Culture: Justifying intervention

In a recent diary and film, French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy has recalled the role he played in last year's NATO-led intervention in Libya, writes David Tresilian

The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, well-known in France for his popular books on philosophy and his journalism, came to international attention early last year when he went to the Libyan city of Benghazi to meet the leaders of the uprising against former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, subsequently promoting their cause with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and helping to bring about their international recognition.

For some days in March last year it might have even seemed that Lévy had taken over the running of French diplomacy, sidelining the country's then foreign minister Alain Juppé and persuading Sarkozy to place himself at the head of western efforts to intervene in Libya on the side of anti-Gaddafi forces.

According to the diary that Lévy has now published recalling these events, entitled La Guerre sans l'aimer (War without Liking It), he says that he originally went to Libya on a whim, having watched the Benghazi uprising on television, and it was only later that he decided to press Sarkozy into recognising the rebels as the legitimate Libyan government and into intervening militarily in their support against the Gaddafi regime.

He telephoned Sarkozy from Benghazi on 5 March last year, proposing to bring the Libyan rebels to Paris as a step towards their recognition as an alternative to the Gaddafi regime. This is shown in real time in Lévy's filmed version of events, entitled Le Serment de Tobrouk (The Tobrouk Oath), which was released in France earlier this year.

"Would you agree to meet this delegation personally," he asked Sarkozy, knowing that if so this would be "a major act with international ramifications." "Of course," Sarkozy apparently said in reply. "I will meet your friends with pleasure. Let's talk about it when you get to Paris."

Following a second telephone call, France recognised the Libyan National Transitional Council, composed of leaders of the uprising in Benghazi. Some days later, members of the Council were "stupefied" to be told, during a meeting in Paris organised by Lévy, that France also intended to recognise them "as the sole legitimate representatives of Libya" and that it would take the lead in organising an international coalition against the Gaddafi regime.

At this point in Levy's record of events, non-French readers may well have decided that he must be exaggerating the role he played in persuading Sarkozy to initiate the intervention that eventually brought in NATO and led to the collapse of the regime in Tripoli. Even in France foreign policy cannot be decided quite like that.

However, if Lévy did not in fact play the role he thinks he did, perhaps acting more as a front man for policies already decided elsewhere, this possibility does not seem to have struck him. In any event, readers of Lévy's diary or viewers of his film may want to put their scepticism on hold and attend instead to the reasons he gives for his decision to promote the western intervention in Libya, particularly since Lévy has recently been arguing in the French press for similar intervention in Syria.

In order for an uprising to be considered justified, a rebel group must be credible in its organisation and demands, and in order for a government to lose its legitimacy it must act in such a way as to forfeit its claim to be acting in the interests of its citizens. Yet, in practice such tests can be hard to meet, since rebel groups may not represent a majority, or even a large minority, of a country's population, and they may act to promote their own interests rather than those of the country as a whole.

It can also be hard to decide at what point a government has lost its legitimacy and has started acting in ways contrary to the interests of its citizens, since all governments have a duty to ensure security, meaning that they may decide to act militarily against groups that threaten it. There is also the question of double standards, since historically interventions, whatever the reasons given for them, have tended to take place unequally, some countries being considered ripe for foreign intervention and others being left well alone, whatever the nature of the events taking place within them.

In the Libyan case, Lévy seems to be in no doubt about the justification for the Benghazi uprising or the illegitimacy of the Gaddafi regime, though his use of a diary form can make it difficult to track down a definitive statement of the reasons behind his views. The waters are muddied further by Lévy's habit, linked to his use of a diary form, of writing down whatever enters his head, such that there is much material about his family, his personal and professional feuds, and his own career.

In the entry for 2 March, Lévy asks himself whether "I haven't put my finger on what is, in the end, the crime of Gaddafi ?ê" the imprisonment, the confinement, the placing in quarantine, and, at root, the attempt to bring about the spiritual deaths of the descendants of the kingdom of Cyrenaica?"

