To a hammer, everything looks like a nail
A couple more thoughts on Dabashi, because they tie into other things, into larger subjects. (Which, come to think of it, is part of what he is claiming about Nafisi and RLT. It’s a reasonable enough thing to claim, it’s just that he does such a terrible job of it. It could for instance be the case that RLT, whether intentionally or by accident, did something to increase US hostility toward the Iranian regime; but that’s a rather different thing from claiming that, for instance, ‘there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi.’ You’ll notice I haven’t been claiming there is no difference between Hamid Dabashi and Iran’s religious police. That would be because I think there’s a difference.)
There is some inconsistency, especially in the interview.
…my critique is almost entirely directed at the substance of RLT, with a very minimum attention to its context. The fact that the author of RLT is a well-known, well-connected, and well-funded neocon, employed by the principle doctrinaire of neo-conservatism Paul Wolfowitz (when he was the head of SAIS), endorsed by the most diabolical anti-Muslim neocon alive Bernard Lewis, and promoted by a scandalous PR firm like Benador Associates, and many other similar indications are all entirely tangential to the substance of my critique…
Well if all that is ‘entirely tangential’ why does he mention it so often and so emphatically and hyperbolically? The tangential doesn’t get hammered on that way.
I am not privy to any information whether this has been a conscious or unconscious choice…Of course I do not mean “recruitment” literally. How would I know if she was or was not recruited to do anything? I am not privy to any such information—whether she is or is not recruited…The accoutrement of neoconservative power that has purchased and promoted that book is entirely tangential and rather irrelevant to the substance of that book and the relevance of my criticism…I am not in the least interested in how her career opportunism has led her to corridors of power without an iota of scholarly credentials to her name…What I am interested in is understanding how the inner dynamics of this vulgar empire works—and how comprador intellectuals like Azar Nafisi and her ilk proceed to manufacture consent for it…Fouad Ajami and Kanaan Makiyyah had made a very powerful case for the US invasion of Iraq…these people disappear from the public scene and there is no court or public forum where one can take these criminal comprador intellectuals and hold them accountable for their deeds. The same is now true about the neocon cohort of Fouad Ajami, namely his SAIS colleague Azar Nafisi.
He doesn’t know, he’s not interested, and yet he does know, and he is interested.
As you rightly document this, I am not “suggesting” anything. I am saying that chapter and verse people like Azar Nafisi have been actively involved in asking the United States officials for what inside the Beltway they call “regime change”—and now there are reports that she and her ilk…are actually on a frequent flier program to and from DC, with regular visits to the White House, the State Department, and Almighty only knows what other doors Elliott Abrams (“the Neocons Neocon”) is opening for them. I am afraid Azar Nafisi’s “friends in Washington,” as she calls them, are precisely people like Paul Wolfowitz, Foad Ajami, Bernard Lewis, and Elliot Abrams.
But, but, that is all tangential to his critique of her book; that’s why he’s so bashful about it all.
What you have in such figures as Azar Nafisi and Foad Ajami is really a band of politically pestiferous career opportunists, peanuts really in the grand scheme of things, utterly illiterate, but at the service of exceedingly powerful people who waste millions of our tax money trying to put a spin on a reality that keeps exploding in their barefaced barbarity. I have said before and I have argued that here is an organic link between what Lynndie England did in Abu Ghraib and what Azar Nafisi did in RLT—and what holds these two underlings in the service of George W. Bush’s war on terror…etc etc
Diffident, tentative, careful, scholarly stuff, befitting a tangential subject that he isn’t interested in and (by his own account) wouldn’t know about. What would he have said if he had been interested and had known, one wonders.
One thing that’s interesting about all this is the hyperbole. Dabashi makes Nafisi sound extremely powerful, barely less powerful than Wolfowitz or even Rumsfeld. On the face of it that’s just silly. She’s a writer, and a literary writer at that; how powerful can she be? But then, Dabashi is a teacher of comparative literature. If he makes a literary writer sound immensely powerful by giving an interpretation of her work, he makes himself sound immensely powerful at the same time. Nafisi is the wicked powerful writer, Dabashi is the good powerful literary critic who explains her wicked designs. No one would have known, no one would have understood, all would have proceeded in secret, had it not been for the brave perceptive righteously angry teacher of comparative literature at Columbia. What a great, wise, impassioned, ardent, benevolent and powerful man he must be.
Could that be what’s going on here? Could that be a large part of the reason for this unpleasant and unwarranted outburst? Why yes, I think it could. I think it’s a vulgar and nasty bit of careerism and cv-polishing along with a healthy dose of ego-inflating. I think Dabashi was posturing and showing off and bigging himself up, I think he was splashing some red paint on his radical credentials. It’s like Xenophanes’s observation – if cattle and horses or lions had gods, they would look like cattle and horses or lions. To a teacher of comparative literature, literary writers and their interpreters look like the center of the universe.
Everybody has a point – including Hamid Dabashi. RTL does occasionally sink to the Ann Coulter level and play to the Joe Sixpack gallery.
Part IV of RTL begins with the sentence “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.”
Yeah – I laughed out loud and snorted my coffee through my nostrils. The message seems to be: what do you expect of these subhuman towelheads? Nothing like a microdose of hate literature to ginger up the jaded reading public.
Never without my daughter. Never without my mother in law. Never without my second cousin twice removed. Never without my Yorkshire terrier. Reading Playboy in Kanachistan. Reading Deep Throat in Downtown Bagdad. Reading Fanny Hill in the Gaza Strip.
OK, that’s not awfully funny either – but perhaps there is a glut of what German Islamologists somewhat snootily call ‘Schleierliteratur’ (veil literature), if only out of envy that people actually buy the stuff and the authors become celebrities, unlike themselves.
