Life is More Beautiful than Paradise (2009) by Khaled Al-Berry. Translated by Humphrey Davies. The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, New York "It is difficult for a person to comprehend why he loves, or even to know what it is he loves," contemplates Khaled Al-Berry, author of the controversial Life is More Beautiful than Paradise. Neither apple nor orange, Al-Berry's captivating opus is both autobiography and fantasy. The connection between an uninhibited lust for life and the religious injunction for restraint is chilling. The author does not pretend that Islamic militancy savagely distorts pristine Islam as practiced by the Prophet Mohamed in the Middle Ages. He brings to life the often forgotten figures whose political activism is paramount to comprehending the genesis of contemporary militant Islamist ideology. The author's reluctant acceptance and then outright rejection of many of the more repugnant notions that became the hallmarks of militant Islamist philosophy is a fascinating subject in itself. In most such autobiographical novels, if the author stared intently at his religion and delivered a panegyric on its very antithesis, secular democracy and liberalism in this case, the readers would smell a rat. Still, Al-Berry's "novel" is required reading for anyone with an interest in the mechanics of radical Islam or the historical realities of militant Islamic activism in Egypt in the last two decades of the 20th century. He nevertheless remains tight-lipped about his former fellow militant Islamists who still uphold their beliefs. Islamic prescriptions must be examined for the sort of brouhaha Islam instills in many Westerners. This week marks the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and this is a novel that works thematically to commemorate the event that rocked America and the world. What is especially intriguing is that the author of Life is More Beautiful than Paradise himself has fallen foul of the Islamist dynamic. The author concedes, caveat emptor, that his association with militant Islamist activists was a regrettable one. The ideological rationalisation of exterminating the other requires, in the author's perception, a radical reassessment of some of our assumptions about the teachings of the Islamic religion. Free publicity can be bad publicity, and the author's mesmeric pitch about why and how he relented and chose life as opposed to the hereafter is a heart-wrenching confession, a divulgence of truths and half- truths. Even more unsettling, the implication of this highly readable labour of love has important policy implications. Yet policy-makers in Muslim nations as in the West need to tread a little carefully here. Proving yourself worthy of a place at the writers' table is no easy feat for a former Muslim fundamentalist. Yes, your memoirs can be all absorbing, or rather all-consuming if you will. Egypt appears this Ramadan to be embroiled in the controversy surrounding the television drama Al-Gamaa, an oblique if somewhat obvious reference to the Muslim Brotherhood. The country chases its chimera down the rabbit hole of religious bigotry. There is curiousity in the country, as much as in the West, as to the true nature of the characters who people the underworld of militant Islam. The "hero" of Al-Barry's "novel" was vaguely aware that a new menace stalks the land. Yet, he didn't know exactly who or what the danger actually was in concrete terms. "I saw my future as being that of a theorist, one who reached his conclusions judiciously, without seeking to please the common people or the mob." Choice may not be such a luxury for a repentant terrorist after all. In the West, it is axiomatic that choice is best. Without that critical assumption the entire theory of rational choice unceremoniously collapses. It is not surprising that this no-holds-barred approach to creativity has put Muslim writing beyond the pale in predominantly Muslim nations. The ideas of a secularist writer come from anywhere and everywhere. Those of a Muslim writer are by definition proscribed. Al-Berry powerfully demonstrates the crucial role that Islamic Puritanism plays in the development of Muslim dogma in Upper Egypt at a crucial historical juncture of that part of the country. But to take him at face value would be a dreadful mistake. Muslims, too, do not often want to be told what to do and precisely how to do what they are permitted to do. Most adolescents are impatient. They always want the next thing, just as soon as they possibly can. The author, too, was once an impetuous youth. Militant Muslims contend that choice is not always so good for us after all. Al-Berry vehemently disagrees and sets out to explain exactly why this is so. Westerners, and Westernised Muslims, who are not particularly impressed by Islamic strictures and restrictions and who are brought up in the rationalist tradition are sceptical of the presumptions and injunctions of the Quran. Islamist militants