Stories From the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction

Introduction

The center of the world, where recorded civilization got its start over 7,000 years ago, can be found in southwestern Asia, in ancient Mesopotamia. It can be found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Torah and the Talmud, in The Odyssey and The Iliad of Homer; in Zoroastrianism, which predated the Qu’ran by over 2,000 years; in A Thousand and One Nights and in the literature of everyone from Khalil Gibran to Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Ahdaf Souief, Nizar Qabbani, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmood Darwish, Forugh Farrokhzad, Amin Maalouf, Edward Said, Hisham Matar, Assia Dejar, Kateb Yacine and too many more to name.

Eventually nationalism took root, as it did in Europe, and the ancient civilizations became identified as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the many other countries, small and large, that stretch from the Mashriq to the Maghreb — from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east to Morocco in the west.

But in 1902, American naval historian and retired admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan expressed a hegemonic vision of the world in a paper he published in the National Review. In “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” Mahan described the western Asian region from the Gulf to the Mediterranean as “the Middle East,” suggesting that whichever navy controlled that part of the world would hold the key to world domination. After World War I, Europeans jumped into the fray with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, divvied up the region, with several countries coming under British or French influence. The domino effect of outsiders meddling in the affairs of west Asian nations led to the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference, the partition of Palestine, the creation of Trans-Jordan (a British protectorate for 25 years), the division of Greater Syria into Syria and Lebanon, the end of Palestine and the establishment of Israel…right up to the year 1953, when the CIA with the machinations of MI6, succeeded in fomenting the overthrow of Iran’s democratically-elected leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, which 26 years later, would lead to the anti-Shah uprising that became known as the Iranian or Islamic Revolution.

All of this to say that “the Middle East” or the “Near East” are akin to exonyms, terms used by outsiders to define others as they often do not define themselves; they are convenient catch phrases that continue to cause consternation today among those of us who are from the center of the world. Lebanese poet and translator Huda Fakhreddine calls the “Middle East” a trap — “a made-up thing, a construct of history and treacherous geography, the Middle East as an American trope, a stage for identity politics.”

To be sure, neither Rear Admiral Mahan nor Lord Balfour, much less Mark Sykes, François Georges-Picot, or any of the other many thousands of western politicians, secret agents, generals, businessmen and other meddlers have ever given much thought or exhibited empathy when it comes to what it means to be Iraqi or Syrian or Iranian or Egyptian, or Palestinian. Geopolitics has been capitalism’s overlord and nationalism’s emperor, serving agendas that have little to do with the needs of real people.

It is a given that governments prefer borders and passports, shored up by flags and patriotism, while people will always find a way to relate to one another, in spite of their nationalities. Personally, I prefer the metaphor of the mosaic or the salad when it comes to parsing my own identity, understanding that we are all the sum of multiple parts, and thus neither quite this nor that. Just as it takes several colors to create a mosaic, and a salad contains diverse ingredients, each of us is much more than our national identity card.

Judging from my DNA, I am 50% North African, Moroccan on my father’s side, but I carry two passports, French and American, and feel myself an honorary Palestinian, because with the freedom of Palestinians comes our own liberation. By all appearances, I am a privileged male who passes for white, yet I have always identified with women, underdogs and people of color. As a result, the center of the world has been my center these past many years, since before 9/11. In fact, I became closer to my North African roots as a result of living in Spain in the lead-up to the 1992 Quincentennial, when there was a lot of talk about the Spanish Muslims and Jews who were effectively exiled from Spain as a result of the Inquisition in 1492. They left a powerful imprint on the soul of the country, as Marie Rosa Menocal so elegantly describes in her classic work, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002). But the convivencia that Menocal described was not merely a period of Spanish history; to me as a multifaceted American and citizen of the world, this coexistence, this cultural entente was innate to southwest Asian societies. In the aftermath of the Nakba, the Islamic Revolution and the Iraq War, however, the region has lost much of its organic diversity, and now economic strife and climate devastation continue what western meddlers started over a hundred years ago.

