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A true free spirit of the Middle East
Abdelrahman Munif’s novels lambast the precariousness of the Middle Eastern puppet dictatorships that sprang up in the wake of the Western oil bonanza, writes Mohammad Al-Urdun
BOMBS over Beirut, bullets across Baghdad: Abdelrahman Munif must be wailing in his grave. His death two years ago extinguished one of the brightest lights in the Middle East, a man who produced some of the most incendiary and monumental writing in Arabic literature, a political revolutionary who helped define the Arab viewpoint.
Of the two-dozen books he turned out the best known, a quintet of novels about oil, colonialism and puppet regimes, ought to be required reading for Blair’s foreign policy wonks. It isn’t of course – Lawrence of Arabia’s account of imperial Britain in the Middle East still adorns Foreign Office bookshelves – but an English translation of the first of the novels is re-issued this year as Cities of Salt. It’s been more than 20 years since they were first published in Arabic and banned in Saudi for their inflammatory ideas.
Unsurprisingly for a man who was at the heart of some of the Middle East’s defining moments, his books, in which he pulls his vast experiences together, illuminate the root of the West’s violent relation with the Arab world.
He was born in 1933 – just months after Americans signed the first oil deals with the Gulf regimes. It was fateful timing. The plunder of Middle Eastern oil was the nail in the coffin for the greater-Arabia of open borders and cultural homogeneity its people had known for millennia. As if to mark the passage his father, a Saudi caravan trader, died soon afterwards.
Raised in Jordan by his Iraqi mother and grandmother, both powerful women in their own right, he went to school a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the British pro-consul from where he would have seen where real power lay – with the colonial ruler rather than Jordan’s royal satrap.
He was still a lad when neighbouring Iraq shook with the threat of revolution after a royal assassination was followed by a British-backed coup. As a teenager he saw the flood of refugees across the border from the 1948 Zionist invasion of nearby Palestine.
As a law student at Baghdad university he plunged into the political maelstrom, joining the pan-Arab socialist Ba’th party and turning his back on the communist party – as many did – for toeing Moscow’s support for Israel. But he was booted out before graduating when Iraq again erupted into violence over the pro-British policies of its puppet ruler Nuri Al-Said.
Showing his practicality and early commitment to Arab politics he switched to oil economics, graduating from Yugoslavia on a Ba’th scholarship and went to work the party in Beirut. But, ever a free spirit, he clashed with the party over its violent coup in nearby Iraq, for which he was banned from the country in the early 1960s. A few years later he quit the party altogether.
Falling out with authority was a habit – the Saudi’s had already torn up his citizenship for criticising the kingdom and its oil deals with the West. In the wake of Israel’s defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 Six Day War and the suppression of the Palestinian resistance by the Jordanian government, he wrote his first book, a guide to oil development the Iraqi Ba’th party used as a blueprint for the nationalisation and development of their industry in the 1970s. His reply to suppression of the Left in Syria and Egypt was to write his first novel, a coruscating account of the Arab reaction to colonialism and Israel.
It earned him instant success and he was welcomed back into the Ba’th party fold as an international icon. In the mid-70s he hit a rich vein of writing form producing four novels about the transformation of old Arabia, which drew on first hand observations of party politics, social repression and the brutality of the state police. They have become pillars of Arab literature. But his novels describing the destructive power of colonialism in of Iran and the desecration of the old Baghdad he loved with skyscrapers and office blocks, earned Saddam’s ire and in the early 1980s he fled for France with his family from where he wrote Cities of Salt.
The title of the quintet is an unmistakeable allusion to the precariousness of the new Middle Eastern societies – baseless things with puppet dictatorships that had sprung up in the wake of the Western oil bonanza and that would, he believed, be ravaged by the tides of time. When he sat down to write he’d spent almost 50 years watching – and warning against – their foundations slipping away and taking with them the greater Arabia he’d dreamed of.
The first of the quintet, now re-issued in English as – confusingly – Cities of Salt, is the story of Wadi Al-Uyoun, a lush oasis in a nameless Gulf state which is in fact a thinly veiled reference to the Saudi his father had known. For centuries life in the Wadi was unchanged, dominated by the passage of caravans hurrying along their trade routes to its clear waters and refreshing winds.