are systematic in their manipulation of subjective reality, the author concedes. It has become a truism to note that Islam is enjoying a golden age simultaneously in the Muslim Heartlands and in the West. Part of the problem is that militant Muslims clearly believe in what they say and do and this single-mindedness seems to be at the heart of their persuasive powers. When Khaled Al-Berry was an adolescent in the 1980s, he fell in love with music and movies. Who, he wondered, would speak similarly to his heart? "It was just a poke in my shoulder. Sure, he followed it up by pushing his face up close to mine, but the beginning was just a poke in the shoulder. It made my brain stop working. What could I do against him? Should I poke him back? If I did so he'll beat me ignominiously for sure. Should I walk away? That would be an unforgivable sign of weakness and my friends would never let me live it down. It was broad daylight, and there was nowhere to hide from the ordeal, or the scrutiny." The author has little doubt about the militant Islamists' Machiavellian machinations. Yet he had been impressed when he first encountered the militants. "Sheikh Tareq had so much love and affection for others that his every word seemed meaningful, and he made you love him and love every word he uttered and every idea he believed in. He bore a scar on his chest from an operation he'd had on his heart." The Muslim moralist in the young recruit was moved. "I believe it may have been performed while he was in prison for three years following the events of 1981." Looking back it is easy to understand why the author was enamoured by the charismatic sheikh. "What I do know is that he continued to practice his religion faithfully and didn't use his condition as a way of claiming that he was incapable of undertaking the activities in support of the Islamist cause that his commitment entailed." The sheikh's religiousity intrigued the impressionistic youngster. "He was an exemplary man -- bold and unflinching despite the vulnerability of his livelihood and health. And on top of that, he was from the same town as the eminent Islamist thinker Sayyid Qutb." The author gives the sheikh an uncannily realistic persuasive voice. He depicts him as patient and sedulous. "Sometimes I would fail to appear at Sheikh Tareq's lessons because of a movie or a soccer match that was being shown on television at a time that conflicted with one of the prayers, most often the late afternoon prayer. Sheikh Tareq seemed to have understood this, so he asked me to prepare a presentation on the Islamist position with regard to music to deliver to my colleagues in the study circle." The unremitting sheikh wins the wavering convert over. At first, the author declines to renounce his love of music. Then, of course, he gives up his resistance in quiescent resignation. "I told Sheikh Tareq quite frankly that I would find this unpleasant to do as I loved music so much and couldn't imagine myself stopping listening to it." Then he relented. "I shut myself up in my room to listen to the songs of Mayyada Al-Hennawi while I leafed through the book, noting the various scholars' opinions on a piece of paper. I emerged with a summary that said that music was forbidden by religion." This was the brave-face answer to the sheikh's dogged persistence. Many of us struggle to find real happiness. The many less salient features of the endless search for material well-being become more apparent when faced with many of life's less palatable experiences. So where should we look for happiness? The sheikh had all the answers. "The next time I failed to attend afternoon prayer it was to watch a soap that I liked. This time Sheikh Tareq himself undertook to explain the position of religious law with regard to those who looked on a woman whose body was not adequately covered, whether in real life or in a picture. It followed that television, with all its images of indecently dressed women, was forbidden." Let's start with the basics of Islam and how the tenets of the religion profoundly influenced the way the author conducted his life and tinted his world vision. "If learning how to distinguish between what was forbidden and what was permitted was my first lesson in faith, learning to distinguish oneself from the unbeliever was my first lesson in its practical application." The cliché "the personal is the political" applies. "Sheikh Tareq was a humane interlocutor blessed with an innate gift. You felt drawn to talk to him by the fact that he would talk about himself, not with regard to the same subject, but about other subjects. He told me about his upbringing in his hometown, the village of Musha, from which Sayyid Qutb, no less hailed." The towering shadow of Qutb loomed large even from beyond the grave. The kind sheikh was Qutb's medium. "He spoke to me for the first time of the operation he had had on his heart and how he had to be careful not to do too much so as not to overwork his cardiac