Not all is doom and gloom when it comes to the center of the world today, however, because despite the failures of the Green Movement, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, “What has not changed is West Asia’s geopolitical centrality,” as Chas Freeman has written. “It is where Africa, Asia, and Europe and the routes that connect them meet. The region’s cultures cast a deep shadow across northern Africa, Central, South and Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean. It is the epicenter of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the three ‘Abrahamic religions’ that together shape the faiths and moral standards of over three-fifths of humankind. This gives the region global reach.”

This is the time for the original voices of people from the region to be heard — for Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, Middle Eastern Jews, Armenians, Turks, Afghans, Pakistanis, the Amazigh and Kabyl peoples, Druze, Assyrians, Copts, Yezidis et alia to speak up, and speak out.

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Stories From the Center of the World is a collection of 25 fictions, divided into three sections, loosely themed around immigration, love and family, and death and immortality. Many of the writers live outside the countries where they were born and often write about. As a result, I think of them as exquisite insider-outsiders — the natural condition of all writers, I would argue, is to be both within and from the world of which we write, and yet hovering at its edge, almost as if we don’t quite belong.

Hanif Kureishi takes up the cause of outsiders in “Asha and Haaji” who become unrooted when war or disaster strikes and they flee for safe haven. Asha, who describes himself as a harmless bookworm with no religion, notes that “no terrorist ever found inspiration in Kafka,” and seduces the younger, whiter Haaji with his erudition. He reminds us that “the foreigner has been suspect from the beginning of time,” and we are not surprised when Asha realizes that in polite London society, he is a pariah, an outcast.

In “The Salamander,” the young Lebanese American writer Sarah AlKahly-Mills champions women and girls, who want to escape abusive men and poverty. The salamander becomes a metaphor for regeneration, and as a result, hope for a better tomorrow. In “The Suffering Mother of the Whole World” by Amany Kamal Eldin, Nadia El Sha’er returns to Cairo to visit her retired father and weary grandmother, but knows that she feels far more at home in her American life. Unmarried, she exults in her freedom and exhibits no desire to move back to Cairo. For Nadia, having become an American, being Egyptian now is a matter of nostalgia.

In Ahmed Naji’s “Godshow.com,” another Egyptian exile searches for a place in Las Vegas to pray, but one feels that the exercise will be in vain, that the search is just for show, for appearances. “All I had wanted was to visit a mosque, not send my children to an Islamic brainwashing laundromat.” In muscular prose, translated from Arabic by Rana Asfour, Naji winks at the reader, inviting us to experience life in his skin, albeit with just the right dose of irony. We are at once inside the character’s experience, and outside with the writer, enjoying his sharp-eyed observations.

In “Nadira of Tlemcen,” things take a more serious turn with Abdellah Taïa’s story about a young Algerian named Samir, whose father always understood that his son was different from other children, but it isn’t until Samir can escape to Paris that he will begin to become his true self. In “The Afghan and the Persian,” a literature professor from Kabul has no choice but to become a harraga, and finds himself in France following a shipwreck. “Why have I come here? I washed up on your shores as a man who loves books and words and libraries and ideas. I thought by coming here, I could save myself.”

Often the men, women and children in these stories have no choice but to flee their troubled countries, but in Malu Halasa’s “A Dog in the Woods,” an Arab patriarch remembers how he became an educator in Ohio, and raised his children to be more American than Arab; he had little desire to look back, and successfully assimilated, but his children do not seem quite so assured in their identity.

With the second part of the book, “The Question of Love,” writers recount divergent tales of love and loss, strained family relations, and dashed dreams. Farah Ahamed’s innovative love story, “Anarkali, or Six Early Deaths in Lahore,” upends expectations as it recounts events from the end to the beginning, and the poor street sweeper known as Anarkali (not her real name) is a surprisingly articulate narrator. In Alireza Iranmehr’s “Buenos Aires of Her Eyes,” translated by novelist Salar Abdoh, a love story between an octogenarian and a much younger woman strikes us as both inevitably tragic and absurd, but also touching and inspirational. The old man — an Iranian transplanted to Switzerland, who is said to have been in love only twice in his life — instructs his children that, “Each person lives in their own special universe. A place no one else can know and yet is not impossible to imagine.” Iranmehr’s story, like the others in this anthology, invites the reader into the special universes of a diverse cast of characters who are each fallible, vulnerable, and yet incredibly strong at the same time, fortified by the experience of having started life over in a new country, often in a new language, braving rejection, and sometimes persecution, as they slowly adjust to their new lives.

