Swedish: Kristokrati och islamism som skönlitteratur
(English text further down)
Fanatism, intolerans och sexfientlighet skiljer sig ytterst lite mellan kristen och islamsk fundamentalism. I USA står avhållsamhet högt på Bushadministrationens kristokratiska agenda och i den islamska världen skall kvinnor gömmas undan. Samma mentalitet, men olika uttryck.
I helgens New York Times Book Review recenseras “The Abstinence Teacher” av Tom Perrotta som utspelar sig i Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either”. Detta kan jämföras med Snö av förra årets Nobelpristagare Orhan Pamuk:
Snö är en politisk roman med stor giltighet i dagens Turkiet. Romanen utspelas vintern -92 i staden Kars, längst öster ut, nära gränsen till Armenien. Hit kommer Ka, poet med tolv år i exil i Tyskland i bagaget. Egentligen har han kommit för att slå sig ner i barndomsstaden Istanbul men det som lockar med resan till Kars är dels förhoppningen att återse en tidigare flickvän, dels ett uppdrag att för en tidning skildra den våg av självmord som begåtts av unga kvinnor i staden. Tar de livet av sig av politiska skäl? Har det med islamisternas framväxt att göra? Kars drabbas under hans besök av ett våldsamt snöfall och staden skärs av från omvärlden. Under tiden i staden kommer Ka i kontakt med alla de viktigaste politiska grupperingarna och institutionerna i dagens Turkiet: regeringsorganen, militären, islamisterna, kurderna, gammal och ny vänster.
Since the Nobel Prize (in Literature as well as other less interesting areas) is a Swedish institution, I had to indulge a bit extra in our language. This year's prize to Doris Lessing is also worth noting. Excellent choice.
Fanatism, intolerance, and sex aversion/fear in not very different when you compare Christian and Muslim fundamentalism. Abstinence education is high on the Bush administration's Christocracy agenda. Too vast a field to go into here, but a couple of links can get you started. Heritage Foundation: The Effectiveness of Abstinence Education Programs in Reducing Sexual Activity Among Youth and the US Department of Health with an entire Abstinence Education Division.
No, this is not Saudi Arabia or the Talibans with their Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. It's the U.S.A. 2007 according to the George W Bush vision of One Nation Under God.
This rather lengthy discussion was a result of this Sunday's New York Times Book Review where “The Abstinence Teacher” by Tom Perrotta is reviewed, a book taking place in i Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either”.
This time, however, he sets his cast of flawed parents and un-airbrushed kids against the stained-glass background of muscular Christianity on the march. A new church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, has come to town, bent on ridding the community of “all manner of godlessness and moral decay,” and the first weed their scythe of righteousness mows down is Ruth Ramsey’s ninth-grade sex-ed class. After a churchgoing snitch reports her teacher’s blasé endorsement of oral sex to her parents, the school forces Ruth to push an abstinence agenda, something she regards as “a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance.” Other secular-minded townspeople are slow to catch on, but to Ruth, who is on the crusade’s firing line, watching the Tabernacle’s influence spread feels like “living in a horror movie. ... ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.”
For the purposes of the narrative, Christ’s spokesman takes the form of a divorced dad named Tim Mason, a Tabernacle congregant who was booted out of his marriage after an “epic coke binge” that “ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.” Mason clings to his newfound belief as if it were a life preserver. (His mother accuses him of “using Jesus like a substitute for drugs, like methadone.”) To keep close to his daughter, Abby, who lives with her remarried, irreligious mother, Mason coaches fifth-grade girls’ soccer; Ruth’s daughter Maggie is his star player. After an emotional match, in a transport of spiritual fervor, Mason leads his team in prayer — enraging his ex-wife and Ruth, and setting off a holy war among the soccer moms and dads of Stonewood Heights.
The conflicts Perrotta invents here feel both instantly recognizable and queerly portentous, calling to mind dystopic science fictions from “Body Snatchers,” to Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives,” to Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” As in the Bradbury story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” in which an Earth family, resettled on Mars, slowly acquires alien customs and language, the characters in “The Abstinence Teacher” shift uneasily between two tongues: the unscripted cadences of ordinary speech and the exalted language of sin, salvation and belief.
