Another church scandal in Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW]

The Catholic Church can breathe a sigh of relief this time: for once, it isn’t them.

Just two months after the Maronite priest Father Mansour Labaki was found guilty by the Vatican of sexually assaulting three minors (and given the typically severe punishment of “prayer and penitence”), the head of a Greek Orthodox monastery in Koura, Archimandrite Panteleimon Farah, has been discharged by Mount Lebanon Bishop George Khodr and sentenced to isolation inside his monastery for committing “practices contrary to Christian life and the monastic calling” – later revealed to be the molestation of youths.

As with Labaki, a crowd of demonstrators quickly congregated to protest the decision and proclaim Farah’s innocence. When LBC’s Dalal Mawad arrived – with permission from the church – to report live from the demonstration, the priest's sympathizers attempted to physically assault her and her cameraman, and were only prevented from doing so by the army. (As the blogger Gino Raidy cannily noted during the Labaki disgrace, these admirers of child rapists are precisely the same people who froth with pious fury when, say, a young Lebanese artist photographs her naked breasts.)

The intimidation of a woman journalist by a mob of religious fanatics is of course a scandal in its own right. Yet the ultimate tragedy is the fate of Farah’s victims themselves, and their families, who will never see the men responsible for their pain brought to real justice. Had it been an ordinary citizen who had molested them, he would have rightly spent a considerable portion of the rest of his life in a prison cell. But give any criminal, no matter how vile, a religious title and he becomes untouchable. Those who defend this notion of shielding wayward clergymen from the law might want to consider how they would feel if it were their children under attack – or, indeed, how they can be sure that it won’t be next time.

Thanks to Christine Sleiman for help with translation.

There was nothing "spiritual" about Ovadia Yosef's bigotry

[Originally posted at NOW]

Of the innumerable euphemisms adopted in polite journalism to make the nasty business of theocracy sound respectable, few are as irritating as the “spiritual leader” designation. What the writer plainly means (and what the reader ought to see from a mile away), when he debases himself with that sickly platitude, is “authoritarian religious extremist.” Try it out; it works in every instance. The Dalai Lama? A Buddhist fundamentalist who suppresses rival sects and tolerates no democracy within his Indian fiefdom. The Pope? An absolute monarch who professes divine “infallibility” and uses the privilege to sustain a multi-billion dollar enterprise of reactionary propaganda (the very word derives from Catholic doctrine). Gandhi may have led an unimpeachably courageous national liberation struggle, but that doesn’t undo his notorious outbursts of crackpottery, such as his suggestion that the best course of action for Jews in Nazi concentration camps would be to commit mass suicide.

And so it is too with the now-deceased Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel who was universally described in yesterday’s obituaries as the “spiritual leader” of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party. Just in case anyone out there is picturing a meek and humble champion of humanity and peace, here (in no particular order) are five of Yosef’s most memorable insights:

• “Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.” (Source)
• “It is forbidden to be merciful to [Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” (Source)
• “It is no wonder that [Israeli] soldiers are killed in war; they don’t observe Shabbat, don’t observe the Torah, don’t pray every day, don’t lay phylacteries on a daily basis – so is it any wonder that they are killed? No, it’s not.” (Source)
• “Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.” (Source)
• “[Holocaust victims] were reincarnations of the souls of sinners, people who transgressed and did all sorts of things which should not be done. They had been reincarnated in order to atone.” (Source)

Don't be fooled by Francis

[Originally posted at NOW]

Desperate as they ever are to believe that inside every scrofulous and reactionary organized religion is a cosmopolitan beacon of enlightenment crying to burst out, liberals have once again allowed themselves to be taken for a ride by a shady cleric, this time the current Bishop of Rome and former friend of Argentina’s notoriously murderous military dictatorship of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

What’s seduced them is Pope Francis’ off-the-cuff remarks to journalists on Monday regarding homosexuality. “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” he asked rhetorically, adding that gays should not be “marginalized” but rather “integrated into society.”

Which is apparently all it takes to melt the more soluble hearts among us. “Pope Francis took a huge step forward for the Catholic church,”said The Atlantic Wire’s Connor Simpson. “[This] real blockbuster […] is a radical change of position from Francis’ predecessor.”

