This
week Time magazine reported that Nobel Prize winner Naguib
Mahfouz died at 94. They called him a hero. The book
Time called "his bravest" was Children
of the Alley, a parable of Islam which was banned
in most Arab countries. Mahfouz was condemned to death by
a fatwa but continued to roam about in his native Cairo. One
day he was stabbed.
That
did not stop him. He held salons (something I suggest writers
do more often -- I even used a salon as a launch for my book
of creative nonfiction, Harkening)
where he encouraged people to discuss whatever they wanted
to and I shouldn't need to remind you that Egypt is a Muslim
country. Thus, he won. Those who seek to silence lost. He
once told a fellow, Paul Theroux, "I feel no hatred,
but it is very bad to try to kill someone for a book you haven't
read."
Because I write
often about tolerance (This Is the Place, Harkening, Tracings)
this, of course, touched me. In fact, I was doubly touched
because Mahfouz's story illustrates not only religious and
political intolerance but also intolerance against books.
Today the publishing industry (that includes all of us --
reviewers, readers, presses, distributors, etc) is committing
a fatwa of sorts against books that are not printed on an
offset press, the books of authors who choose to publish alternatively
not necessarily -- I might add -- because no traditional press
will have them. There are dozens of other reasons why authors
choose a more independent route.
Isn't this like
judging a book by its cover? Doesn't it feel like an effort
to silence those who speak with a different voice? You may
say I am reaching. Perhaps I am. But I think Mahfouz would
likely have agreed that an attempt to kill a book, either
directly or coming at it from an angle by denying it without
knowing anything about its content, its quality -- is at least
distant kin to trying to kill the author who wrote it. To
us authors, at least, our books are living, breathing part
of us. We don't want to see them die because others are unwilling
to judge them on their own merits.
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