But it can't have been for this crime that the rebellion was initiated or the NATO-led intervention in its support carried out, since a desire to "bring Libya back to life" is not a credible political demand. There is much material about allegedly parallel cases, mostly to do with Lévy's earlier support of western intervention in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, as well as about Sarkozy's own sabre-rattling. But on the question of how to deal with those states, Germany among them, that did not share Lévy's views about the necessity of foreign military intervention he has little to say apart from fulminate against them for not agreeing with his views.

Among the requirements before any intervention is carried out are that it should not make the situation worse and that the rebellion it is designed to support should have a reasonable chance of succeeding in bringing down the existing government and establishing an improved replacement regime. In the run-up to the NATO-led intervention in Libya, there must have been doubts about these requirements since the rebel groups in Benghazi did not seem to speak for the entire Libyan population and little was known about their aims and objectives for a replacement government.

Lévy brushes aside these doubts in the entry for 20 March entitled "where it is explained that Libya will not be like Iraq," in which he finally explains his views on what makes a war, or foreign military intervention, right. He runs through the standard arguments, including the intrinsic justice of the cause, the idea of intervention as an act of last resort, and the principle of proportionality, and claims that these fit the NATO-led intervention in Libya and the bringing down of the Gaddafi government.

According to Lévy, there were "five objective, clear, undeniable reasons for why this is a different set of circumstances and why this war is the 'anti-war' of Iraq: (1) a mandate from the UN, the source of undeniable international legitimacy; (2) a strong moral mandate, given by the Arab League, which, it must not be forgotten, was immediately ready to condemn, with the West, the aggression carried out by Gaddafi against his own people; (3) the presence of a national transitional council that has the merit of actually existing, of having genuine popular support and of being much more attractive than the wretched Iraqi National Congress that [Iraqi opposition figure Ahmed] Chalabi used to preside over."

"(4) A democratic uprising, a popular and democratic uprising that came before the foreign intervention and which the latter is taking place not to bring about, but to support ?ê" and that changes everything; and (5) no ground troops and no army of occupation. Should it be possible to go ahead without a ground army and protect the civilians in Benghazi or even bring down Gaddafi without having to send in an expeditionary force, this would mark this war out from those prosecuted by the West up to now."

Yet, not everyone shared Lévy's certainty on points (1), (3) and (4). The UN mandate, contained in UN Security Council Resolution 1973 of March last year, authorised member states "to take all necessary measures?ê? to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory." It also established a no-fly zone over Libyan territory and tightened up the arms embargo. This text was interpreted to justify the commencement of a NATO-led bombing campaign of Libya and the bringing down of the Gaddafi regime ?ê" actions that some considered went beyond what the original mandate had authorised.

Moreover, just as Ahmed Shalabi, an exiled Iraqi politician and opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime, turned out not to have had the kind of popular support in Iraq that he had apparently claimed he had once the US had invaded and occupied that country in 2003, there were also doubts at the time of the NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya regarding the extent of support for the Benghazi-based Libyan National Transitional Council, given its regional character, though these were apparently not shared by Lévy.

Finally, it is possible to agree or disagree with the reasons Lévy gives for supporting the NATO-led intervention in Libya, but the particular tone of his book owes less to its arguments, which are those that circulated at the time, than to its author's staging of himself as playing a special role in the victory of the Libyan rebels and the collapse of the Gaddafi regime. Readers might even gain the impression that this is not really a book about Libya at all, given Lévy's obsession with the history of French foreign policy and his desire to make up for earlier failures to persuade former French presidents Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac to intervene militarily in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, respectively, before the United States did so.

"I have been pleading for the right to intervene for more than 30 years," Lévy writes, giving the examples of campaigns he has engaged in in Bangladesh, Darfour in Sudan, Angola, Burundi, Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, and in support of the former Afghan Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Masoud.

The abiding tone of the book can perhaps be illustrated by the following passage, where Lévy not only deploys his address book and his apparently indefatigible self-regard, but also manages to insert himself into the history of French literature and diplomacy.

"Dinner with [US chat show host] Charlie Rose and [media tycoon] Arianna Huffington. Let's admit, I told them, that I played the role?ê? of helping to bring about this war. But there is a single precedent of a French writer launching a war, though this is a hugely important predecent, obviously?ê? It is that of [Francois-Rene de] Chateaubriand becoming foreign minister in order to launch the Spanish war in 1823 and put Ferdinand VII back on the throne."