“May he next open the door on contraception,” cooed the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Yet, as the merest flicker of skepticism should elucidate, the statements don’t amount to any tangible departure from orthodox Catholic doctrine at all. The first sign of this came from Francis himself, who rushed to explain that it was gay “lobbying” that was the real “problem,” a pronouncement sinister and plain weird in about equal quantities.

Besides, what constitutes “search[ing] for the Lord and [having] good will”? Refraining from having gay sex, presumably. Certainly no one with serious Vatican expertise seems to believe anything will differ henceforth. “I don’t know that we’ve learned anything new at the level of content,” said National Catholic Reporter John L Allen, who was present when Francis made the remarks. “Church stance will not change,” was Papal Adviser John Haldane’s rather blunter message for the BBC. Veteran LGBT activist Peter Tatchell perhaps put it best:

“Pope Francis has offered a change of tone in Vatican pronouncements on gay people but not a change in substance. The church’s hardline stance against gay equality and relationships remains intact. It opposes same-sex marriage. The Catechism condemns homosexual love using strident, inflammatory and homophobic language.”

As it will continue to do so long as it is safeguarded by a man who just three years ago declared the idea of gay marriage “an attempt to destroy God’s plan.” So far from showering servile praise on such characters, it’s high time the intellectual class recognized them for the contemptible bigots they are – and confronted them.

Actually, secularism might be against Islam

[Originally posted at NOW]

In 1925, a distinguished Egyptian religious scholar named Ali Abd al-Raziq produced a highly unusual book, titled Islam and the Origins of Governance, in which he made the unprecedented argument that the caliphate, or state ruled by Islamic law, was not in fact a requirement of the Muslim faith.

Steeped in the most rigorous theological training as he was – being a graduate of and jurist appointed by al-Azhar, then the preeminent institution of Islamic learning worldwide – al-Raziq built his case entirely on religious grounds, marshaling to his side an ostensibly impressive set of observations. For one, neither the Quran nor the Hadith actually makes any mention of a caliphate, he noted. For another, there is no evidence that the Prophet Muhammad presided over any kind of institutionalized Islamic state, nor did he leave instructions for his followers to do so, he argued. Instead, the caliphate was an innovation devised by venal, self-serving tyrants who distorted the Prophet’s essentially apolitical message, with the result that by the 20th century the caliphate had become “a plague for Islam and the Muslims, a source of evils and corruption.”

The reader can probably guess how this thoughtful suggestion was received by the gatekeepers of the faith at the time. The al-Azhar clerics issued a formal condemnation of the book, enumerating with exhaustive quotations from Quran and Hadith exactly how very gravely it was mistaken, and then fired al-Raziq from his post. Muhammad Rashid Rida, probably the single most influential Islamic thinker of his generation, called the book the work of the “enemies of Islam,” while other notables such as Muhammad Bakhit argued at painstaking length that the Prophet did in fact govern a caliphate-like entity in Medina. Central to all these rebuttals was the fundamental conviction that, in Islam, religion and politics could not be separated. As Bakhit put it: “The Islamic religion is based on the pursuit of domination and power […] and the refusal of any law which is contrary to its sharia and its divine law, and the rejection of any authority the wielder of which is not charged with the execution of its edicts.”

This episode came to mind when on Sunday I had the privilege of attending a talk given by Ahmed Benchemsi and Karl Sharro in which they argued, among other things, that “secularism is not against Islam.” Of course, things have moved on a bit in the last nine decades – only a crackpot fringe minority of Muslims seriously calls for a revived caliphate, and many are those who would call themselves both Muslims and secularists – but the idea that Islam must have some kind of role in politics remains very much the official view of the clerics today. Indeed, state theologians continue to wield legislative power in every country in the Arab world, including supposedly ‘secular’ Syria and ‘liberal’ Lebanon (where they recently decreed civil marriage “apostasy” and blocked a draft law against domestic violence on the grounds that it “[violated] the Islamic law”).