Suddenly in the 1930s a handful of foreigners appear at the Wadi and the
outside world crashes in. They are Americans representing an oil company with the backing of the local emir.
Their strange behaviour first intrigues, then frightens the Bedouin. The pale-skinned Americans eschew modesty, wearing just a few pieces of clothing despite the embarrassment it causes the locals. They dig the ground, study the earth, consult strange books and devices, gesticulate oddly and command obsequious servility from the man acting as their host.
The Bedouins shock slowly turns to suspicion but it is too late. The Americans return with more men and huge, terrifying creatures that neither eat nor drink – bulldozers that one morning roar into life and flatten the Wadi. The Bedouin are given payoffs and some are recruited into the new oil field – the first proletariat. But Miteb al-Hathal, the Wadi’s most respected figure whose grandfather led a guerrilla war against the Ottomans and who had been against the Americans from the start, rides off into the night to become a mythical hero of resistance.
The hero, the harking back to mythical past for inspiration against the occupiers, is a central theme in the modern Arab history. But for Munif, whose mind was sharpened by a lifetime at the coal face of political action, it was pointless. In Cities of Salt the call to arms does indeed come but the events that spark it are rooted in history – always a key part of Arab art – and prosaic at the same time.
They unfold suddenly in the second part of the book which moves to the coastal town of Harran. Harran is transformed from a tiny village into an industrial hub by the oil company, which with Munif’s knowledge of the Middle East, is closely based on the American conglomerate Aramco, which trailblazed oil exploitation in the Gulf.
The Bedouin, confused and conned, are coerced into ill-fitting overalls and into jobs to which they are even less suited. New workers arrive, a middle-class of traders and craven courtiers – easily beguiled by trinkets like radios and cars – emerges. The little town becomes a city-state with the trappings of state power, including a brutal militia that evolves under the guiding hand of the Americans. It isn’t long before all traces of the traditional Arab life – the houses, habits and social relations, are swept away. It is the transformation of the old Arabia Munif’s father had known under ports and pipelines.
In the most powerful scene a huge cruiser docks and hundreds of white-skinned revellers spill out, scantily dressed, drinking and cavorting to the stunned shock of the Arabs. The Arab workers, who are corralled at far away from the party-goers and their special compound, lick their lips – like colonised people have done all over the world: craving the pleasures but ashamed of their lust.
The book climaxes with an uprising – not the revolution Munif hoped would make a sweep clean of the Middle East – and the story continues in the second of the quintet, The Trench (a loose translation of a Quranic reference to a pit of flame into which an infidel ruler tossed believers).
As oil expert Munif was well aware of the potential of the black gold to fund tremendous development and Cities of Salt is no Luddite elegy. But it draws on his intimate knowledge of Arab political history and the social impact of colonialism to paint a picture of Saudi – one that broadly holds true for the whole area – in the crucial years between 1933 and 1953 when America supplanted Britain in the region. The Trench picks up the story, dealing with events in the 1950s when the regime consolidated itself and, conflating time and events, includes a pointed reference to the assassination of King Faisal in 1975 by his nephew.
These sorts of references to the naked corruption and inequality, clear to any Arab reader, are why the quintet, and Munif himself, is blacklisted in the Gulf. And why, of course, it ought to be carefully read by anyone – especially in Whitehall – with an interest the real roots of Middle East conflict.
“When the West looks at us all they see are oil and petrodollars,” Munif once said in an interview. He added: “My first memories of [the Americans] go back to the 1940s. In most cases there was no hostility to them at that stage but the context in which they appeared changed our way of life and the relationship. In our countries the oil industry is something alien. It has stayed like an island, cut off from everything around it … The presence of oil could have led to real improvements and change, creating the opportunities for a better life … The West is not owed the credit for the riches of the Peninsula and the Gulf. These riches come from within the earth. What happened was that the West discovered these riches and took the lions share … which ought to belong to the people of the region. Our rulers were brought in by the West, which used them as instruments. We all know the relationship there is between the West and these regimes.”
Mohammad Al-Urdun is a writer on Middle East affairs
Cities of Salt
by Abdelrahman Munif
Published by Vintage International
£13.99 paperback
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