Some Origins of Totalitarianism

Yaacov Lozowick

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Riverhead Books, New York, ‏2007

This is not a literary review of Hosseini’s new novel. How could it be? I have no pretensions to being able to write one. Not only do I only rarely read what critics say about novels, and don’t know how they go about their trade, sadly I don’t even read much literature. Yet I’m not certain that my reading of this thought-provoking new book may not perhaps be closer to what the author intended than much of the literary attention it has drawn. It’s a fighting book, an attempt to tell us something significant about the historical context in which we’re living – ultimately, it’s about politics. A review by a politically minded historian, therefore, might not be so totally out of place.

Literary analysis runs a danger of focusing to such a degree on the metaphors and the tropes as to lose sight of the essence. Think of perhaps the single most important poem that deals with the Shoah: Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. Here’s the German original, and for non-German readers, here is John Felstiner’s fine English translation, which manages to teach the necessary German phrases as it goes. For many years, and perhaps still today, this classic was taught at any respectable German school, yet I have repeatedly been told by former students that it was so analyzed, so dissected and deciphered, it’s poetic structure and method so admired, that by the end of the lesson it was quite possible still not to understand what it was about. Given that after writing it Celan then wrote ever more obscure poetry before eventually killing himself, you wonder if perhaps he wasn’t aware how his words had been hijacked to obscure rather than clarify.

Hosseini’s second book (the first, Kite Runner, appeared in 2003) thankfully is showing no signs of retreat into a private and uncommunicative language. His prose is readable, engaging, and most important of all, very interesting. The story unfolds at a good pace, and there are quite a number of motifs that reappear at satisfying moments – Mariam points at a Volga car and much later Rasheed compares her to one; a Pinocchio film makes two appearances, one as the story first lurches, and then near the end, as closure is sought for. If it is the primary task of literature to tell us something significant about the intricacy of the human story, and more specifically, about the psychological layers of particular people, the central figures in this book all come alive for us. Is it immortal literature of the highest grade? Perhaps not, but Hosseini creates people who live in a dramatically different world than ours, who deal with matters we can hardly imagine, and it turns out that the universal – they are people – is more powerful and important than the exotic – they live in Afghanistan.

For Hosseini, living in Afghanistan is not exotic, it’s what he originally did. Although he no longer does, he has been back recently. And he cares, very much, about the land of his fathers. He wants us also to care, which is the point where my reading diverges from that of most of the reviewers whom I came across during a lazy and unscientific Google trawl. Hosseini’s Afghanistan is at war, and he’s taking sides and wants us to join him. That we’re expected to be motivated to do something, not merely to enjoy the aesthetics of the story or briefly to deplore the barbarity of some far away strangers – this didn’t seem to occur to the reviewers I saw.

Not only is Hosseini calling us to action, he is doing so according to a system. His first book was about, and dedicated to, the children of Afghanistan; this one is about and dedicated to the women. We can look forward, hopefully, to additional installments. The peasants of Afghanistan, perhaps, or the teachers.

His call to action, it seems to me, has three elements. The first focuses on the barbarity of the various warring parties in three decades of wars, the chronology of which is detailed a bit too much if the book were merely a tale of human travail. The Communists, both Soviet and Afghanis, were murderous beasts. The Mujaheedeen who defeated and replaced them, only to plunge into a horrendous civil war, were murderous beasts. Finally, the Taliban put them all to shame for sheer evil (the Buddha statues at Bamiyan serve as one of the more poignant motifs).

The Americans also waged war in Afghanistan, and their actions are directly referred to for their needless destruction, but it seemed to me that the author was being perfunctory. There is a quick discussion between two figures, one who is against all wars for the way they all end up killing innocents, but the other who rejoins that the American campaign may have a worthy goal. The conversation is not resolved, but the plot of the book is. It is the American invasion which enables the closure at the end of the book. As we know, the actual war in Afghanistan is not yet over, but this tale is as convincing as any in implying that it dare not be lost. Precisely because the author cares so deeply about the Afghanis.

The second theme is that however excessive the barbarism of the warlords and the Taliban are, they are extensions of a culture. Deviations, perhaps, but not without context. Rasheed, the central male figure, is not a bad chap by his own lights, nor by those of the society he lives in; indeed, Jalil and his wives, who stand at the side of the stage, all live by the same code, and regard Rasheed and his standards as perfectly reasonable. Woman are property, to be bought, sold, and controlled by their husbands. Even when Jalil’s wives force him to take actions he’d prefer not to, it is to save face, i.e. to preserve the code – and unless he takes the actions, they won’t get done. Women on their own cannot take action. I know that it is not permissible to say, but I’ll do so never the less: the story Hosseini tells us is that the very culture in which his actors live set the stage for its atrocities. The deviations deviate from somewhere: Rasheed, upright citizen in an unfortunate culture, is no Talib, nor even a killer… or is he?

(The barbarism of the Soviet Communists, of course, cannot be explained by the flaws of Muslim Afghanistan. They had cultural sources of their own, which are not discussed. But this doesn’t disprove anything, it merely tells that other cultures can also go awry.)

Clash of civilizations or not, the world is at war, and significant strands of Islam are at the heart of it. Which is why the third theme of the book is so very important. This, as Bernard Lewis once wrote, is that throughout the 14 centuries of its existence, Islam has been a source of inspiration and dignity for countless millions of people whose lives would have been barren, miserable and meaningless without it.

Most of the figures in the book are devout Muslims. The vicious ones cite Islam as their authority, but the humane ones are no less attached to their religion; indeed, their religion is their main source of strength. This of course should come as no surprise to anyone. Ancient world religions are intricate, complex, intelligent and contradictory systems, otherwise they would never have weathered the centuries. Harking back to the political action in the real world, the call to which is implied so fundamentally in Hosseini’s novels, we need to bear in mind how benevolent our society is, despite its many flaws, and encourage the moderate Muslims to attain something similar. For them, and for the rest of us.

Jerusalem,

September 2007