Stonewood Heights could perhaps be compared with the Turkish city Kars, the scene of “Snow” by last year's Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, also review by New York Times (in 2004):
As the novel opens, Ka has been in political exile in Frankfurt, but has returned to Istanbul after 12 years for his mother's funeral. He's making his way to Kars, an impoverished city in Anatolia, just as a severe snowstorm begins. (Kar is ''snow'' in Turkish, so we have already been given an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.) Ka claims to be a journalist interested in the recent murder of the city's mayor and the suicides of a number of young girls forced by their schools to remove their headscarves, but this is only one of his motives. He also wants to see Ipek, a beautiful woman he'd known as a student. Divorced from a onetime friend of Ka's turned Islamist politician, she lives in the shabby Snow Palace Hotel, where Ka is staying.
Cut off from escape by the snow, Ka wanders through a decaying city haunted by its glorious former selves: there are architectural remnants of the once vast Ottoman Empire; the grand Armenian church stands empty, testifying to the massacre of its worshipers; there are ghosts of Russian rulers and their lavish celebrations, and pictures of Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and instigator of a ruthless ''modernization'' campaign, which included -- not incidentally -- a ban on headscarves.
Ka's pose as a journalist allows Pamuk to put on display a wide variety of opinions. Those not living in the shrunken remains of former empires may find it hard to imagine the mix of resentful entitlement (We ought to be powerful!), shame (What did we do wrong?), blame (Whose fault is it?) and anxiety about identity (Who are we really?) that takes up a great deal of headroom in such places, and thus in ''Snow.''
Ka tries to find out more about the dead girls but encounters resistance: he's from a bourgeois background in cosmopolitan Istanbul, he's been in exile in the West, he has a snazzy overcoat. Believers accuse him of atheism; the secular government doesn't want him writing about the suicides -- a blot on its reputation -- so he's dogged by police spies; common people are suspicious of him. He's present in a pastry shop when a tiny fundamentalist gunman murders the director of the institute that has expelled the headscarf girls. He gets mixed up with his beloved's former husband, the two of them are arrested and he witnesses the brutality of the secularist regime. He manages to duck his shadowers long enough to meet with an Islamist extremist in hiding, the persuasive Blue, said to be behind the director's murder. And so he goes, floundering from encounter to encounter.
In ''Snow,'' translated by Maureen Freely, the line between playful farce and gruesome tragedy is very fine. For instance, the town's newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem ''Snow.'' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called ''Snow'' and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: ''Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'' And sure enough, inspired by the love affair he begins with Ipek and happier than he's been in years, Ka begins to write poems, the first of them being ''Snow.'' Before you know it, there he is in the theater, but the evening also includes a ridiculous performance of an Ataturk-era play called ''My Fatherland or My Head Scarf.'' As the religious school teenagers jeer, the secularists decide to enforce their rule by firing rifles into the audience.
As it happens Mr Parmuk has been involved in another international controvercy covered on this blog in Holocaust Competition? and Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust. Once again from the New York Times:
Nationalist Turks have not forgiven Mr. Pamuk for an interview with a Swiss magazine in 2005 in which he denounced the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the killing of Kurds by Turkey in the 1980’s. The remarks were deemed anti-Turkish, and a group of nationalists initiated a criminal case against him. The charges were dropped on a technicality in January. Accepting a literary award in Germany in 2005, Mr. Pamuk said: “The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.”
Mr. Pamuk’s work speaks to Europe’s growing skittishness about its Muslim population and to the preoccupation with the question of whether Islam is by nature compatible with secular European values on issues like criminal justice and women’s rights. Turkey is edging closer to becoming part of the European Union. On Thursday, though, the lower house of French Parliament passed a bill that would make it a crime to deny that the Turkish killing of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 constituted genocide — a law that contradicts Turkey’s view.
In remarks sure to further annoy Turkey, the Armenian foreign minister, Vartan Oskanian, weighed in with a message of congratulations for Mr. Pamuk. “We welcome this decision and only wish that this kind of intellectual sincerity and candor will lead the way to acknowledging and transcending this painful, difficult period of our peoples’ and our countries’ history,” Mr. Oskanian said in an e-mail message to The New York Times.
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