Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

The values in the narrator’s home are sometimes harsh and unforgiving, but they are real and true nevertheless. Wrapped up with them are perfumes and carpets, music and plays, a rich Islamic and poetic heritage, precious mystical experiences.

But beyond the walls there’s a non-conservative Aleppo, too: the dominant secular world. At school the uncovered girls call the veiled girls ‘the Penguin Club’. The mukhabarat (secret police) sympathizers write reports on the indiscretions of their peers. These students, like Mao’s cultural revolutionaries, are able to terrorize their teachers and trample on the moral code. A girl called Nada, in her ‘suits of commando camouflage’, is kept by a much older lover who works for ‘the death squad’. Political and sexual transgression are closely associated in the narrator’s mind, and she is outraged when her friend Ghada gives up modest dress to enjoy an affair with a regime figure. ‘Hatred bewildered me,’ she confides, ‘just as powerful love bewilders a lover.’

She praises hatred because she perceives it to be, like the struggle for sterile purity, a means to power. She calls on it to save her from the ‘absurd compassion that threatened my inner strength’. She calls on hatred religiously; indeed there is a suggestion here that hatred is the common religious impulse linking up Syrian society. The regime, too, conflates compassion with weakness and violence with strength, as does the Islamist organization the narrator approaches first through women’s study circles. Her guide urges the girls ‘to hate all the other Islamic sects’.

* * *

The dictatorship in Syria gave secularism a bad name, because it was a forced and sectarian secularism, to fit with the general Middle Eastern postcolonial dispensation, in which minority groups ruled over majorities. The French had established an ‘army of minorities’ which took control of the state shortly after independence. In 1963 the military wing of the Ba’ath Party reached top position, and by 1970 Hafez al-Assad and his generals — from the Alawi community, an esoteric Shia offshoot — had reduced the Party to an instrument of absolute power.

At first the Assad regime was perceived as a popular nationalist, modernizing alliance between Alawi and Sunni peasants against the urban Sunni bourgeoisie. By the late seventies, however, unrest was bubbling in a population outraged by over-representation of Alawis in the security services, a corruption-crippled economy and, most of all, the regime’s 1976 intervention in Lebanon to aid Phalangist forces against the Palestinian-Muslim-Leftist alliance.

Syrian leftists and Islamists organized against the regime, which responded with savage repression. Soon opposition activity degenerated into an assassination campaign run by the Muslim Brotherhood’s armed wing. At the June 1979 Artillery School massacre, Alawi cadets — ‘the ones’, in Khalifa’s words, ‘who had descended from the mountains with limitless ambition and vitality’ — were separated from their Sunni fellows and shot in cold blood. The regime’s savagery culminated in the February 1982 massacre at Hama, where tens of thousands were killed, and in the slaughter of hundreds at Tadmor prison.

The poet Hassan al-Khayyer, an Alawi from the president’s village, summed up the tragedy:

There are two gangs: one is ruling in the name of patriotism but has none of it.

Another gang claims good faith; and religion forbids their sayings and acts.

Two gangs. My people, be aware of both! Both drink from the same evil waters.

The regime murdered al-Khayyer in prison.

* * *

From the eighties until 2011, Syrian society was effectively depoliticized. It became a state of fear, a kingdom of silence. Discussion of the ‘ ahdath ’ (‘events’) publicly was taboo. Stories were transported by whisper, in private.

So how brave and necessary it was to write a fiction of these ‘events’. In our narrator’s harsh euphemism, Alawis are ‘the other sect’ and the Ba’ath Party is ‘the atheist party’, but the historical references are unmistakeable. Khalifa plays one of the noblest roles available to a writer: he breaks a taboo in order to hold a mirror to a traumatized society, to force exploration of the trauma and therefore, perhaps, to promote acceptance and learning. He offers a way to digest the tragedy, or at least to chew on its cud. In this respect he stands in the company of such contemporary chroniclers of political transformation and social breakdown as Günter Grass and J. M. Coetzee.

The regime, which we now know hasn’t changed mentality since the eighties, didn’t recognize Khalifa’s achievement. In Praise of Hatred was published secretly in Damascus, where it remained available for forty days until the regime discovered its existence. Next it was published in Lebanon by Dar al-Adab, and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, otherwise known as the Arab Booker, in 2008.

* * *

In purely literary terms as well as politically, the novel rises to a daunting challenge: how to represent recent Syrian history, which has often been stranger and more terrible than fiction.

For a start, it’s a perceptive study of radicalization understood in human rather than academic terms. It accurately portrays violent Islamism as a modernist phenomenon, a response to physical and cultural aggression which draws upon Trotsky, Che and Regis Debray as much as the Quran, and contrasts it with the more representative Sufism of Syrian Sunnis.

Next, it examines the dramatic transformations of character undergone by people living under such strain: the bucklings and reformations, the varieties of madness. The characters here are fully realized and entirely flexible — even our bitter narrator — and their stories are told in a powerful prose which is elegant, complex, and rich in image and emotion. There is musicality too in the rhythm of the episodes, the subtle unfolding of the plot.

If readers are imprisoned by the narrator’s perspective, they can escape into the many lesser stories within the frame. The detailed backgrounds and narratives of the characters met weave a realist fabric dense enough to rival that of Naguib Mahfouz. The range is broad: Turkish inn-keepers, English archaeologists, a Yemeni ex-Communist and a CIA officer who together enthuse over a future Islamic State, and a Saudi prince who wants a palace ‘that looks like his mother’s womb’. During the ‘events’ we meet death-squad members with skulls tattooed on their chests, kicking volumes of Shakespeare, and fugitives who evaporate into the night sky, and death becomes ‘as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out on to the pavement’.

Just a few days before sitting down to write this, I was lucky enough to meet Khaled Khalifa in Beirut. He was calm and effortlessly cheery, despite the fact that his arm was still in a sling, broken five weeks earlier when regime thugs attacked a funeral procession for the murdered musician Rabi Ghazzy.

Glancing from Khalifa’s novel to internet updates, it seems that nothing has changed since the eighties; the same massacres, tortures and battles unfold. It’s as if Syria is locked in a recurrent curse. But this twenty-first-century uprising is a popular revolution on a far greater scale than the one in the eighties; its revolutionaries arise from a far broader social spectrum. Instead of assassins and secret cells, there are grassroots organizers and defected soldiers. In the early months at least, the slogans on the streets focussed on freedom, dignity and national unity. Yet violence and the regime’s instrumentalization of sectarianism has reopened deep and rarely examined wounds. Khalifa’s plea for ‘absurd compassion’ is more necessary now than ever.