“Show me a book that is not us”

A conversation to broaden our cultural-historical perspective on book burning, banning, and censorship

October is a month that celebrates one of our most revered forms of expression: the book. Avid readers throng to book fairs to listen to their favorite authors, discover new ones, and experience the joy of touching a new cover and the anticipation of cracking open fresh pages. Agents and publishers, the purveyors of the industry that has grown up around the idea of the book, present their authors, meet and greet, and trade.

Speaking from my own experience, book fairs can be as exhausting as they are engaging for an author, and yet I am grateful for them as this October, we in the Western democracies also find ourselves in a bewildering time of accelerating book burnings, banning, and censorship.

In Sweden, the police have been kept more than busy protecting the rights of individual extremists to burn the Koran. Elsewhere, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, books that many of us grew up reading are being banned from schools and libraries, and the proverbial black pen is being run through “unacceptable” terms in well-loved children’s stories in the deliberately misguiding haze of left and right extremist politics.

All this takes place in an age of social media, where one can sometimes wonder whether any conversation takes place at all and where a decoupling from truth and courtesy is common. Like the fate of the beloved book in our age, it raises the question of what freedom is and whether it can ever be discussed separately from other considerations, such as respect and living peacefully in a multicultural society.

As a writer and a democracy activist, I’ve shaken my head as I’ve listened to discussions about protecting democratic freedoms and values that lack a sufficiently broad cultural and historical context. To help broaden the discussion, I’ve invited a friend with special insights into this subject to exchange thoughts about it. Akil Zahiri is a Muslim who has watched the Koran burning in Sweden with sadness and dismay. He is the spokesperson at the Imam Ali Center outside of Stockholm and has previously worked as a spiritual confidante in prisons.

JULIE:  Akil, after a long break imposed on us by the pandemic and its after-effects, I was so glad to resume our conversation at a café the other day. In 2019, you participated in a talk I gave to an interfaith audience about having difficult conversations, a skill I’ve honed to come to terms with my family’s Nazi past. Soon after the talk, you asked whether I’d visit your center for an interview to be shared in the internal circular of Sweden’s Shia mosques. I was delighted but also surprised as I wondered how my WWII-related story could be of interest to your community. After all, I’ve experienced the way that tensions in the Middle East have sometimes led to difficulties among Muslim communities in absorbing the history of the Holocaust. I found your heartfelt invitation refreshing.

Before we get into the subject of book burnings and bannings, I want to ask why you invited me.

AKIL: Thank you for inviting me to continue our conversation at The Tendril. There are various answers to your question.

In my regular work, I often meet individuals and families in crisis, and your experience seemed relevant to learning how to communicate in complex, emotionally charged situations.

Then, there is ignorance or at least incomplete knowledge about the history of WWII and the Holocaust, which needs to be addressed. Many of us in our community have never been able to deepen ourselves in a story like yours. You offer the possibility of reflecting upon the perpetrators of that time as people with different sides and thus remind us that any of us can be drawn in by the wrong side. This is a common denominator among all humans and a thought that should unite us in reflection. Otherwise, we become victims of the failure to do so.

At our center, we feel we have a duty to help our community to listen to people who do not share our faith. This is the key to peaceful co-existence while maintaining our own cultural and religious identity.

JULIE: During our conversation in the café, you raised an episode from Middle Eastern history with which Muslims associate the current crisis of book burnings in Sweden. I have my own historical associations from Nazi Germany and earlier periods of persecution in Europe, which are the lens through which I see current events, but I am very interested in yours as these are less well-known in the Western world. What does the burning of the Koran say to you and others in your proximity? Can you situate it in your literature, your religion, your history? By way of this, can you clarify where you come from, what brought you to Sweden, and what history you are referring to?

AKIL: Of course. When I attended school in Iran, we learned about the Mongol invasions of Persia during the 13^th century, in which so much of our literary heritage was destroyed. Just think, after those book burnings, there were no remaining copies of those books, which means that we cannot understand our forefathers as well as we might have were these books preserved. So much knowledge was destroyed, the objective of tyrants who then decided which books we should read. The destruction of literature was accompanied by the murder of millions, resulting in one of history's bloodiest chapters. This story is so well known that it has entered the colloquial; that is to say, it is a metaphor for the historically close relationship between the destruction of culture, books, and what so often has followed: mass murder.

My mother (who loves to read) was from Iran, and my father was from Iraq. I came to Sweden via various countries, including Syria, when I was 18, fleeing Sadaam Hussein’s regime, which executed two of my uncles.  That regime confiscated hundreds of thousands of books and maintained lists of banned authors. One could easily be executed for owning certain books.

JULIE: We’ve been talking about the burning and banning of books in general, but what does the burning of the Koran say to you and others in your proximity? What happens in your family and community when you watch it burn?

AKIL: The Koran is the holiest book for all Muslims, that is over 2 billion people worldwide. Those who burn it have other goals than to burn the Koran, and we ask ourselves what those are. The burnings create fear within our community and potentially damage our chances for peaceful coexistence, which is likely what such persons would like to achieve.

Picture that you are standing outside Stockholm Mosque with your children on Eid al-Adha, one of the most important holidays in the Muslim calendar. It should be a day of great joy – people even buy themselves new clothes to celebrate it. Instead, you encounter 80-90 journalists and police protecting a man who sets our holiest book on fire in a ritual burning. My son asked me: “Why do they burn our book?” This is something you cannot explain away to your children.

One can criticize and question the Koran. In fact, in a democratic society, one must be able to do that. But to burn it sadly sets in motion cycles of hate.

Several modern democracies have found reasonable ways of dealing with this issue without sacrificing civil freedoms. Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Germany are all examples, so it is possible.

JULIE: What sorts of books other than the Koran have meant the most to you from your own cultural tradition? What would you like to pass on to me to read?

AKIL: I think of the letters, lectures, and so-called hadither (traditions) of Ali ibn Abi Talib, an important personality in Islam, after the Prophet Muhammed who was the first imam in Shia Islam.  The book is called Nahj al-Balagha and I think it provides helpful insights into Islam’s history and mystery (Irfan). I would also like to suggest The Voice of Human Justice, a biography of Ali by George Jordac (1931-2014), a Christian Arabic author and poet from Lebanon.

JULIE: Many thanks, Akil. I look forward to reading and to our next coffee.

Below is the poem I wrote that motivated my thoughts and outreach to Akil.

When Books Burned

When letters burned, eyes were struck blind,

When pages burned, tongues were muted,

When spines burned, songs were silenced,

When covers burned, the sweet smell of spring fled.

​

Show me a book that should not be read,

Show me a sky that should not be seen,

Show me the river that should not flow,

Show me the grass that should not yearn.

​Show me the fire that should not burn,

But first, show me the book that is not us.

15 February 2023