Is secularism, then, compatible with Islam? Or, to put it another way, can Islam be separated from the clerical apparatus – the ulama – that converts its teachings into legislation in the real world? It’s a question that ultimately only Muslims can decide (and part of the problem to begin with, of course, is there is no single “Islam”), but the prevailing scholarly view for now seems to be that it can not. To claim otherwise is to make the rather large claim that one knows Islam better than its own clergy.

Which is obviously not to say there aren’t muftis and mullahs out there who would disagree vehemently. The point is rather that so long as such dissidents are firmly in the minority – so long as the great mass of their peers continue to dismiss and discredit them – then it cannot be accurate to say that “Islam,” as it is generally practiced around the world today, is a secular phenomenon.

Not that Islam is alone, of course. Every religion has a theocracy problem. Catholicism, as practiced in the Vatican, is not compatible with secularism. Judaism, as practiced in Israel, is not compatible with secularism. Even the quaint variety of Protestantism in my native UK is, in fact, a state religion, “defended” by a priestess-queen and granted 26 unelected and unaccountable seats in parliament. These are all by necessity the foes of any secularist worth the name, and I don’t think we should be embarrassed to say so forthrightly.

NB: All quotes and information on Ali Abd al-Raziq come from Albert Hourani’s indispensable Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939.

Will the Pope now face trial?

[Originally posted at NOW]

The preeminent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC, whose career is so distinguished that he is one of only three experts nominated to the UN’s Internal Justice Council (that is, he polices the world’s police), wrote a regrettably neglected book in 2010 in which he argued that, in his legal opinion, Joseph Ratzinger (known until yesterday as Pope Benedict XVI) ought to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

As Robertson and many others have noted, Ratzinger personally aided and abetted the rape of children – by shielding perpetrators from punishment; bribing victims and their families into silence; and placing unsuspecting children in the “care” of known rapists, who predictably went on to re-offend. This history is extraordinarily well-documented. We have, to take one of dozens of examples, the infamous letter of 2001, penned in Cardinal Ratzinger’s own hand, in which he threatened to excommunicate any bishop anywhere in the world who informed local police of child rape cases, which were to be handled exclusively by the secretive courts of Canon Law (the Catholic version of shari’a), hushed up in “perpetual silence”.

Indeed, so solid is the evidence against Ratzinger that the Vatican doesn’t try to contest it, basing its defense instead on his alleged legal immunity as a head of state.

This defense was always disputed by Robertson, who noted that Vatican “statehood” was premised entirely on a sleazy quid pro quo with the mass-murderer Benito Mussolini.

But after yesterday’s news, that debate no longer matters. Pope Benedict XVI has become Joseph Ratzinger again; a fallible, non-divine, non-King. Robertson is already on the case, so to speak, writing that Ratzinger now loses whatever immunity he might once have claimed, and has thus become completely fair game. His concluding words are tantalizing ones for all who hold the protection of children from rape to be of greater concern than preserving the powers of religious authoritarians:

“There are many victims of priests permitted by Cardinal Ratzinger to stay in holy orders after their propensity to molest was known, and they would like to sue the ex-pope for damages for negligence. If he steps outside the Vatican, a court may rule that they have a case.”

On attending the Pope's Mass

Pope Benedict XVI wields a stick (Alex Rowell)

I’ll say this much for Joseph Ratzinger: no one could accuse him of over-emotive speechmaking. With his barely-audible lethargic croak, rising infrequently and with great strain to a mumble, there is little danger of him whipping a crowd into a frenzy of bloodlust or vengeance. He would, indeed, be incapable of holding an audience of any kind were it not for his claim to be the quasi-divine “vicar” of Christ on earth, with the “infallibility”, “supreme authority” and other special powers that that heady title entails.

Having reached the waterfront venue in central Beirut a full hour before the Popemobile arrived, and having outlasted many a devout Catholic and hardened journalist in staying till the very end under the roasting sun, I think I can fairly claim to have given my first Mass my best shot. Much as when I visited Jerusalem, I went into the experience with an open mind; willing to be taken wherever my emotions moved me. Ignore, to the extent possible, the unspeakable crimes in which the man is complicit, I told myself. Perhaps seeing him live in the flesh, I speculated, would induce some stirring within me, however slight, of the awe, or contentment, or “agape”, or whatever exactly it is that the faithful get out of these things. Even Larkin admitted to an “awkward reverence”, after all.