We find reliable narrators in the stories by Nektaria Anastasiadou, MK Harb, Leila Aboulela, Danial Haghighi and Natasha Tynes, which all take place among people who have not had to leave their country, yet confront situations in which love itself is a questionable unguent or adhesive. Love may not be enough, it might not solve all problems, but clearly we are better off living with it, as ugly as things can get.

In Anastasiadou’s “The Location of the Soul According to Benyamin Alhadeff,” two students in Istanbul issued from different classes — and religions that have often been at odds with one another — believe they can overcome all obstacles. In Harb’s story, “Counter Strike,” we’re invited to empathize with queer love among Beiruti adolescents, yet we may find ourselves scoffing internally at Al-Naas’ heteronormative character in “The Cactus.” Aboulela’s “Raise Your Head High” features a sympathetic narrator, who loves her sister Dunia (married to a creep) but is hounded by her Tante Walaa. She ultimately seems like a very lonely soul, right up to the moment that the Egyptian uprising erupts, on January 25, 2011. In Haghighi’s “Here, Freedom,” an arranged marriage turns out not to be quite what it seems, right when Iran is going through another series of protests. And in “The Agency,” Natasha Tynes invites us to experience traditional Amman, as men and women look for their ideal mate via a dating agency that has developed its own peculiar classification for what passes for a virtuous woman (the men are under no such scrutiny).

Finally, in the last section, “The Roots of Heaven,” Salar Abdoh invites us into the world of former militants, fighters who fought ISIS or Daesh in Iraq and Syria, who are having a hard time readjusting to civilian life. There is glory in being a martyr, but not everyone makes the cut. In Mai Al-Nakib’s “The Burden of Inheritance,” a departed husband’s death turns out to be the beginning of a calvary, as his wife discovers that art can become a wearisome housemate. Do we best remember our loved ones via their words, or the work they leave behind?

Karim Kattan, a native of Bethlehem who writes in both French and English, tells an unexpected Palestinian story, almost haunting in its detail, in which the usual boogeymen — Israeli occupation forces — are mostly absent, while another malevolent force seems to overtake an unsuspecting family. The brother in “Eleazar” is both an innocent and a potential suspect, and his sister Mariam, who narrates, seems out of her depth.

The young Lebanese American writer, May Haddad, takes readers on an outer space journey in their speculative fiction, “Ride on, Shooting Star,” in which Carna’ is an unconventional heroine to say the least. Here, the future seems inconsequential, while the present looms as large as the known universe. There are, of course, no pat answers, but we are somehow with this young cosmic courier all the way, dreaming with Carna’ that she will find her utopia. In Tariq Mahmood’s “The Settlement,” the oldest and tallest tree in the world is at the center of a controversy in which a jailed mystery woman resists interrogation. And in Sahar Mustafah’s “The Peacock,” a Palestinian woman who has become an internal migrant to escape her futureless existence, finds her power unleashed when she decides to risk everything.

Omar El Akkad’s “The Icarist” is a coming-of-age story, yes, but it’s much more than that. It is about the encounter that inevitably occurs between the haves and the have-nots, the underworld in which illegal immigrants are forced to live, and what happens when one dares to break away. A quintessential outsider, El Akkad’s thirteen-year-old Mo’min Abdelwahad is dimly aware that his future in Dubai is limited, yet he remains unilluminated for decades, until the moment he risks death.

We come to the end of our adventures with Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi’s story about a mediocre writer who imagines that he might just be able to escape his destiny, challenge what is maktub, if only he can make a deal with the devil. In “The Devil’s Waiting List,” Mansi takes the initiative, but begins to feel that he is a fool — not unlike the way one feels buying a lottery ticket.

Taken together, these 25 stories represent a collective orchestra of voices and are the beginning of an east-west conversation.

—Jordan Elgrably

Montpellier, September 2023