In recent years, the Gulf States have made a real effort to attract major Western cultural institutions–the Louvre, NYU, the Sorbonne– and become a player on the world cultural stage. With a rich written tradition of their own, many Arab countries are focusing on book fairs as a way to attract the literati and rival the flagship Eurocentric book fairs of London, Frankfurt and Jerusalem. But even in the relatively liberal Gulf States, there have been some problems. This year’s inaugural Dubai fair hit a roadblock when the conference organizer–Isobel Abuhoul, an independent bookseller in Dubai–disinvited British author Geraldine Bedell because her novel The Gulf Between Us has homosexual characters. Harpyness hero Margaret Atwood withdrew from the fair in protest.
But the plot thickens this week in Saudi Arabia, where this week two male novelists were detained for approaching a female novelist to ask for her autograph at the Riyadh Book Fair. They were accused of violating Saudi law prohibit social mingling of unmarried males and females:
According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, Abdu Khal and Abdullah Thabet approached female writer Halima Muzfar when they were stopped by police.
Both novelists, who were held for questioning but not charged with a crime, are demanding an apology from the conservative Muslim kingdom’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Really, Saudi Arabia? Seriously? I mean, we know you’re misogynist as hell, and you’re busy patting yourself on the back for allowing women writers at all, so we know not to hope for too much. We don’t expect you to be like freewheeling Abu Dhabi, where they’ve been running a perfectly civil and ethnically integrated book fair for 19 years now. But if you’re serious about joining the rest of us in eighteenth nineteenth twentieth twenty-first century culture, you need to cut this shit out.
What drugs are the Saudi religious police ON? The authors were asking a fellow author for her autograph. Are they so horny that they can’t imagine approaching a woman for anything that isn’t sexual?
Whenever something bills itself as for the “Promotion of Virtue” I get a very, very bad feeling…
@sarah: Me too. Probably because we’re both godless harlots.
But yeah, anytime a religion or a government is promoting virtue you can be sure that their promotional efforts will largely consist of oppressing women.
Hm, I want to comment, but I don’t know exactly how to express myself.
I think what I want to say has to do with your sentence “…so we know not to hope for too much”. Although I feel almost uncomfortable to say it, I do think that in a way Saudi Arabia should indeed be happy with the fact that women writers are ‘allowed at all’. From the point where we’re coming from it’s unbelievable that such things happen, but I think that in a culture where tradition and thought are dominated by a rigid (religious) ideology, what we perceive as (too) minor developments are experienced by many insiders as important changes.
So although I do think these acts should be protested against, judging another, for us difficult to understand culture, from our western perspective should be done carefully. And with our culture where young women feel the need to undress in front of cameras and to have sex because they think it’s ‘normal’, not because they want to, I can imagine that such conservative countries don’t find us very inspiring examples.
@Dutchie: I agree about minor developments–it’s an improvement that women writers were allowed to participate in the book fair at all, and that would not have been possible even a couple years ago.
But from any perspective, arresting male writers for trying to speak to a female write is ridiculous and embarrassing to a country that’s ostensibly trying to have a cultural event like a book fair. A book fair is nothing at all like having sex or undressing before cameras. You’re comparing apples with oranges. I think we can all agree that a free press, uncensored, and free exchange of ideas between male and female writers and professionals is absolutely necessary for a modern society, and that is still lacking in much of the Arab world.
Here’s a link to Atwood’s Guardian piece about the Dubai controversy. Of course it’s not as simple as it appears.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/21/atwood-dubai-literature-festival
@marmorea: Our own Canadian feminist, PilgrimSoul, pointed that out to me as well. I knew about Atwood’s expressing regret for dropping out, and there was definitely conflicting information about whether the book was set to launch at the fair and whether it was banned by the government. As it turned out, neither was true. Still, I applaud her stance, and here’s why:
Beldel’s novel is not sold widely in Dubai. It is still very difficult to sell books about “controversial” topics like homosexuality in that part of the world (although books about Holocaust denial and Jews drinking the blood of children are widely available and sell quite briskly).
From The Bookseller.com, a trade publication of the publishing industry:
Isobel Abulhoul, director, has now issued the following statement: “I have lived in Dubai for forty years. Based on my knowledge of who would appeal to the book-reading community in the Middle East, and having read 150 pages of Bedell’s manuscript I knew that her work could offend certain cultural sensitivities. I did not believe that it was in the festival’s long term interests to acquiesce to her publisher’s (Penguin) request to launch the book at the first festival of this nature in the Middle East.”
Whether or not the publisher wanted the book to launch at the festival is hardly the issue. “Launching” doesn’t actually mean much more than a cocktail party and a marketing push. The fact remains; the author was disinvited because the conference organizer–who is herself a bookseller–was worried about “certain cultural sensitivities.”
Given that, I think Atwood took the right stand, and I wish others had followed her. Penguin itself is familiar with this kind of cultural showdown–for years it provided protection for its employees after publishing Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and refused to pull the book from the market even after three foreign publishers were brutally attacked and one murdered by Islamic extremists.
@BeckySharper: Of course a book fair is different from having sex or undressing before cameras. The point I tried to make is that I can imagine that if we, who are from a culture where these sort of things are by many seen as normal, judge a country like Saudi Arabia because of how they treat their women, they don’t find it necessary to listen, because from their point of view we are probably treating women even worse.
And I agree with you that it is embarrassing to arrest someone on a book fair because he ask for the autograph of a female writer, but they were in fact breaking (a very lousy) law. By not arresting them, the police officer was probably not only not doing his job, but also breaking the law himself. And as history shows there are unfortunately many people who don’t have the courage to take that risk.
However, maybe there are police officers who find this law as ridiculous as we do, and do ignore it, but that wouldn’t be in the news.
I’m sorry for going on about this – I do agree with you of course on the basic issue, but the ‘feminist dialogue’ between different cultures really interests me, because it questions issues that seem obvious to us.
[...] resistant to the abuses of the religious police. Still, the zealots are as busy as ever, as I pointed out on Sunday. One human-rights activist, who will be representing the elderly woman in this case says: [...]