And yet, here as in the Old City, precisely the opposite turned out to be the case. Once again it squarely struck me that personal exposure to “holiness” only confirms its essential banality. Just as the Western Wall is really just a wall, and the Stone of the Anointing is really just a stone, so a mediocre man in a hat and costume is really just a mediocre man. Non-Catholics already know this, of course, but as the minutes became hours and the postures succumbed to gravity, I wondered how many of “the flock” were privately beginning to suspect it too. Indeed, when the chairs began to empty by the hundreds while the Baba was still on the mic, I might have even felt a twinge of pity for the geriatric if I didn’t remember what infamous villainy he was capable of.

Not that I intend to go into any of that now, nauseating as it was to see a quarter of a million people cheering a paedophile-enabler (in case you’re interested, the authoritative account of Ratzinger’s widely-underestimated role in these crimes against humanity is human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC’s ‘The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse’). My point, as I was saying – which is one I’ve known since childhood, just as every child in the crowd yesterday knew, as did most of the adults if they only had the honesty to admit it to themselves – is that religion is desperately, unrescuably dull.

It might seem like a frivolous criticism, but it’s enough by itself to discredit the whole enterprise. Take humour alone, or rather the lack thereof. As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead pointed out, “The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature”. How can a book without laughter – that famously most efficacious of medicines; “the sunshine”, as Hugo put it, “that chases winter from the human face” – claim to give comfort to troubled souls, let alone pave the way to eternal bliss?  

Or, in the present case, how can God’s own incarnation fail to keep common mortals listening for a mere two hours? How could he be anything less than brilliantly, incomparably captivating? One might have expected the creator of the Universe to be a bit of a personality. (One might also have expected him to be a bit kinder with the weather – I counted no fewer than four limp bodies carried away on stretchers.)

In short, if yesterday were any indication of what the party’s like up in heaven, it underscored once again why most atheists are happy enough to be excluded. 

Is Lebanon ready for a Pope protest?

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

While much of Lebanon looks forward to celebrating the Pope’s arrival next Friday, a small group of activists were until recently preparing to mark the occasion in a rather different way.

On August 24, a Facebook event was created calling for a peaceful protest against the Pope during his three-day stay, citing the Vatican’s “corruption and immorality.” Users posted photos and anti-Pope slogans and debated with others opposed to the idea. On Monday, after over a week of infighting and physical threats to the organizers, the event was cancelled. As of Tuesday, 61 people had pledged to attend, while 49 said they “maybe” would. The event page has since been taken down.

The protest was aimed at specific Vatican policies, rather than Catholicism in general, according to Firas Taher, the organizer. These included the “embargo of contraception,” the “cover ups for pastors in clear cases of child molestation,” the “unjustified hatred and discrimination towards homosexuals,” the Pope’s “unexplained wealth,” and his “stand on abortion,” said Taher in correspondence with NOW Lebanon.

The cancellation raises the question of whether such a protest is yet possible in Lebanon, a country often seen as the freest in the Middle East but one in which public criticism of religious institutions remains taboo. “Are you serious? The religious assholes will slaughter us,” said one Facebook commenter, echoing the concerns of many. Indeed, within days Taher announced on the social network that he had “received a threat” to “hurt” participants in the protest.

Taher insists, however, that it was not security concerns that drove him to call the protest off. “The event wasn’t cancelled because of the threats, the threats were there from the beginning,” he told NOW Lebanon. “I cancelled the event because I realized that the Lebanese public is not ready for a demonstration of this type.”

“Most Lebanese people do not understand what a real protest is; their perception of a protest is people starting fights and burning tires and cars. This protest will definitely be misinterpreted and will only cause more problems.” Indeed, some mistakenly believed the event to be organized by Muslim extremists, following a call by Salafist cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad in early August to prevent the Pope’s visit on the grounds that he had “insulted” Islam. “Many of those who actually read the event description thought this was a religiously affiliated and/or a violent demonstration. Imagine what people who haven’t even read the description would think of it,” said Taher.

