http://modernsmile.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword Readers who seek some profound insight into the nature of Afghanistan will probably be disappointed by reading The Kite Runner, a modern novel by Khaled Hosseini. But the book is a very useful document for exploring the values of the liberal upper class, which one presumes is in large part an American/West-European phenomenon, although I am prepared to admit that perhaps the upper class of every nation today thinks the same way.
The novel follows a wealthy Afghani family who move from Afghanistan to America following the Russian invasion in the late 1970s. The viewpoint of the narrator is December 2001. Afghanistan in those decades was the theater of continual war, at first brought on by a communist invasion, then turning into a civil war won by Islamic fundamentalists. The American invasion does not form a part of the novel. But those two ideologies – communism and Islamic fundamentalism – and their effects on human minds are some of the most interesting and important phenomena of our lifetimes, and there is little doubt that this setting is one of the things which makes people pick up this book.
One of the book’s little moral lessons is that some people are evil and must be stopped by the good people. This is hardly profound, but on some level it is worth proving and it provides a good place to start talking about the book. This is the moral lesson passage, which gives a sense of Hosseini’s simple and generally disappointing style:
That’s right. Your father [who believed that “it’s wrong to hurt even bad
people”] was a good man. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Sohrab
jan. That there are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people
stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them. (319)
where to buy isotretinoin in hong kong (The simple style is in part produced by the plot, which is mostly about children. But it’s clear even from this single excerpt that real developed thoughts are not an element in this book.)
An interesting question then arises: what do these “bad people” look like? For surely, now that we know they exist, it would be good to be able to identify them. What do they do? How do they think? What does “standing up to them” mean? The key adventure in this book is the return of the protagonist Amir to Kabul during the reign of the Taliban. There he sees a public stoning in the football stadium, and has to meet with the executioner, who strangely is wearing “dark round sunglasses like the ones John Lennon wore” (271). This is a very strange fashion statement for the Taliban, and our key to understanding exactly what Mr. Hosseini is up to.
Hosseini decides to make this executioner a character, and so of course we are interested to know what sort of person becomes an executioner for the Taliban. As simply had to happen, the protagonist knew him when they were children. Of course, he was a weird sadistic bully. He was also a sexual deviant, raping, at the age of twelve or so, the protagonist’s best friend. So what does this radical muslim, this powerful leader in the Taliban look like? Well, here he is, at a party, not long after the rape scene:
He extended a wrapped birthday gift to me. “Happy birthday.”
He was dressed in a cotton shirt and blue slacks, a red silk tie and shiny
black loafers. He smelled of cologne and his blond hair was neatly
combed back. On the surface, he was the embodiment of every parent’s
dream, a strong, tall, well-dressed and well-mannered boy with talent
and striking looks, not to mention the wit to joke with an adult. (96-7)
So there he is, your average Taliban executioner, with blond hair and blue slacks, in loafers. Of course – he wore those John Lennon sunglasses in order to conceal his blue eyes! (I’m not making this up. See page 281.)
He is the only member of the Taliban, and indeed the only Taliban sympathizer, who is so much as given a name in this book. And he just happens to be an Aryan white supremacist. His mother was – pause for dramatic music – a German! And the gift he gave the protagonist, well, you know what it was, the book all the Taliban read – “a biography of Hitler.” When, during the climactic confrontation, he is offered a bribe – which, one would imagine, is a pretty good way to get what you want in a country where the people really were incredibly poor, and one which did in fact work with most members of the Taliban, who were desperate for money – he retorts,
“Money?” Assef said. He tittered. “Have you ever heard of
Rockingham? Western Australia, a slice of heaven. You should see it,
miles and miles of beach. Green water, blue skies. My parents live there,
in a beachfront villa. There’s a golf course behind the villa and a little
lake. Father plays golf every day. Mother, she prefers tennis – Father
says she has a wicked backhand. They own an Afghan restaurant and two
jewelry stores; both businesses are doing spectacularly.” He plucked a
red grape. Put it, lovingly, in Sohrab’s mouth [his homosexual boy lover].
