Literature and its symbiotic relationship with statecraft and politics
In Xanadu, wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), “Kubla Khan” built a grandiose palace for himself. Coleridge’s celebrated poem about Kublai Khan’s pleasure dome was an exercise of poetic imagination taking flight on reading some references made to the grandson of Genghis Khan (c. 1162-1227), the greatest Mongol warrior-king and empire builder from the twelfth century.
But Samarkand, unlike the fictional Xanadu, was a great capital built by Timur, or Tamerlane, the fourteenth century warrior-king and empire builder from Central Asia. Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), Shakespeare’s contemporary and rival, celebrated the builder of Samarkand in his Tamburlaine the Great, a play written in two parts. Marlowe’s hero speaks of his capital glowingly:
Then shall my native city, Samarcanda…
Be famous through the furthest continents,
For there my palace-royal shall be placed,
Whose shining turrets shall dismay the heavens,
And cast the fame of lion’s tower to hell.
Much later the American poet Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) wrote an epic poem in praise of “Tamerlane.” In recalling the famed city located on the ancient Silk Road to China, Poe eulogized:
Look ‘round thee now on Samarcand,
Is she not queen of earth? her pride
Above all cities? in her hand
Their destinies? with all beside
Of glory, which the world hath known?
Stands she not proudly and alone?
And who her sovereign? Timur he
Whom th’ astonish’d earth has seen,
With victory, on victory,
Redoubling age!
Today Samarkand in contemporary Uzbekistan is a UNESCO World Heritage site rescued from obscurity into which it had fallen. I visited Timur’s capital on a journey along the Silk Road some years ago. I spent an afternoon at Timur’s ornate mausoleum where the great conqueror lies buried at the foot of his Sufi master. Amin Maalouf, the brilliantly imaginative and graceful storyteller of Lebanese-Catholic origin – and author of such splendid novels as Leo The African, The Gardens of Light, Balthasar’s Odyssey, and The Rock of Tanios which won the 1993 Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French literary award – made Timur’s beloved city the setting for his 1989 novel Samarkand.
Poetry and novels, especially great ones we treasure, give us endless joy. They take us into the ringside of events, as in the struggle of the old fisherman to bring home the biggest catch of his life in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, or feel the anguish of losing a beloved and heroic leader, as in Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” This power of great art to inspire and instruct, especially in high matters of politics and statecraft, through storytelling as in Homer’s Iliad or Valmiki’s Ramayana, or imagined events in Tamerlane’s distant Samarkand, was the theme of a remarkable book by Charles Hill (1936-2021), an American career diplomat and academic.
In Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order (Yale, 2010), Charles Hill illustrated how great works of fiction provided a richer understanding of politics than the arid tomes of social sciences, in particular political science. “The great matters of high politics,” wrote Hill, “statecraft, and grand strategy are essential to the human condition and so necessarily are within the purview of great literature. Tolstoy’s War and Peace treats them directly. What has not been much recognized is that many literary works read and praised for insights on personal feelings, such as Jane Austen’s Emma, possess a dimension wholly apt for statecraft – in Emma’s case, the gathering and misanalysis of intelligence.”
Hill’s own rich experience in politics, intelligence, and diplomacy as a Foreign Service professional in the U.S. State Department and in the office of the U.N. secretary-general, combined with his long love affair with literature, makes Grand Strategies a rare kind of book. It is also one of those books that should be on the reading list of those who report on politics and those who engage in it. For in our perilous times the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and its peaceful resolution is that the long held idea of the “just war” theory is the devil’s proposition in the age of nuclear and bioweapons. There has always been the need to humanize the study and rhetoric of politics and, Charles Hill showed as his career exposed him to the diversity of world’s cultures through work and travel, that great literature is the best leavening agent in humanizing politics.
Thucydides account of the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C. remains a classic text that monarchs, statesmen, diplomats, military commanders, and students of statecraft have studied over the centuries. It was a record of history in the making in which the author was a participant. But Thucydides account of that ancient war was not a rigorous and documented piece of historical writing in the modern sense. Instead, as Hill pointed out, Thucydides narrative was “literature, and literature does not restrict itself. It can say anything that needs to be said.”
Among the many authors and books Hill discussed for their relevance in learning about the high politics of statecraft and world order – from Homer’s Iliad and Aeschylus The Oresteia, Shakespeare’s plays, Machiavelli’s epistles, Cervantes Don Quixote, Swift’s satire, Gibbon’s history, Kant’s philosophy, Rousseau’s Confessions, poetry of Dante, Milton, Whitman, Tennyson and Eliot, novels by Dickens, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Mann, Malraux and Kipling, to the memoirs of Lawrence and Lee Kuan Yew – he included the works of Salman Rushdie.