From a purely legal perspective, too, it’s unclear if such a protest would be possible. Lawyer and constitutional expert Marwan Sakr believes it would be protected under free speech legislation, provided demonstrators did not personally insult the Pope. “It’s a free speech issue, so as long as it’s peaceful there should be no problem,” he told NOW. “However, it is a crime to insult the Pope, because he is a head of state and we have legal provisions against insulting heads of state. There are a couple of articles in the civil code that were used very frequently during the Syrian occupation years against those attacking the Syrian president. So if anti-Pope demonstrators get really aggressive with their statements, they could be prosecuted.”

For their part, the organizers of the Pope’s visit told NOW they would not prevent demonstrators from staging protests. “If somebody wants to voice their opinion we cannot stop them,” said Father Abdo Bou Kassm, media coordinator of the Pope Visit’s Campaign. “But I can tell you that every Lebanese from all sects and parties welcomes the arrival of the Pope.” All the same, Bou Kassm told NOW that a number of security measures were being taken, including electronic frisks at entrances to the Pope’s various destinations.

Civil society groups, too, defended the rights of the protesters. “In a country where we have so many religious communities as well as people who don’t believe in any religion, you cannot shut everybody up. We have to agree to disagree,” said Lea Baroudi, co-founder of the MARCH NGO promoting free expression. “As long as the demonstration is not threatening or violent, then they are free to express whatever feelings they have.”

Baroudi dismisses the idea that Lebanon isn’t ready for a Pope protest. “Our authorities always deal with these things by saying we’re not ready, everything is taboo, but this only creates more frustration. I think we underestimate the Lebanese population. People can handle it.”

Taher, however, is less hopeful. “I do not believe that I will live to see an anti-Pope protest in Lebanon.”

Omar El-Tani contributed reporting.

God's war on medicine

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

An ongoing debate concerns the matter of whether religion and science are compatible; symbiotic; antagonistic; or even, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “non-overlapping magisteria”. As two pieces of news this week show, this is no irrelevant, ivory-tower squabble between bespectacled egg-heads, but a practical question with real, often grave, consequences in the real world.

Take the case of the cleric Maulvi Ibrahim Chisti, of Pakistan’s Punjab province, who has declared vaccination against polio to be “un-Islamic” and called for “jihad” against all those involved in its proliferation. His reason? The vaccine is a “poison”; a “Western conspiracy” designed to render the Muslim population impotent.

Polio is, of course, one of those diseases like smallpox that shouldn’t exist anymore. Science conquered it as long ago as 1950, and it is now entirely eradicated in the developed world. Yet according to the World Health Organisation, it’s actually on the rise in Pakistan, with over 150,000 children not immunized against it, largely thanks to the terrifying propaganda of religious charlatans like Chisti.

But hey, this kind of stuff only happens in the ill-educated, impoverished tribal backwaters of Asia, right? Wrong. Consider the recent statement by senior American Roman Catholic bishops that President Obama’s health care plan threatens religious liberty in a way not seen since the beheading of Thomas More in the 16th century. The grievance in this case was Obama’s refusal to remove contraception from proposed health insurance packages. Of course, by this logic, a Jehovah’s Witness might argue that the inclusion of blood transfusions is also an egregious assault on his faith, just as I might invent a religion right now that claims (on equally valid evidence) that rape is virtuous, and decry state opposition to this as Stalinist brutality, and so on.

It comes down to this: If what my doctor says contradicts what your holy book says, my doctor wins. And if you want to exempt yourself from condoms or the polio vaccine or gathering sticks on the Sabbath, you’re more than welcome to do so, but you may not force the rest of us to follow you.

Holocaust "mostly horseshit", says Mel Gibson

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

In what must surely count as one of history’s most tersely-phrased utterances of five-star fruitcakery and fanaticism, the actor Mel Gibson recently described the Holocaust as “mostly a lot of horseshit”, according to a letter penned by a Hollywood screenwriter with whom Gibson was working on a now-scrapped film about the Jewish historical figure Judah Maccabee.

Of course, this kind of bigotry is more or less routine for Gibson, whose previous outbursts include informing a Los Angeles police officer that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” and telling his then-girlfriend that she deserved to “get raped by a pack of niggers”. Even so, one finds oneself whistling at the sheer variety of epithets in this latest trove.

