On the
Perversions of our ‘Allies’ and a Defence of a Poet.
(This piece was originally written for The Heythrop Lion's 'THIS' Magazine
There are few occasions on which
the United Nations is able to disgrace itself more effectively than when it
comes to making appointments to committees and sinecures. Iraq, for example,
was due to take the chairmanship of the special committee on disarmament in
2003; a move prohibited not by any common sense on the part of the U.N. but
because the US-led intervention in that same year made such an appointment
impossible. Iran has recently been re-elected to a seat on the U.N’s Commission
on the Status of Women. Robert Mugabe, the subject of a wide-ranging travel ban,
was asked to be an ambassador for tourism in 2012, and the Human Rights
Council - which counts amongst its
membership such bastions of human rights as Pakistan and Uganda and the Holy
See – is currently chaired by Saudi Arabia.
It should come as no surprise
that the U.N., which makes no firm commitment to anything save the moral
imperative to create ever more useless, ever more profligate committees, will
express no opinion on the matter of Saudi Arabia’s chairmanship. Rather more
depressing, though, is the silence on the part of our own government (which, by
taking part in tactical vote-trading with Saudi Arabia, ensured that country’s
elevation to its current lofty position) on the crimes against humans and human
rights being committed almost every day by the head of the UNHRC.
The Kingdom’s recent history –
and by recent I speak of the past few months – is a hideous collection of
sundered heads and bloodied bodies. The execution of the prominent Shia cleric
Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was at least granted some coverage in the Western media, though
the Obama and Cameron administrations declined to condemn it in anything but
uncertain terms. The sentencing of the human rights blogger Raif Badawi to 10
years in prison and one thousand lashes (a punishment that has had to be
staggered given the very real chance that it might have killed him) has
received less attention than that, possibly due to the fact that it did not
cause embassies to be closed or burned, but it, too, has been covered.
But whilst the first example can
be understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of its not-so-cold
war with Iran, and both cases can be seen as the desperate actions of a regime
seeking to re-establish sure-footing following the death of King Abdullah and
the destabilizing effects of Islamic State (and how sharper than a serpent’s
tooth it is to have a thankless child!), it is the impending execution of the
Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh which speaks most clearly to the character of
the House of Saud.
It serves no purpose as an act of
geo-realpolitik. Nor is it part of a wider attempt at suppressing political
dissent. The sentence of death in this case, for the related but distinct
crimes of apostasy and ‘spreading blasphemous ideas’ in his art (charges he
denies), are symptoms of a deep-rooted loathing of art and music and freedom of
thought and expression; a loathing which is a necessary consequence of Saudi
Arabia’s Wahhabi or Salafist iteration of Sharia. It should be of great concern
to all of us that that is the iteration which we in the West are made to import
into our own countries, often through Saudi-printed and Saudi-approved copies
of the Quran with which we stock our prison libraries, and also in the form of ‘generous’
donations to mosques and madrassas made by the Saudi state. The exporting of
evangelization and religious coercion, often in radicalizing forms, is one of
the largest and least spoken-of facets of Saudi trade policy.
(And it is no coincidence that
the same aversion to aesthetics and thought can also be found in wide swathes
of Pakistan, in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan and in the territories
in Iraq and Syria governed by Islamic State. But, of course, it has nothing to do with Islam.)
I cannot attest to the quality or
beauty or insightfulness of Ashraf Fayadh’s poetry. I cannot read his works in
the language in which they were written and I am increasingly of the opinion
that poetry can never be properly translated without suffering some essential
loss. I cannot even support Ashraf’s claim that he is innocent of the charges
levelled against him. Fortunately, I do not need to. For it should go without
saying that apostasy and blasphemy are not considered crimes under any sane
system of justice, and the decisions by the Saudi authorities to deny Ashraf
anything like a fair trial, not to mention access to a lawyer, are so obviously
in contravention of international law and of human rights as enshrined by the
UNHRC – yes, again, the very body now chaired from Riyadh – that there really
is, on our side, no case to defend.
But there is undoubtedly a case
to be prosecuted, and every passing
day on which the wider international community remains silent is one in which
our supposed commitment to support human rights and values is side-lined by spreadsheet
morality; by concerns over arms deals and oil exports. Remember when, following
the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the streets of Paris were treated
to a parade of world leaders, all of whom voiced their commitment to uphold the
rights of freedom of thought and expression? Well, where are they now? Where is
their support now?!
It should be beholden upon all of
us, and not just those who claim to speak for us, to combat the forces who
prefer and who act in the hopes of achieving an unfeeling, unthinking,
beauty-less world. But it should be particularly important for us, we subjects
of this disunited kingdom, to speak more loudly and with an especially firm commitment
to purpose in matters such as this. For we have known its antithesis, and it
has cost us dearly in the past.
The case of Ashraf Fayadh bears
the hallmarks of the affairs of both Salman Rushdie and Oscar Wilde. The facts
of the former should be so well-known that they need no restating here – the sentencing
to death of a writer for the crime of writing is abhorrent to us, isn’t it?
Laws against blasphemy and ‘offensiveness’ are loathsome and infantile, are
they not?
But the second might perhaps
require something more by way of explanation. Indeed, its inclusion here caused
me to think and think again, but I have concluded that it is right to include
it and the point it makes is more than salient. For the ruin of Oscar Wilde,
like the attack on Mr. Fayadh, are both proofs that can be used against W.H.
Auden’s fatuous claim that ‘poetry makes
nothing happen.’ And both are examples of individuals sent down by forms of
love. To quote from Alfred Douglas’s fateful poem: a love ‘that dare not speak its name.’
The ‘Shame’ spoken of and felt
(and, yes, acted upon) by the likes of Wilde and Bosie, which was a crime (and
remains a crime in places like Saudi Arabia), is just as natural and vital to
us as the ‘crime’ for which Ashraf Fayadh has been condemned. It is natural to
us because it is of our nature! The dignity
of our species, in other words, demands that we use and are able to use, free
from fear of punishment, our ability to think and to write what we think, and
to portray beauty, and to practice it and feel it with all the pain and
reverence and hard work befitting any fundamental Love. To deny the freedom to
think is to deny the freedom to love. They are, in that sense, two forms of the
same virtue. And it allows one to accuse the House of Saud, and religion, as
being opposed to love. Which it is; which they both are.
I have penned a poem – The Ballad of Burning - which shares its
sentiment with that expressed within this piece. I had thought to close with it. But as there
is a place set aside in this august journal – a poets’ corner, of a kind - for
works of rhyme and rhythm and metre (and sometimes those that lack the same,
but that is an argument for another time), I have decided instead to close with
the words of another.
Part of the title of this piece
is taken (and then reworked) from Percy Bysshe-Shelley’s polemic, published
posthumously, entitled ‘A defence of
Poetry.’ It is amongst the most
eloquent cases ever made for art and for the meaning and the importance of art.
I encourage the reader to peruse it in its entirety, but it closes as follows:
“Poets are the hierophants of an
unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the
trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence
which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world.”
The point, if I have done my job,
is clear. And I hope that you will join with me, and with the good people at
PEN International, and Amnesty International, and the innumerable poets and
writers and musicians and ordinary human beings in doing what our government is
too cowardly to do on our behalf: condemn this sentence, condemn this crime,
and work for the freedom of Mr. Ashraf Fayadh.