The novel Midnight’s Children earned Rushdie the 1981 Booker Prize. His novel The Satanic Verses published in 1988 provoked a furor among Muslims worldwide and brought upon him a death sentence pronounced by Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. V.S. Naipaul, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, sardonically observed that in calling for Rushdie’s killing Khomeini’s pronouncement was “an extreme form of literary criticism.”
Midnight’s Children is about the birth of modern India, narrated through the lives of two boys born at the midnight hour when the moment of independence from British rule occurred, as well as the partition of the subcontinent into two successor states of India and Pakistan. In Rushdie’s storytelling about the main character named Saleem Sinai – born at the midnight hour with the vagaries of his life linked to the high and low dramas of his country –, the whole panorama of India’s diverse cultural and religious traditions is laid bare. Similarly, in The Satanic Verses Rushdie deconstructs the mythic history of early Islam, exposing the vulnerabilities of Muslims in the modern world of globalization and, as Hill commented, “of migration, rootlessness, multiple identities and fractured entities, of post-modernity’s shattering effect on traditional cultures and national bonds.”
Rushdie’s writings, as that of V.S. Naipaul, explore the broken realities and existential despair in post-colonial societies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The promise of independence for people in these continents turned sour, and migration offered an exit for the ambitious and the bitterly disappointed, to move from former colonies in the southern hemisphere or the tropics to the northern climates and richer economies of former colonial and imperial powers.
Rushdie and Naipaul plumbed the highly unstable and volatile cultural reality of contemporary Muslim societies contending with modernization that has undermined their traditional cultures. The public burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, England, by Muslim immigrants from South Asia – ahead of Khomeini pronouncing death sentence on Rushdie as an example of penalty for anyone violating Muslim sensibilities by insulting Islam and its prophet – was a foretelling of events to come. Their works have offered a more intricate and layered understanding of Islam and the Muslim world than all of the stolid output from academic experts, thinktank gurus, media pundits, and policy wizards in government bureaucracies or non-governmental organizations in the West.
This brings me back to Amin Maalouf and his novel Samarkand. The English translation of the original in French was published in 1992, some nine years before Arab-Muslim terrorists of al Qaeda struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. It was as if through this work of fiction the author was sending out a warning signal to his alert readers that the quarrels of the eleventh century Muslim world were not so remote, and that understanding the nature of those quarrels would be helpful in contending with the effects of the deeply unsettling changes in the lands of Islam.
Maalouf in Samarkand, as Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, gives flight to his literary imagination in spinning a tale of love, rivalry, intrigue, betrayal, murder, and loss among erstwhile friends turned enemies. Maalouf’s three principal characters – Omar Khayyam, Hassan Sabbah, and Nizam al-Mulk – brought together in eleventh century Samarkand are real historical personalities. Omar Khayyam is the best known in the West of the three, his Persian quatrains or Rubaiyaat translated into English by Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83) and first published in 1859. Fitzgerald is most responsible for introducing Khayyam to the Occident, and making the Persian verses as rendered by him into a treasured possession for any home library in the English-speaking world.
Khayyam is the hero of Maalouf’s Samarkand. He is the astronomer and mathematician who calculates a new calendar for the Seljuk Turk ruler in whose realm Samarkand is located. In an age when politics was shaped by religion and religious strife was an expression of politics, Khayyam was a skeptic, if not a full-fledged agnostic. His view of God and religion was well expressed in a rubaiyaat that Maalouf places at the beginning of his story:
Pray tell, who has not transgressed Your Law?
Pray tell the purpose of a sinless life
If with evil You punish the evil I have done
Pray tell, what is the difference between You and me?
In Samarkand Khayyam found bliss as a young man. Here he worked as an astronomer-mathematician during the day and went home to recline in the evenings with his beloved wife, drink wine, listen to music and write poetry. Into this blissful world arrived one day unannounced Hassan Sabah, a marked man wanted by the authorities for his threats against Nizam al-Mulk, the vizier or chief minister to the Seljuk Turk ruler.
In Maalouf’s novel, the three men were known to each other from the time they were students together. Later they would go their different ways until fate brought them together again in a world of strife and sectarian violence. Khayyam’s blissful life was torn apart when he discovered Hassan was the secret and disguised leader of a band of assassins that had spread fear and violence far and wide beyond Samarkand, and his intended prey was Nizam al-Mulk.