As the letter says: “[Gibson] continually called Jews “Hebes” and “oven-dodgers” and “Jewboys” […] [He] said most “gatekeepers” of American companies were “Hebes” who “controlled their bosses […] [He] said the Torah made reference to the sacrifice of Christian babies and infants […] [He said] the mothers of the last three Popes of the Catholic church were Jewish [and] there was a Jewish/Masonic conspiracy to destroy the Catholic church […] [He] referred to Pope John Paul as “the devil” [who] “destroyed the church”” by implementing Vatican II, which famously repealed the charge of Christ-killing against world Jewry (a theme to which he repeatedly returns throughout the letter). “Perhaps most disturbing [was his comment that] “What I really want to do with this movie […] is to convert the Jews to Christianity.””

Indeed, what interests me much more than the crude insults and petty racism is his obsession with the supposed threat posed by Jews to his faith, which in its rank paranoia and delusion exceeds even the efforts of Osama Bin Laden. The religious underpinnings of Gibson’s habitual explosions are still poorly understood by the wider public. As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in a 2010 article titled ‘Mel Gibson Isn’t Just an Angry Narcissist’, Gibson is a member of a “schismatic crackpot sect” of Catholicism, “headed by [his] father, Hutton Gibson” that has “never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews”. Seen in this context, Gibson’s latest remarks are yet another reminder – if anybody needed one – of the infinite ways in which religious ideologies nurture and cultivate, rather than restrain, the cancers of hatred and extremism.

An Alternative Asset: A review of Nasri Atallah's 'Our Man in Beirut'

“I don’t want to turn into one of those pathetic creatures who are always homesick, always saying I wish I were still in Beirut. I don’t want to become like you, split between here and there. I know I’m not happy here, but why should I be unhappy in two countries?” – Asmahan in Hanan al-Shaykh’s Beirut Blues

At one point in Pope Benedict XVI’s most recent Christmas greeting to the Roman Curia, after having blamed the European debt crisis on atheism and dared to defend the Christian mission in Africa (will we ever get an apology for Catholic crimes in Rwanda?), he more or less gave the entire game away by saying that the best argument for faith was that it enabled one to succumb to the happy idea that the Universe was created with us in mind after all:

Where does joy come from? How is it to be explained? Certainly, there are many factors at work here. But in my view, the crucial one is this certainty, based on faith: I am wanted; I have a task in history; I am accepted, I am loved.

Every ribbon of DNA within me revolts against this infantile talk of a ‘divine plan’. And yet, on some days, it can almost sound plausible. Thus in the same month that I quit my job as a financial analyst to move to Beirut to pursue a writing career, I find in my Christmas stocking a new book written by a man who has quit his job as a financial analyst to move to Beirut to pursue a writing career. Like me, it transpires, this man is British, and yet like me, also, he is a ‘Third Culture Kid’. Both of us have spent years living in London. When I tell you, dear reader, that we even shared the same supermarket in Holborn, where he once worked and I once lived in student halls, you will see, I think, why I had to write this review. 

Martin Amis once said of Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village that it “looks like a book and feels like a book but in important respects it isn’t a book”. Our Man in Beirut isn’t really a book either, being instead a collection of his blog posts, or “rants”, shuffled out of chronological order for reasons that don’t become apparent. Some of them are humorous, and some of them aren’t supposed to be humorous, but all of them are markedly, peculiarly readable.

I use the word cautiously; strictly in the sense that the book is easier to pick up than to put back down. This isn’t to say that the prose itself is a thing of particular beauty. We are told that Flaubert is a favourite writer of Atallah’s, but there is little evidence of any labour expended in search of les mots justes. The words “pretty much” find their way into far too many sentences where they don’t belong, as does the phrase “maybe, just maybe”. It’s claimed that our author has a “deep-seated hatred of the cliché”, and yet he can be found “running like a headless chicken”; “cast[ing] all caution to the wind”; “pulling the rug from under” things; “tak[ing] in the sights and sounds”; “enjoy[ing] a good party as much as the next guy” and solemnly telling us that his father has “travelled to the four corners of the earth”. Elsewhere, some things are “full to the brim” while others are “slim pickings”; people are “unsung heroes” and Lebanon is a “concrete jungle”. Every writer must be forgiven the occasional stale or lazy expression, but in a book that numbers fewer than 150 pages, one can only be so clement. Put simply, I’m not convinced that the man loves language. This is a terrible thing to make a reader suspect. 