valves. He would, however, be able to get married. This the doctors confirmed." Marriage and sexual gratification within the proscribed confinement of conjugal bliss are perfectly acceptable in Islam. Sports, however, is not always permissible. "Dribbling the soccer ball between my feet and throwing myself on top of it when I was goalkeeper were my greatest pleasures." His boyhood fantasies metamorphosed into less innocent pursuits. "Girls, as vague images and pictures and conversations among boys, came far behind [soccer]. Now, in the presence of one of them, when I got close to her, my body changed in ways that made me realise that the last time had indeed been child's play, and what had happened before had been meaningless. The parts of her that I looked at and my sense of what I wanted to do with her were totally different." Confusion raged in the pimply adolescent mind. He was told in no uncertain terms that such wicked thoughts must be blotched out. The sheikh was his lascivious alter ego. Detractors of the novel view such observations as yet more black propaganda aimed at Muslims. What devout Muslim readers might find most offensive is that the Islamic religion is judged by the author, or at least that is what is contrite conscience dictates, according to the actions and injunctions of individuals rather than the actual teachings of the Quran. The sheikh interprets the texts and his followers blindly obey. This is precisely the distorted picture most Western commentators presume. Such notions leave no room for Muslims as free- thinkers. "The laws of society do not vary greatly from the laws of physics that we studied at school. When two forces work in different directions, the result of their action is a force working in an intermediate direction. This was what happened with us and with our society. We were a fundamentalist force convinced of its fundamentalism, and, they were a secular force convinced o its secularism." The secularists quite rightly, according to the author, resisted the usual religious desire for emphatic solutions. Just to show that his jocund critique of militant Islamists wasn't restricted to activists, the author spells out his instinctive belief that the government collaborated or at least tacitly connived with the Islamists thereby strengthening the hand of the fundamentalists and tightening their stranglehold of society. There have been signs for some time, the author presumes, that the government has a vested interest in establishing Islam as what he terms the "reference point". "We exerted pressure so they exerted pressure. And the outcome was that they arrived at a midpoint between the two forces, an area they believed proved that they had adopted a middle-of-the-road Islam, as represented by sheikhs whose point of reference was also Islam, which was our territory, our playing field, and our banner." Turf wars of this kind marked a radical departure, a step into the unknown, as far as the author was concerned. "This acknowledgement that Islam was the point of reference was in itself a victory for us, though not a sufficient one." In the notoriously bellicose world of Upper Egyptian confessionalism and sectarian strife, Christian fundamentalism emerged as something of a backlash to the nascent militant Islam. "We were now equipped to assert our moral authority, and we didn't let an opportunity escape us. It came to our ears that on the Prophet's birthday a Christian student has made a drawing of a store selling a special candy made for that day and labelled it The Worm-eaten Candy Store. Some of the brothers waited for him as he left the school and beat him up. Telling him not to try making fun of Muslims again." The author clearly identifies the Coptic Christians as victims of the resurgent Islam, but ordinary Muslims, too, were losers. The families of Muslim fundamentalists often paid a terrible price for their inability to contain the passions of their insubordinate progeny. The author's parents were no exception. "The following day, my father visited the school and got a taste of how serious the matter was. My parents phoned my uncle on my mother's side, the officer, and he informed them that from his contacts with his friends in State Security things did not bode well." This particular episode was one of many that drew attention to the predicament the parents and relatives of militant Islamist activists find themselves in. "My father did not lose hope. He contacted acquaintances and local politicians, who promised him they'd solve the problem. I was confident that it would be solved; it was just a matter of time. However, my father's acquaintances withdrew their promises, informing him that the decision came from the upper echelons and no one could interfere with it. So serious was the matter, in fact, that a rumour went round among the students, just to make things even scarier that Hosni Mubarak had himself phoned the governor, reprimanded him for what was happening at