts of western Utah, I watched an RV pull into a sand-blown rest area right beside my battered Honda Civic. It was almost as long as a supermarket truck, and the air around it was sharp with the smell of its newness. A woman with white curly hair stuck her head out of a window, tried the air, and said something cheerful to someone inside, over the hum of the air conditioning. A moment later the door opened, a flight of stairs clicked magically into place under it, and she stepped out, throwing a wave and a cheery "How you doin'?" in my direction. She was carrying a couple of chairs and a rack of magazines. Her husband climbed out too, and in companionable silence they pulled an awning out of the side of the vehicle and unrolled a ten-foot length of artificial turf under it. She waved again, after the chair, the magazine rack, a pot of geraniums, and a vase with an ikebanaed orchid had been properly arranged on the patch of green. "I call this my bower," she said, smiling. "Join us for cakes and coffee?"

  Never had a wilderness seemed so utterly vanquished.

  Often those RVs have striking names: Winnebago, Itasca ... The names of the dispossessed tribes of the Americas hold a peculiar allure for the marketing executives of automobile companies. Pontiac, Cherokee—so many tribes are commemorated in forms of transport. It is not a mere matter of fashion that so many of the cars that flash past on the highways carry those names, breathing them into the air like the inscriptions on prayer wheels. This tradition of naming has a long provenance: did not Kit Carson himself, the scourge of the Navajo, name his favorite horse Apache?

  There are many of them on Route 160, those memorials to the first peoples of the Americas, bearing number plates from places thousands of miles away—New York, Georgia, Alaska, Ontario. Having come this far, everybody wants to see the only point where four states meet.

  There cannot be many places in the world quite as beautiful as the stretch of desert, mountain, and canyon that sprawls over the borders of the four states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. For the people who inhabited it at the time of the European conquest—the Diné, who came to be known as the Navajo—it was Diné Bikeyah, the country of the Diné, a land into which the First Beings climbed from the Underworlds through a female reed. To them it was the Fourth World, known as the Glittering.

  Route 160 runs through some of the most spectacular parts of the Glittering World: around the caves and canyons of Mesa Verde and through the spectacular mesas that border on Monument Valley. Curiously, its one dull stretch comes when it dips south of the little town of Cortez and heads toward the Four Corners monument. The landscape turns scraggy and undecided, not quite desert and not quite prairie, knotted with dull gray-green scrub, and desert scarred by a few shallow ravines and low cliffs.


  That is why it is impossible to miss the Four Corners monument.

  It springs up out of nowhere, perched atop nothing, framed by the only stretch of dull country in the region. There is nothing remotely picturesque about its surroundings—no buttes, no mesas, not even a salience of rock or an undulation in the plain. With the greatest effort of the imagination it would not be possible to persuade oneself that this may once have been, like so many places in the Glittering World, a haunt of the Spider Woman or the Talking God or the Hero Twins. Legends of that kind need visible metaphors—wind-scarred buttes or lava fields—to attach themselves to the landscape. For the Four Corners monument the landscape does not exist; it sits squatly on the scrub like a thumbtack in a map, unbudging in its secular disenchantedness.

  There is something majestic and yet uneasy about the absoluteness of its indifference to this landscape and its topography. It is simply a point where two notional straight lines intersect: a line of latitude, 37 degrees north, and a line of longitude, 109 degrees and 2 minutes west, the thirty-second degree of longitude west of Washington. These two straight lines form the boundaries between the four states. These lines have nothing whatever to do with the Glittering World; their very straightness is testimony to a belief in the unpeopledness of this land—they slice through the tabula rasa of the New World, leaving it crafted in their own image, enchanted with a new enchantment, the magic of Euclidean geometry.

  The center of the Glittering World was Diné Tah, which lay around Largo Canyon, about eighty miles southeast of the Four Corners monument. To the Navajo it was the sacred heartland of their country. The first time they left it en masse was in the 1860s, after Colonel Kit Carson and the U.S. Army reduced them to starvation by scorching the earth of their Glittering World. Carson felt no personal animosity toward the Navajo. He is said to have commented once, "I've seen as much of 'em as any white man livin', and I can't help but pity 'em. They'll all soon be gone anyhow." He was an unlettered man, given to expressing himself plainly. Unlike him, his commanding officer, General James H. Carleton, had had the benefits of an education. He was therefore able to phrase the matter more dispassionately, clothed in the mellow light of current trends in science and theology: "In their appointed time He wills that one race of men—as in races of lower animals—shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race ... The races of the Mammoths and Mastodons, and great Sloths, came and passed away: the Red Man of America is passing away."