The kernel of the story from which Maalouf spun his tale was discussed briefly by Bernard Lewis in The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam. Lewis’s history of Hassan Sabah and his men, based on documented sources, was first published in 1967. A second edition was released in 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Here is the passage from Lewis about the three personalities in Maalouf’s novel – it begins with reference to Hassan Sabah leaving for Cairo to present himself at the court of the Fatimid Ismaili rulers of Egypt, who were rivals of the Seljuk Turk rulers of Syria and Persia, and defenders of orthodox Islam:
“A story related by several Persian authors, and introduced to European readers by Edward Fitzgerald in the preface to his translation of the Rubaiyat, purports to give an account of the events leading to [Sabbah’s] departure. According to this tale, Hasan-i-Sabbah, the poet Omar Khayyam, and the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, had all been fellow-students of the same teacher. The three made a pact that whichever of them first achieved success and fortune in the world would help the other two. Nizam al-Mulk in due course became the vizier of the Sultan, and his schoolmates put forward their claims. Both were offered governorships, which they both refused, though for different reasons. Omar Khayyam shunned the responsibilities of office, and preferred a pension and the enjoyment of leisure; Hasan refused to be fobbed off with a provincial post, and sought high office at courts. Given his wish, he soon became a candidate for the vizierate and a dangerous rival to Nizam al-Mulk himself. The vizier therefore plotted against him, and by a trick managed to disgrace him in the eyes of the Sultan. Shamed and resentful, Hasan-i-Sabbah fled to Egypt, where he preferred revenge.”
Lewis points out that the story Edward Fitzgerald reports is improbable, since Nizam al-Mulk was at a minimum thirty years older than both Omar Khayyam and Hassan Sabbah. Given this discrepancy in the respective ages of the three men in Maalouf’s novel, they could not have been friends from an early age at school. Yet the three men were contemporaries and Nizam al-Mulk was assassinated in 1092, as Lewis discusses in his study, by an assassin disguised as a Sufi holy man and sent by Hasan Sabbah for the purpose.
Maalouf, however, exploits the literary license of a writer of fictions and pulls together in Samarkand a gripping story that has lessons for our time, when the West finds itself enmeshed in a war waged by religious fanatics of the Muslim world. In the fictional Hassan Sabah of Maalouf’s novel, there is to be found an uncanny resemblance to the wealthy Saudi business man, Osama bin Laden, who turns into a fanatical organizer and leader of the al Qaeda network of Arab-Muslim terrorists.
Hassan Sabah ruled from the mountain fortress “Alamut”, located in the high peaks of the Elburz Mountains along the southern shores of the Caspian Sea in Iran. He came to be known as “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and he struck terror in the hearts of his opponents, primarily Muslims, from his forbiddingly inaccessible mountain retreat. There is here the astonishing similarity between Hassan Sabah with his assassins and Osama bin Laden with his band of terrorists taking shelter in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Eventually, however, Hasan Sabah and his followers were routed. Similarly, Osama bin Laden was bombed out of his mountain retreats and eventually killed by the U.S. navy seals. Of the earlier episode, Lewis wrote,
“Considering the place of the Assassins in the history of Islam, four things may be said with reasonable assurance. The first is that their movement, whatever its driving force may have been, was regarded as a profound threat to the existing order, political, social and religious; the second is that they are no isolated phenomenon, but one of a long series of messianic movements, at once popular and obscure, impelled by deep-rooted anxieties, and from time to time exploding in outbreak of revolutionary violence; the third is that Hasan-i-Sabbah and his followers succeeded in reshaping and redirecting the vague desires, wild beliefs and aimless rage of the discontented into an ideology and an organization which, in cohesion, discipline and purposive violence, have no parallel in earlier or later times. The fourth, and perhaps ultimately the most significant point, is their final and total failure. They did not overthrow the existing order; they did not even succeed in holding a single city of any size. Even their castle domains became no more than petty principalities, which in time were overwhelmed by conquest, and their followers have become small and peaceful communities of peasants and merchants – one sectarian minority among many.”
It might be expected that the current crop of Muslim terrorists, be they Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis, Somalis, or of any other ethnicity belonging to the widely diverse world of Islam, is similarly routed and crushed for the sake of civilization’s order and amity among cultures in our highly shrunken world of instant global communication.
It might also be anticipated that the cultural strains of our time will eventually be relieved, since they are symptoms of the great transition of non-Western societies from pre-modern traditionalism of the pre-industrial era to the modern age of science and democracy. The world witnessed such a transition once before in the birth of the modern world in one corner of Europe, and it was as painful, ugly, and soaked in blood as the one in the contemporary transition of Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) from the pre-modern to the modern age.
Amin Maalouf’s novels, as those of Salman Rushdie and others that Charles Hill drew upon in his study of literature and politics were written not for any pedagogical purpose; these are perennial stories about us as men and women driven by our conflicting urges in a world that often is a bewildering place. Their novels, when held up as mirrors, lead to the discovery that we remain behind our masks much the same, despite the changes of seasons and years and places, as characters from the past. “Of all the arts and sciences,” wrote Charles Hill, “only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded.”
This is the marvel of classics for “each generation reads in its own way to fill its particular need, each finds something new in it.” And so did Marlowe, then Poe, and Maalouf, as each found in the tales of Samarkand the thread to spin their stories connecting us vividly to an imagined past that can disclose to readers dark, hidden, and unspoken realities that haunt our world and in multitudinous ways shape it too.
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August 2022