the school, and instructed him to intervene resolutely." What is special about Life is More Beautiful than Paradise ? It depicts in graphic terms the journey from innocent religiousity to unabashed secularism. The author today lives in London and works for the BBC. His ex-wife, Liliane Daoud, the "Lebanese student of sociology" he accredits with encouraging him to jot down his memoirs with the Jamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group) -- the shady terrorist movement he once belonged to, is a colleague at the BBC. So with a little inventiveness he tells his extraordinary tale. His capacity to admit mistakes can be disconcerting. But to focus on the narrow question of why he was tempted to become a terrorist is to miss the point. "How serious things really were came home to me one evening when we were sitting listening to my father as he told us of his trip to see State Security. The officer had kept him waiting three hours before deigning to see him. My father said this and then broke into tears." Even then, he was not quite sure whether it was time to make up his mind. He knew then that he must stop equivocating about how to approach God. "The Christians among my old friends would have nothing to do with me and I would have nothing to do with them. The families of my Muslim friends, as the latter eventually told me, were not happy about their being with me in the same study groups because I was a dangerous person who had been removed from his school by the security apparatus only months before. I might still be under surveillance even now." What was even more unnerving was that he stumbled upon the original sin. Overseeing his weakness was no fun. "The mixing of the sexes was the source of all corruption, and no excuses for it could be accepted." Human nature craves novelty and there was something in him that longed to be the daredevil adventurer. Sooner or later he came face to face with reality. The group he belonged to was a terrorist organisation and rather than distancing him from sin, it implicated him in it. One of the militant Islamist activists was allegedly sodomised in prison. "I had read the details of the case he brought against the State Security apparatus in an opposition newspaper. The forensic evidence had proved that his backside had been violated by insertion of a stick, and my information regarding homosexuality was that someone who had an object inserted in his backside would thereafter feel an emptiness that he would want to fill." This was no accident. "Had God not known that Islamic society would contain sodomites, He would have stipulated a punishment for sodomy." In retrospect, he reflected that such reasoning might have been a mistake. "I never spoke of this episode to anyone in the Jamaa again." "We also touched on other rumours that involved a brother who was older than us and had been hit by a bullet in the leg. The reason I believed this particular rumour was that this brother had a special stance when he played ping-pong that involved his sticking his backside out. This reasoning in turn sprang from another widespread belief in our society to the effect that people with large buttocks were 'faggots', because the insertion of the male member into their buttocks inflated them." The important thing is that a good Muslim must never feel compassion for sinners. This was what the Jamaa Islamiya taught. This is what militant Islamists believe. But things have changed quite a bit for the author in the intervening years. Near the end of the novel, he discovers new truths no less compelling than those of political Islam. "I felt as if there was a bird in my chest that wanted to get out. Going out onto the balcony to take the air was not enough to drive away my feeling of claustrophobia, nor was crying enough to shed my melancholy." That much was clear from the manner in which the author read and understood Western thinkers. "Arthur Miller's The Crucible made me weep like a madman, and damn and curse, and curse, and curse." John Stuart Mill's On Liberty inspired the former jihadist to free his mind of anachronistic beliefs and confining superstitions. He became convinced that he alone had the power to adjudge a situation and make sense of his own personal experiences. At last he was a free thinker: "no one to decide what I should read or listen to; no one to impose on me their paradigm, their own interpretation of history, or their own aspirations for the future; no one to take me to task when I had committed no wrongdoing, while they did wrong without being held to account." This is what makes this "novel" a most touching and a very entertaining read. Last but not least, the sensitivity to the nuances of the Arabic language and Islamist idiom made manifest in the meritorious translation of Humphrey Davies truly makes this work an ideal jumping-off point for any Westerner who is curious about reading the Muslim mind. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