“So if I need money, I’ll have them wire it to me.” He kissed the side of
Sohrab’s neck. (282)
I would pass over all this as merely absurd if it were not so current – this book has been lauded to the skies, and truly terrible writing like this has not stopped it from selling millions of copies – and so revealing. The face of evil is a combination of Nazi and country-club WASP. The face of evil is wealthy, effortlessly wealthy, so wealthy it isn’t even greedy anymore. (Greed, by the way, is generally good according to this worldview, so it has to be effortless wealth which is offensive, not greed). That evil should look this way is apparently so necessary to a certain sort of person that it was required to insert it here, in a Taliban executioner, in Afghanistan, where it is really – please, let’s be honest – completely inappropriate. Now I will not deny that there were some Westerners – but how many? A dozen in a country of millions? – who showed up in the Taliban, and also some people who swore off wealth, especially from Saudi Arabia. But our intelligence agencies found places like Afghanistan notoriously difficult to infiltrate, because of the value placed on family, blood ties, and race when it came to getting real power. A half-breed German with blond hair and a family in Australia would, to the Taliban, have been useful for recording propaganda in English but not much more.
Of course, this is only a novel, but plausibility is an element in a novel, and this really is too much. And as I said, it is revealing. As far as I can tell, one of the key elements in modern liberalism is the reservation of moral autonomy for Westerners only. Westerners alone, and especially rich Westerners, are capable of good and evil; everyone else is a victim. Consequently when these victims do something bad, it is merely a reaction, and a justifiable one, to the evil of the rich Westerners. How can you blame them? I once lamented to a friend about the environmental degradation on an American Indian reservation – the litter, the rusty cars scattered about, etc. – he replied, “You have no right to criticize them, after what this country’s put them through.” If you agree with that statement, congratulations, you’re a liberal. I am not against sympathy. But exempting people from moral standards is also depriving them of full humanity: there charity dissolves into condescension.
The consequence of this worldview, however, is that it simply was not possible, given the apparent constraints of the novel, for Hosseini to make an evil person who was not white and rich. I do not know where these constraints came from – from Hosseini himself, from his editor, from a desire to market to a particular book-purchasing niche – but it is clear that anyone reading the book will not get any perspective other than that of the rich modern liberal. One of the characters in the story, the protagonist’s father who is not allowed to be especially bright, hates Jimmy Carter and
When Reagan went on TV and called the Shorawi (the USSR) “the
Evil Empire,” Baba went out and bought a picture of the grinning
president giving a thumbs up. He framed the picture and hung it in our
hallway, nailing it right next to the old black-and-white of himself in
his thin necktie shaking hands with King Zahir Shah. Most of our
neighbors in Fremont were bus drivers, policemen, gas station
attendants, and unwed mothers collecting welfare, exactly the sort of
blue-collar people who would soon suffocate under the pillow
Reaganomics pressed to their faces. Baba was the one lone Republican
in our building. (126)
The metaphor is really quite striking – the pillow to the face. It feels especially strong coming from an Afghani refugee. Does Reaganomics really look that bad to someone from Kabul? Especially when that person (I am talking about the protagonist here) came to the U.S. as a child, watched his father pump gas for a living, but then went on (according to the story) to become a professional novelist and own a large Victorian home in San Francisco? I will say that I myself have a somewhat similar story, in that my family was poor and on food stamps at the beginning of the Reagan administration, but off them by the end, and now is quite prosperous. Neither this novel nor my own life has indicated to me that living in America is like having a pillow to one’s face. But in this novel, where it is not necessary, this statement seems to serve merely as a chunk of undigested propaganda (with the usual liberal “my embarrassing Daddy is a conservative” dynamic) inserted in order to confirm the reader in his presumed opinions.
The novel’s world-view is also on display in another of the book’s moral teachings. We are told that all sin is theft – murder is theft, meanness is theft, etc.
