I am currently reading one of the most acclaimed Arabic novels of recent years, Chicago, by Alaa Aswani.  It is a rich and rewarding tapestry of characters, mostly Egyptians, who have in one way or another made their way to Chicago, and specifically to the laceType w:st="on">SchoollaceType> of laceName w:st="on">MedicinelaceName> at the University of Illinois-Chicago.  It is, more than anything, a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the collision of cultures—the Egyptian born physician who suppresses his origins in every manner possible, only to find them explode when his daughter moves in with her boyfriend, the Copt who cannot let go of his homeland despite being continually disappointed by it, the graduate student who falls in love with a Jewish American—that anyone who is familiar with both American and Arab culture would, I think, enjoy immensely.

But this isn’t a book review, mostly because the novel to my knowledge is only available in Arabic and I cannot begin to see the point of posting an English language review of an Arabic book.  What I found remarkable was that for the sharp novelist’s eye that Aswani brings to this subject, his skills fail him when it comes to tackling the subject of race, and the one interracial relationship in the novel contains scenes that come off as stilted as they are impossible to imagine.    

Thus, for example, the black girlfriend of a professor walks into the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Department of Histology and asks for the room of her boyfriend, Professor Graham.  One of the professors looks her over and asks why she wants to know.  She tells him she is his girlfriend, and he tells her curtly, the office is at the end of the hall, and that he does not believe for a moment that she is the professor’s girlfriend.  When she asks why that is, he says “I think you know.”  

It was this statement that moved the incident from improbable to farcical.  Now I am not one who would deny the continuing scar of racism in the U.S., but it doesn’t go down like this.  I would like to think that my fellow faculty members would never assume that an African American woman could not be dating a colleague, but this unfortunately would not always be the case.  What would be unlikely, to my mind, would be their giving voice to that skepticism.  And what would be virtually impossible to imagine, for reasons of self interest if no other, is, when challenged on that skepticism, instead of retreating and trying to find a reason that wouldn’t involve race, all but to admit this as the source of their skepticism to the very person challenging them.  That’s a good way to lose tenure. 

Given that the scene was a university, I could not help but compare it to a different novel that was a much more masterly portrayal of this issue in a similar setting, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.  Despite Aswani’s excellent work in other respects, on this particular score, the comparison does Aswani no favors.  It’s not even close.  And, I would surmise, if you made Philip Roth try to write about a devout female Egyptian exchange student from the city of Tanta who came to Chicago for the first time, he’d flub it rather badly as well.  

What is the point of all of this?  It’s simple enough.  Even when you have a novelist, one trained to turn a scalpel onto the human soul, their preternatural abilities of observation and discernment require a context in which they are familiar.  A novelist as fine as than John Updike made as near a mess of a Muslim terrorist that Aswani does trying to address a subject as fraught with cultural and social and historical baggage as race in America is.  I haven’t seen a white author portray a Muslim in a novel even remotely as well as any one of Aswani’s characters.

Without the context, the novelist is lost.  And if the novelist cannot bridge this vast contextual space, imagine the lawyer, robbed of the same skills as the novelist in understanding the human soul.  Imagine her attempting to understand an entire legal system, not just from its texts, as if that isn’t hard enough, but in the cultural context in which it is placed, to make some sense of how it might work.  Imagine her trying to put herself in the place of a local lawyer, and how hard that might be for her, when one of the most gifted novelists in the Arab world, precisely trained for such a task, proves incapable of even portraying this.  

Really, we shouldn’t be surprised at the incredible level of ignorance in the West to the law in Muslim lands, or to shari’a or anything else.  It’s a miracle any knowledge is permeated at all.