It is left to his humour, then, to give life to the pages. That he has a gift here is undeniable, especially when it comes to dialogue. Try the following dilation on Lebanese driving:

People drive the wrong way down one-way streets, and they do this at full speed as if to cancel the illegality of their move by amplifying it. Boy racers zigzag in and out of traffic on battered scooters, ponytails flapping in the wind. Traffic cops urge you to ignore red lights: “Yalla! Arrib! Mfakarhallak bi Fransa?”¹

Or how about the ghoulish aunts gossiping in Gemmayze cafes about the errant niece who postpones marriage for a career:

“Yvette, you know I don’t like to talk, yaane I’m very discreet, bta3rfineh. Bass cette Maya, she’ll never find a husband like zis. She wants to be a banker 2al. Haram her parents, 3an jad. Bass ca reste between us!²

He mentions at one point that he is writing a novel: I hope very much that it will be a comic one. But I would urge him to be on guard against what one might call the Jon Stewart Syndrome – from which he is a slight sufferer – whereby a joke that could be funny if pitched intelligently is compromised by cheap recourse to the elbow in the ribs. Take this example:

When I was studying for a master’s in international politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I always used to give my papers unnecessarily complicated names, casually sprinkled with words I didn’t understand, colons and subtitles. Things like “Pseudo Dualistic Dichotomies in Post-War Glasgow: How Factory Workers Overcame the Unicornification of Labour and Triumphed Over Plethorism.”

Contrast this with Jim Dixon’s coming to terms with a similar piece of intellectual bankruptcy in Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485.’

Amis’ title is funny because one really can imagine such chloroform actually existing somewhere. The person who laughs at “Unicornification” will, I’m afraid, laugh at anything.

Yet one of Atallah’s appeals is that when he is funny, he often makes a very unfunny point at the same time. Here is his summary of the Lebanese attitude to politics:

Choose one of a plethora of local petty leaders. Adore them. Place their pictures on your car, balcony and other visible areas that may come under your ownership. Follow these leaders blindly, regardless of how racist, irrational and frightening they may be.

Most of the Lebanese that I know could laugh at this. Yet it was precisely this factionalism that, barely a generation ago, dragged the country into a fifteen-year bloodbath that left well over 100,000 Lebanese dead. Indeed, in more than a few cases, today’s “petty leaders” are the very same warlords responsible. That this doesn’t appear to detract from their popular support is a paradox deftly caught by Atallah: “We’ve come to expect very little from our leaders, all the while bestowing them with demi-god status”. 

As for God himself, I was disappointed to find he gets conspicuously friendly treatment in Our Man. The satire of religion has of course been a staple of comic literature since at least the poetry of Omar Khayyam. For Atallah – a self-avowed atheist – to discard this exorbitantly bountiful stock of material is a great, and grave, sacrifice. (He does, I should say, get one jab in: “I had a Haitian cab driver in Miami once who recited a good portion of the New Testament as he was speeding down a busy highway, which I took to mean he was intent on sending us headfirst into the harbour”. Interesting that nobody has to have this joke explained to them.)

Atallah states no purpose or objective in his introduction, so an ultimate appraisal of the book’s ‘success’ isn’t possible. However, he does tell us at one point that “there are ambitions I have in Beirut. I want to be part of the generation that comes back and makes a difference.” His triumphs, from shaming Lebanese racism to extolling the pleasures of walking in Beirut to his passion for Lebanese theatre and architecture to his attacks on the “grotesque” plastic surgery culture mean that, whatever the book’s shortcomings, Our Man is a tangible first step toward that difference. 

¹ "Come on! Go! You think you're living in France?"

² "Yvette, you know I don't like to talk, I mean I'm very discreet, you know me. But this Maya, she'll never find a husband like this. She wants to be a banker, so she says. Her poor parents, really. But this stays between us!"