“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “You steal a wife’s
right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie,
you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the
right to fairness. Do you see?” (18)
If you agree with this, again, congratulations, you are a liberal. But is there really any cosmic significance in this teaching? What is a “right to a husband”? Could you really sue a virus for violating your rights if your husband dies? Will legal terminology really help us understand the universe? And what exactly is the “right to fairness” anyway? Can I invoke that when I see someone else’s novel selling well while mine sells poorly? Or when women prefer other men to me?
Of course we know that people believe these things. The surprising part is seeing this sort of viewpoint coming out of Afghanistan. It makes you wonder if the book is merely manufactured to play to the prejudices of Western liberals, or if it might be true that in fact everyone really thinks exactly like rich Americans.
While we are on this, we may as well discuss Islam, which is not one of the book’s focuses but is a controversial topic in the world and undoubtedly one of the causes of interest in this book. In the Kabul soccer stadium, the stoning of adulterers is preceded by a little speech. It’s worth quoting it in full, I suppose:
When the prayer was done, the cleric cleared his throat. “Brothers and
sisters!” he called, speaking in Farsi, his voice booming through the
stadium. “We are here today to carry out Shari’a. We are here today to
carry out justice. We are here today because the will of Allah and word
of the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him, are alive and well here
in Afghanistan, our beloved homeland. We listen to what God says and
we obey because we are nothing but humble, powerless creatures before
God’s greatness. And what does God say? I ask you! WHAT DOES
GOD SAY? God says that every sinner must be punished in a manner
befitting his sin. Those are not my words, nor the words of my brothers.
Those are the words of GOD!” He pointed his free hand to the sky. My
head was pounding and the sun felt much too hot.
“Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!” the cleric
repeated into the mike, lowering his voice, enunciating each word slowly,
dramatically. “And what manner of punishment, brothers and sisters,
befits the adulterer? How shall we deal with those who spit in the face
of God? How shall we answer those who throw stones at the windows
of God’s house? WE SHALL THROW THE STONES BACK!” He shut
off the microphone. A low-pitched murmur spread through the crowd.
(270-1)
Now I do not know much about Afghan rhetoric, but based on how Western the rest of the book seems, it does seem a little strange that the above speech can be spoken in a baptist-preacher accent, be it a white preacher or a black one, and every cadence will fit. The multiple anaphora at the beginning, the yelling of certain phrases, the pointing to the sky – all of it is traditional American Gospel style. That is one suspicious fact. But beyond that, the crowd is represented as distinctly disinterested and innocent. There are numerous rhetorical questions, all of which go unanswered by the passive crowd. Needless to say, this oversimplifies the problem of the popularity of Sharia law and totalitarian Islam in Afghanistan and the world at large.
But even better is what comes next:
“Next to me, Farid was shaking his head. ‘And they call themselves
Muslims,’ he whispered.” (271)
This is quite a fashionable thing, to say, “That’s not Islam. Killing people is not Islam.” Well then, one may ask, what is Islam? There is no answer to that question in the book – in fact, the protagonists viewpoint is that of an atheist/agnostic (why are we not surprised?) – but how then do we know that publicly executing adulterers is not Islam? (Unless Farid is more upset about the weak Gospel-style rhetoric the cleric was using.) Of course the term “Islam” can be used to describe fourteen centuries of human activity in a large part of the world, so defining it is not easy. Perhaps we should return to the term Muhammedanism (or Mahometanism). Muslims themselves have not shown any comfort with this term, because it implies that following the example of Muhammed and being a muslim could be different. But I will explain its usefulness.
The West hopes that Islam is compatible with certain contemporary Western practices, such as democracy, or equal legal rights for men and women, or tolerance of homosexuality. The obstacle is the following: Islam defines itself as the religion of Muhammed; Islamic scholars have documented the life of Muhammed very satisfactorily according to their own standards; and in those documents Muhammed dealt explicitly with questions such as democracy, equal rights for men and women, or tolerance of homosexuality. He is opposed to them all. Christians have the term “What would Jesus do?” For Muslims, the question is, “What did Muhammed do?” He held public executions of adulterers. Consequently every nation that claims to be organized according to Islamic law – Muhammedan law – does the same. I believe that these nations have a good title to being called muslim nations. If you oppose the practice of these nations, then you should oppose Islam, or work to create a distinction in the world’s thought between an Islam which is potentially compatible with things like equal rights for women, and Muhammedanism, which is not.