Bernard-Henri Lévy, La Guerre sans l'aimer, journal d'un écrivain au coeur du printemps libyen, Paris: Grasset, 201, pp.640.

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Culture: God's Books: Interview with the Vampire

Mohab Nasr, Ya rabb, a'tina kutuban linaqra' (Please, God, give us books to read), Cairo: Al Ain, 2012

"Any pretence of having specific reasons to stop writing poetry at one point or to return to it at another will be a fabrication," says Mohab Nasr (b. 1962). "All I can say for sure is that I was surrounded by friends who used up my energy in conversations, which gave me a sense of reassurance of a certain kind, the extent of whose hazardousness it took a long time to realise."

Thus the seemingly eternal vicious circle, perhaps even more pronounced outside Cairo, the underground literary centre of operations--in Alexandria, where, after a stint in said centre in the mid-1990s that cost him his government schoolteaching post, Nasr was living again:

To write, you have to have a reader; but, being a serious poet in late 20th-century Egypt, your reader can only be a fellow writer; you might as well just talk with them at the cafe--and, beyond an inevitably skewed sense of personal fulfillment, what on earth in the end could be the point of that?

Prompted by his short-lived marriage to the feminist-Marxist activist, aspiring theorist and Student Movement icon Arwa Saleh (1951-1997), Nasr's experience of Cairo had been more depressing than instructive. But, like the bite that makes a man immortal, freezes him in the age at which it happened and binds him to a routine of bloodsucking, spending the day in a tomb and surfacing only in the nighttime, the experience marked him; some 14 years later, when unprecedented protests broke out while he lived and worked as a cultural journalist in Kuwait, it would prove obliquely regenerative.

Cairo gave Nasr a direct taste of the wannabe aesthetician's pretensions and the wannabe autocrat's mean-spiritedness so rife among Generation of the Seventies activists and writers; it made him aware of the potentially fatal fragility of the Arab Intellectual--a creature as mythical and parasitic as a vampire, and perhaps ultimately as irrelevant to consensual reality, since its emergence in Muhammad Ali Pasha's times.

It was in 1997 that Nasr's first book of poems, Ann yassriq ta'irun 'aynayk (or "For a bird to steal your eyes"), was published in a small edition in Alexandria: the year during which his divorcee, Saleh, finally killed herself.

They had not been in contact for months and he felt no guilt about the incident; he felt he had done all he could to be supportive, and anyway what drove her to suicide as he saw it, the inevitably failed attempt at literally embodying moral-political principles, had nothing to do with him. But the horror of what happened left him unsure not only about moral and political but also emotional and aesthetic issues.

Following the event, he started working on a long and involved text he still refers to as The Fragments, in which--without the arguably necessary theoretical equipment, as he readily admits--he tried to work out the meaning of life in the context of his experience. But, realising the result was too abstract to lead anywhere, he gave up.

The process was to be echoed far more recently--and perhaps also more meaningfully--in the wake of 25 January, 2011, when Nasr began responding to a Facebook comment by an old Muslim Brotherhood-sympathetic coworker who asked, "What if the Brotherhood comes to power?" It was as if the question unplugged a cache of latent energy:

"Instead of writing a few lines to him I found myself reviewing with him the entire history of the concept of the state and the decisive point separating two histories before and after the emergence of modernity and capital. I dealt with the rise of the notion of identity as more of a slogan than a truth; with the way the scaffolding of society had been taken apart; and with the resulting absence of society. It ended up as an incredibly long Facebook 'note', and I repeated the experiment with several other topics after that."

Nasr had himself been a Muslim Brother once, however briefly, as an Arabic student at Alexandria University's Faculty of Arts (he graduated in 1984); and it was not as if, by the time his Fragments took on such concrete form--for which he thanks the revolution--he had made no discoveries.

"When the writer creates an image to be attached to, they stand directly behind that image and lionise it as a 'conviction'--a mask: when you remove it the writer goes away with it, vapourises. The real writer places their image at a distance, knowing that any image is a moment out of something fluid, a portion of existence in flux; and when they place it between the covers of a book, they are also placing it between two brackets of doubt?ê?"