In fact RTL is a fascinating book – but not for its bijou pretentiousness in dragging in Nabokov, Jane Austen et al. It’s fascinating when it comes to describing what these girls have to say about their daily lives, not about their contrived interpretations of the Western Canon.
Hope I’ve got that right – I haven’t actually read RTL from cover to cover yet but a random sample is always good for starters.
Oops, for RTL read RLT = Reading Lolita in Tehran (info for newcomers unfamiliar with the acronyms)
Oh come on, Cathal – do try to read carefully. That sentence is many times removed – it’s multiple layers of not being a literal statement by Nafisi. Of course the message doesn’t seem to be “what do you expect of these subhuman towelheads?”. It’s one of the students who says it, she says it “in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly ironic,” it’s a modified quotation from Austen, who herself was being multiply ironic, it’s promptly given a different spin by another student – and so on.
I’ve already said more than once that Dabashi has a point. I have reservations about the book myself, and I also have qualms about the whole problem of giving ammunition to Bush types who invade first and think about consequences years afterward. But the fact that Dabashi has a point doesn’t excuse him for all those wild and inaccurate accusations, nor for the puglistic style. A thug may have a point and still be a thug.
Now, see, I no sooner say that than I check my email and find one from Azar Majedi, with a speech she gave at a women’s rights conference in Düsseldorf. The title and subtitle are “Mass resistance is the other side of large scale oppression: The reality of women’s liberation movement in Iran”
I’ll be publishing that, despite the (tiny) risk of its being co-opted by the Pentagon. That’s how it goes.
Ophelia,
I know its from Austen, honest, I’ve been thru Cliff’s Notes.
I agree with you that one should read carefully — but people who don’t write carefully are liable to be misunderstood by people who don’t have the time to pore over every line. One man’s off-the-cuff irony is another’s kick in the cojones.
The message is pretty clear anyhow: most Muslim males are, on the whole, to some degree, give or take a bit of irony, and we’re only joking anyway, assholes.
Why call such a statement ‘racist’, though? Perhaps its ‘religionist’. Say no to religionism? Anyway, my point is that provoking a guffaw doesn’t really help answer the question: what makes these guys tick?
Of course you are right about Dabashi — if you enjoy polemics as an art form without concern for its truth value, he reigns supreme. Still, I think he’s right about the randomness of the particular Western Canon books covered in RLT. Why not Middlemarch or Jude The Obscure or Bleak House? Why not the Vagina Monologues?
In lit crit, anything goes, I suppose.
“Of course you are right about Dabashi — if you enjoy polemics as an art form without concern for its truth value, he reigns supreme.”
Aargh! That’s not what I’m saying! I do indeed enjoy polemics as an art form, and that’s one big reason I find Dabashi appalling – he’s a terrible polemicist. That’s not art, it’s vulgar brawling. Polemics as an art form is Hazlitt, it’s Gibbon, it’s Macaulay; it’s Mencken, Mary McCarthy, Twain, Amis (both), Hitchens. It’s Marjane Satrapi. It’s a million miles from being Hamid Dabashi.
“The message is pretty clear anyhow: most Muslim males are, on the whole, to some degree, give or take a bit of irony, and we’re only joking anyway, assholes.”
No, I’m sorry, but that is not the clear message of that line. It’s directed at the regime, not at all or most Muslim males. Lowering the marriage age for girls to 9 is one of the first things the regime did. RLT is about the regime, it’s not about all/most Muslim men.
“Anyway, my point is that provoking a guffaw doesn’t really help answer the question: what makes these guys tick?”
So? Why should it? One, it’s one sentence out of a 400 page book (much too long, in my view, but that’s another subject); two, why does that have to be the subject matter anyway? What if the book is not about what makes these guys tick but about the experience of these women? What if it’s about action rather than motivation?
“Why not Middlemarch or Jude The Obscure or Bleak House?”
Well if it had discussed Middlemarch and Jude The Obscure and Bleak House would you be asking why not Gatsby and Lolita and Pride and Prejudice?
I won’t shout at you if you don’t answer this time though.
I have reservations about the book, as I’ve said (probably to the point of tedium). I just want to be, you know, fair.
Ships that pass in the night — well, my defence of Dabashi was basically of the quicky advocatus diaboli sort, I suppose.
I agree that the book is far too long — that’s one of the reasons I flicked thru it.
Just expurgate all the lit stuff and it would be quite fine.
And thanks for giving me a break before I continue to plough my narrow furrow.
Yeah. I frankly don’t like all that literary vaporing; all that detail, all that description, all that Fine Writing. There’s way too much of it, and it’s not good enough for how much of it there is. That kind of thing gets on my nerves. I like concision.
I’m a little late to this particular party but I have to add the following comments:-
Dabishi is evidently influenced by Edward Said. Said is an elegant and restrained writer – “But we must be as fastidious as possible,” he says in Culture and Imperialism. What would he have made of all this boorish flailing about by his disciple? The highly educated Professor Frankenstein appalled at the lurching monster, I would guess.
That bit about the picture of the girls on the cover – well, he reads a lot more into it than I ever could, but then of course reading more and more into less and less is his job. So he compares them to pictures that are obviously erotic in intention, of the harem woman of fantasy doing the dance of the Seven Veils, and says that is how they are supposed to be seen. Input needed from heterosexual men – is that how you saw (or “saw” as a post modernist would write) the cover picture? As for me, there were two young women from Teheran and Iran, a city and a country much in the news, which does not belong in my mind to an exotic Orient but in the realistic worlds of modern politics and modern totalitarianism in Muslim dress.