Forgive me for going off on such a digression, but one of the reasons for the popularity of this book is the “war of ideas” between the West and groups like the Taliban. Unfortunately, this debate has still not gotten past its definitions. We are still trying to figure out what Islam means. It seems that whenever a person tries to define himself explicitly and uniquely as a muslim (as opposed to a muslim-American, or French muslim, or muslim intellectual, or anything else), there is someone else nearby to say, “He is not a muslim. That is not Islam.” Eventually, we will tire of this game. This is the Hosseini game. “The Taliban? Don’t worry, they weren’t muslims. Don’t worry about the fact that they said they were muslims. They weren’t.” What would he say about Muhammed publicly beheading nine hundred Jews in the main square of Mecca (which no traditional Muslim scholar would deny)? Would he shake his head and say, “And he calls himself a Muslim.”
But while we are on this, let us finish our picture of modern liberalism. We have mentioned that the viewpoint of the book is that of an atheist/agnostic. Let us look at this phenomenon. His father seems to be a materialist of sorts:
One of the refugees asked Baba why he wasn’t joining them [in
prayer]. “God is going to save us all. Why don’t you pray to him?”
Baba snorted a pinch of snuff. Stretched his legs. “What’ll save us is
eight cylinders and a good carburetor.” That silenced the rest of them
for good about the matter of God. (120).
The protagonist himself, however, is incapable of such bold talk. Rather, he is capable of prayer when he needs something: “Caught between Baba and the mullahs at school [who were religious, of course], I still hadn’t made up my mind about God. But when a Koran ayat I had learned in my diniyat class rose to my lips, I muttered it” (62).
All this is fairly standard liberal novel fare. People pray when they need things. The protagonist is not quite an atheist, because he is weak. But there is at least one strong character who doesn’t “need” God (the basic liberal conception of why people have a conception of God) whom the protagonist admires. Atheists are upright, strong, and heroic. What about religious people? Well, there really is only one person, besides the peasants who are blessed with the ignorance of their social position (but who don’t really care about “organized religion”), who would seem to be religious: the members of the Taliban. But of course, the one Taliban character is pure evil. More than that, he is preeminently a hypocrite. Besides stoning adulterers, his main activity is raping children, especially boys. He visits the local orphanage monthly for his prey. Now it is true that the guilt which many people feel as a result of doing things they believe are wrong can be expressed as religious energy, and so the worse a person’s character, sometimes the more vehemently they cling to and profess their religion. This is the root of much religious hypocrisy, which is admittedly a perennial element of religion. But this is the boy Hosseini has his Taliban leader accompanied by a boy of the following description:
His head was shaved, his eyes darkened with mascara, and his cheeks
glowed with an unnatural red. When he stopped in the middle of the
room, the bells strapped around his anklets stopped jingling. (279)
This is, I am afraid, something of a liberal fantasy. There can be no question of religious sincerity. Religion is merely a show designed by “religious” leaders who are busy pursuing the goods of liberalism: money, power, and (especially kinky) sexual pleasure.
Human beings are human beings, and money, power, and pleasure will sway them all, but there is more to life than such things, and the religious impulse in human beings is often precisely the attempt to transcend these things. Literature may also contain such possibilities. But a book like The Kite Runner represents the opposite tendency: it is designed to pander to the preconceptions of its audience. It produces good feelings in its target audience: its popularity attests to that. But for people of another sort, acquaintance with the book is liable to call into question the whole project of merely pleasing books, whose value is purely in dollars and cents and so many hours of an otherwise bitter life diverted.
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