***

As is nearly always the case with poetry, it is next to impossible to say anything about the present book, apart from: "If you know Arabic, read it!" Mohab Nasr defines the poem very tentatively as a text that says something it never actually makes explicit, linking it to the cliche of knowing that someone is lonely when you notice how compulsively they chatter. After a hiatus that lasted over a decade, poems came back to Nasr like a reunion with a long lost friend, once he was out of Egypt. There was a sense of vertigo, he says: he was less confident than simply, shyly joyful; and he would send his texts to a select number of fellow writers to make sure they really were poems. The revolution, which would set off a parallel process of nonfiction writing, made his emotions raw and intense. Finally history was opening its door, he says, even if only monsters and dwarfs came through. It is interesting to note that, unlike much Generation of the Nineties poems to which it is linked, the present book makes absolutely no concessions to sensationalism: besides the fact that--prose as they remain--they are written to be read out loud, Nasr's poems achieve the Nineties objectives of concentrating on immediate (physical) reality, drawing on day-to-day life and avoiding rhetoric precisely by avoiding direct and formulaic approaches to the New Poem. The language and images are extremely familiar, easy and recognisable; but they are just as extremely hard won.

***

"The life of an image in a book is the death of that image in reality. It is being free of the image's limitations, of the illusion that an image however satisfying actually represents life."

Thus the seemingly eternal life cycle of genuine or meaningful (literary) discourse, as opposed to the discourse of the Poet (the Arab Intellectual) who, precisely by placing himself above and beyond, manages effortlessly to be nonexistent as well--the echo of an echo of a lie:

To write, you have to have been a reader; you read what books life throws at you, but you also read the books of life itself--the people, the places, the things, the relations--as honestly, as sceptically, as unpretentiously as you can; then, when you tell someone else about what you have read, you contribute to an exchange that will somehow at some time actually shape a collective consciousness, a social state of being, life.

By 1999 Mohab Nasr will have met his present wife, the young short-story writer and fellow Arabic teacher Jehan Abdel-Azeez, with whom he settled down in Kuwait in 2007, three years after they were married. By then there had been a year of employment in Libya, and a difficult year of unemployment.

Kuwait seemed to open up a new space through both the slave-driven routine of having to produce a newspaper page every day and distance from Egyptian intellectual life, where the problem has less to do with a scene that puts pressure on or unsettles you than it does with one in which "the battle is lost from the beginning, even with yourself, because it is completely spurious"; he had felt he could only respond to that scene by letting it choke on its own lies.

"In the same way as writing in itself creates delusions, so too do opinions laid down easily during informal gatherings among writers," he says in response to my questions, typing into his laptop in a seaside cafe back in Alexandria, a city he now visits only for holidays:

"They create delusions of belonging to a common, mutually comprehensible language?ê? There is an extremely subtle difference between the writer creating images of consciousness as an interactive and critical medium and the writer creating those images with the intention of being attached to them as a person, of using them as a shield against society," a tool for upward mobility, a sense of individual distinction, a lucrative link with the--political--powers that be, "not a way of relating to human beings at large."

Prompted by this belief in a common ground, a multiparty dialogue, a welfare that eschews elitism without being populist, with Nasser Farghali, Hemeida Abdalla and the late Abdel-Azim Nagui, Nasr founded a literary group, Al Arbi'a'iyoun (or the Wednesdayers)--three issues of their eponymous journal were published in the early 1990s--and was later among the founders of the much longer-lived and by now well-known non-fiction journal, Amkenah, edited by Alaa Khalid.

In both cases his tendency towards excessive abstraction seems to have got in the way of a greater or longer-lived contribution on his part, but it was the increasingly dog-eat-dog conditions of life that drove people away from each other and dissipated the collective momentum (Amkenah charges ahead thanks to Khalid's individual dedication).

Nasr's nonfiction, an open-ended form of critique that can be seen as both amateur sociology-philosophy and political commentary-journalism, reveals a moralist eager to transcend morality, an aesthete well aware of the absurdity of art for art's sake and an aspiring scholar with neither the patience nor the dispassion for scholarship; it reveals, in short, exactly the kind of man of letters whose scarcity has robbed the scene of vitality for decades, reducing the Role of the Intellectual to yet another empty slogan.

