Constraint could be a bulwark against a self that was always in danger of dissolving in the face of too much choice, opportunity and desire. By opposing that which continually changes around us, by denying those things we might want, we keep ourselves together. In the face of such decadent possibilities and corrupt pleasures — or where there is the fear of what free or disobedient people might do — Islam would provide the necessary deprivation and could attenuate the repertoire of possible selves.
Open the Koran on almost any page and there is a threat. ‘We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, missiles for pelting devils. We have prepared a scourge of flames for these, and the scourge of Hell for unbelievers: an evil fate!’
There is, then, sufficient regulation and punishment available. Without harsh constraint things might get out of hand, particularly in the post-modern world, where no one knows anything for sure. And so, against the ‘corruption’ of the West to which so many had innocently travelled, a new authority could be posited — that of Islam and, in particular, those who spoke for it. Without the revolutionary or opposing idea of Purity there wouldn’t be those who knew what it was and could tell us when it had been violated. These men — and they were always men — became very powerful. The young invested a lot of authority in them.
Edward Said wrote: ‘There are now immigrant communities in Europe from the former colonial territories to whom the ideas of “France” and “Britain” and “Germany” as constituted during the period between 1800 and 1950 simply excludes them.’
It must not be forgotten, therefore, that the background to the lives of these young people includes colonialism — being made to feel inferior in your own country. And then, in Britain, racism; again, being made to feel inferior in your own country. My father’s generation came to Britain full of hope and expectation. It would be an adventure, it would be difficult, but it would be worth it.
However, the settling in, with all the compromises and losses that that implies, has been more complicated and taken longer than anyone could imagine. Yet all along it was taken for granted that ‘belonging’, which means, in a sense, not having to notice where you are, and, more importantly, not being seen as different, would happen eventually. Where it hasn’t there is, in the children and grandchildren of the great post-war wave of immigrants, considerable anger and disillusionment. With some exceptions, Asians are still at the bottom of the pile; more likely to suffer from unemployment, poor housing, discrimination and ill-health. In a sense it hasn’t worked out. The ‘West’ was a dream that didn’t come true. But one cannot go home again. One is stuck.
Clearly this affects people in different ways. But without a doubt it is constraining, limiting, degrading, to be a victim in your own country. If you feel excluded it might be tempting to exclude others. The fundamentalists liked to reject the usual liberal pieties, sometimes for historionic reasons. But their enemies — gays, Jews, the media, unsubmissive women, writers — were important to them. Their idea of themselves was based, like the MCC, or like any provincial snob, on who they excluded. Not only that, the central tenets of the West — democracy, pluralism, tolerance, which many people in Islamic countries, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are struggling for — could be treated as a joke. For those whose lives had been negated by colonialism and racism such notions could only seem a luxury and of no benefit to them; they were a kind of hypocrisy.
Therefore, during our conversations Ali continuously argued that there are no such things as freedom or democracy, or that those abstractions were only real for a small group. For him, if they didn’t exist in the purest possible form, they didn’t exist at all. Milosz might call Ali’s attitude, with some sadness, ‘disappointed love’, and it was a disappointment that seemed to attach itself to everything. Which isn’t to say there wasn’t hope too. For instance, he believed that when the existing corrupt rulers of Muslim countries were swept away, they would be replaced by ‘true’ Muslims, benign in every way, who would work for the benefit of the people, according to the word of God. If the present was unsatisfactory and impossible to live in, as it always would be for him, there was the perfect future, which would, probably, safely remain the future — the best place for it, for his purposes.
Fundamentalism provides security. For the fundamentalist, as for all reactionaries, everything has been decided. Truth has been agreed and nothing must change. For serene liberals on the other hand, the consolations of knowing seem less satisfying than the pleasures of puzzlement, and of wanting to discover for oneself. But the feeling that one cannot know everything, that there will always be maddening and live questions about who one is and how it is possible to make a life with other people who don’t accept one, can be devastating. Perhaps it is only for so long that one can live with that kind of puzzlement. Rationalists have always underestimated the need people have for belief. Enlightenment values — rationalism, tolerance, scepticism — don’t get you through a dreadful night; they don’t provide spiritual comfort or community or solidarity. Fundamentalist Islam could do this in a country that was supposed to be home but which could, from day to day, seem alien.
Muslim fundamentalism has always seemed to me to be profoundly wrong, unnecessarily restrictive and frequently cruel. But there are reasons for its revival that are comprehensible. It is this that has made me want to look at it not only in terms of ideas, but in stories, in character, in terms of what people do. For a writer there cannot be just one story, a story to end all stories in which everything is said, but as many stories as one wants, serving all sorts of purposes and sometimes none at all. The primary object, though, is to provide pleasure of different kinds. And one must remember that perhaps the greatest book of all, and certainly one of the most pleasurable, The One Thousand and One Nights, is, like the Koran, written in Arabic. This creativity, the making of something that didn’t exist before, the vigour and stretch of a living imagination, is a human affirmation of another kind, and a necessary and important form of self-examination. Without it our humanity is diminished.
Sex and Secularity: Introduction to Collected Screenplays One
To me writing for film is no different to writing for any other form. It is the telling of stories, only on celluloid. However, you are writing for a director and then for actors. Economy is usually the point; one objective of film writing is to make it as quick and light as possible. You can’t put in whatever you fancy in the hope that a leisured reader might follow you for a while, as you might in a novel. In that sense films are more like short stories. The restrictions of the form are almost poetic, though most poems are not read aloud in cineplexes. Film is a broad art, which is its virtue.
Nevertheless, it didn’t occur to any of us involved in My Son the Fanatic, for instance, that it would be either lucrative or of much interest to the general public. The film was almost a legacy of the 1960s and 70s, when one of the purposes of the BBC was to make cussed and usually provincial dramas about contemporary issues like homelessness, class and the Labour Party.