"I always suffered from this idea of abstraction as a writer, and even though I still believe in abstraction I feel it is necessary for live examples of the abstract concepts to be always present. This is what the revolution has done, or let's call it the dissolution that facilitated such unprecedented human boiling over: the essential questions--even if they are extreme or naive or fallacious--have risen to the surface, come out (if temporarily), broken free of the hegemony of a cultural sphere that is dead and in shameful conspiracy with itself."

Reviewed by Youssef Rakha

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Culture: Migrations to the north

A new translation of mediaeval Arab travel narratives may herald further English translations of classical Arabic literature, writes David Tresilian

Speaking to the Weekly in an interview late last year, the British orientalist Robert Irwin suggested that while more works of modern Arabic literature were now being translated into English than ever before, western readers were still sometimes ill served when it came to translations from the classical literature.

Irwin himself is the author of a useful Companion to the Arabian Nights, a kind of extended commentary on the stories making up the Thousand and One Nights, and editor of a widely used anthology of classical Arabic literature in English translation. Yet, English-language publishers, he said, "don't really know where to start as far as classical Arab writers are concerned," and they can turn a deaf ear to pleas for better, more modern translations as a result.

"I keep telling publishers they should do Jahiz," the polymath Abbasid writer, Irwin explained, as "he's so witty and so interesting, or the pre-Islamic poets, but they are not very receptive. When I suggest Jahiz, people look blank." At the moment, non-Arabic-speaking readers wanting to read the works of Jahiz have few options aside from older French or German translations, unavailable except in larger research libraries.

However, the decision by Penguin Books to bring out a new translation of works by mediaeval Arab geographers, among them the 10th century writer Ibn Fadlan, in its familiar Penguin Classics series may be a sign that things are changing and that English-language publishers are at long last beginning to cater to western readers curious to know more about mediaeval Arab civilisation.

Entitled Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, Arab Travellers in the Far North, the book contains some of the earliest accounts in any language of the Viking traders who penetrated Central Asia down to the Caspian Sea in the mediaeval period and of the indigenous inhabitants of the region. It has been expertly translated by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone, and it is full of fascinating details about the Abbasid caliphs' northern neighbours and how these appeared from the perspective of a writer from the caliphal court in Baghdad.

As Lunde and Stone explain in the introduction to their translation, nothing is known of the life of Ibn Fadlan, more fully Ahmed bin Fadlan bin al-Abbas bin Rashid bin Hammad, aside from his authorship of an incomplete account of an embassy sent by the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir to the ruler of the Bulghars, "semi-nomadic, horse-riding, Turkic-speaking shamanists," who had set up camp on the Volga River far to the north and east of Abbasid territory.

Al-Muqtadir seems to have been a rather ineffectual ruler (reigned 908-932 CE), having been proclaimed caliph when he was only 13 and presiding over "a period of unparalleled impotence and disaster for the central power of the caliphate," according to the article about him in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. However, it was during al-Muqtadir's rule that the Bulghars seem to have decided to free themselves from the domination of their neighbours the Khazars by sealing an alliance with the caliph in Baghdad, and an envoy, Sawsan al-Rassi, was sent out from Baghdad in June 921.

Ibn Fadlan was a member of the delegation, and his particular responsibility seems to have been to read the caliph's letter to the Bulghar king. In his account of the overland journey to the Bulghar encampment, eastwards from Baghdad to Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan and then northwards through the territories of the Pecenegs and Bashgirds, Turkic peoples, before reaching the Ural Mountains and the Bulghars in May 922, he gives details, sometimes picturesque, sometimes alarming, of the nomadic tribes encountered on the way.

These tribes were for the most part not Muslim, and Ibn Fadlan describes, usually without further comment, their religious and other beliefs. One sticky moment came as the embassy was crossing the territory of the Ghuzz Turks to the west of the Aral Sea, when a local commander, pointing out that "never in our whole lives, nor in the lifetimes of our fathers, has an envoy of the caliph come to us," concluded that "this is some trick of the caliph's?ê? [and] the thing to do is to have each of the envoys cut in two and to take everything they have."

Fortunately, the embassy was allowed to continue. On its arrival in the land of the Bulghars, it was kept waiting for four days while the local dignitaries gathered. When they had done so, banners were unfurled and the letter produced.

Ibn Fadlan writes that "I got out the caliph's letter and said, 'It is not permitted to remain seated during the reading of the letter.' Then the king rose and the principal men of his kingdom who were present did likewise. The king was a very fat man with a large belly. I started to read the first part of the letter. When I reached the formula, 'Peace be upon you, for in addressing myself to you I praise God, beside whom there is no god,' I said, 'Return the greeting to the commander of the faithful.' He returned the greeting as did all the others without exception. Then the interpreter continued to translate the letter word for word, and when we had finished reading, they pronounced Allahu Akbar so loudly that the earth shook."

Ibn Fadlan's account of the caliphal embassy to the Bulghars is preserved in a later work by the traveler Yakut al-Rumi (c. 1179 -- 1229), who apparently came across the original while visiting Merv, now in Turkmenistan, and in a manuscript discovered in Mashhad in Iran in 1923. It may have been intended as a report to the chancellery in Baghdad, or it may have been intended for a wider audience. Whatever the case, according to Lunde and Stone what marks it out from other mediaeval travel narratives is its "almost scientific detachment" and objectivity. Ibn Fadlan does not embellish his text with stories of the "wonders" to be seen at the limits of the known world at the time, and while "much that he saw appalled him," being "very outlandish to a Muslim from Baghdad," he "made every effort to understand what was going on around him."

Among the outlandish practices that Ibn Fadlan reports on is a Viking ship burial, carried out by Viking traders, probably from Kiev, on the upper reaches of the Volga River. A young girl was sacrificed in this ceremony, strangled by an old woman named the "angel of death," and the ship, containing lavish grave goods as well as the body of the deceased, was burned. According to one of the Viking bystanders, "you Arabs are fools?ê? you put the men you love most into the earth?ê? but we burn them in an instant, so that all at once and without delay they enter paradise." Without commenting on the matter, Ibn Fadlan adds "and indeed, not an hour had passed before ship, wood, girl and master were no more than dust and ashes."

In addition to Ibn Fadlan's account of the Abbasid embassy to the Bulghars, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, Arab Travellers in the Far North also contains a later account of the same region by Abu Hamid al-Andalusi al-Gharnati (1080 -- 1169), along with shorter extracts from other mediaeval Arab travelers who visited this and similar northern areas. Al-Gharnati left his native Granada in southern Spain at an early age and travelled widely throughout the Mediterranean, staying in Cairo in 1118 -- 1122, as well as in central Europe, today's Hungary, and central Asia. His narrative is less distinguished than his forebear's, being concerned more with the "wonders" to be seen at the edges of the known world and less useful as veridical documentation. However, it also includes material on areas not visited by Ibn Fadlan, including Anquriya, today's Hungary.

The Hungarians were descended from Turkic tribes, al-Gharnati says, adding, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, that they included "uncountable thousands of the descendants of the Maghribis," in other words North Africans. In fact, much of what al-Gharnati says is doubtful, to say the least, such as when he claims that the inhabitants of Central Asia "are Nestorian Christians, like the Byzantines," both statements being obviously untrue. While al-Gharnati's book has charm, for example in his comments on beavers, found in Central Asia, but not in the Middle East ("some beavers are jealous of others, and take them prisoner"), for the most part it sets off the altogether superior qualities of Ibn Fadlan's earlier narrative, according to Lunde and Stone standing "almost alone in Arabic literature for its immediacy, personal flavour and balanced description of the lives and customs of the peoples of the north at a critical stage in their history."

Lunde and Stone's English translation of the work of these early Arab travelers has been provided with an informative introduction, useful notes, and a set of bibliographical and textual references. It will appeal particularly to anyone whose knowledge of mediaeval Arab travellers stops with the much later and very different Ibn Battuta, and it may signal an intention on the part of its publishers to make other works of classical Arabic literature available in readable modern translations.

Paul Lunde & Caroline Stone (trans.) Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness, Arab Travellers in the Far North, London: Penguin, 2012. pp239

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