If you're looking for something fantastical and very weird, this might be the book for you.
Robert Irwin (1946-2024) was a British scholar of medieval Islam who in his twenties tried to become a Sufi saint and lived for a time in a Dervish monastery in Algeria. Among other things he was an expert on The Arabian Nights. So he knew Islamic culture very well, especially in its more fantastic versions.
The Arabian Nightmare (1983) focuses on an Englishman who journeys to Cairo in 1486 in the company of several Venetians and other western travelers. It's hard to describe what happens next, except to say that he falls into madcap misadventures that involve sleep. Also hidden gardens, talking apes, magicians, athletes of self-harm, and so on, but especially sleep. He spends much of the book unsure whether he is asleep or awake, "waking" from one dream only to enter another, and so on and so on. He begins to wonder if he has something called The Arabian Nightmare, which, well, here is Irwin's description:
The Arabian Nightmare is obscene and terrible, monotonous and yet horrific. It comes to its victims every night, yet one of its properties is that it is never remembered in the morning. It is therefore the experiencing of infinite pain without the consciousness that one is doing so. Night after night of apparently endless torment and then in the morning the victim rises and goes about his daily business as if nothing had ever happened, and he looks forward to a good night's sleep at the end of a hard day's work. It is pure suffering, suffering that does not ennoble or teach, pointless suffering that changes nothing. The victim never knows that it is he, though he may well know the story and speculate on it, but there will be people in the marketplace who will know him by certain signs. There will be talk behind his back, for he has been marked — as a sort of idiot Messiah, perhaps. That is the Arabian Nightmare.
If nothing else, the book is an extraordinary feat of imagination. In its pages we meet the Knights of St. Lazarus, a crusading order who are all lepers; the craziest game of three wishes with a djinn ever played; "the gnostic escapologist who wriggles free from any body he may be entrapped in"; and many others.
The plot, alas, is utter nonsense. As things go along the reader starts to think that this or that scene is a pointless distriaction from the main story, but then wonders – wait, what was the main story anyway? At one point the tale dissolves into a tangential story, within which is another story, and another, and so on until you suspect that the goal is to set the world record for story nesting.
But as I read, sometimes entertained and sometimes only baffled, one thing kept nagging at me: Robert Irwin was both a scholar of Sufi mysticism and, for a time, a practicing mystic. He later moved away from Sufism but this was his first novel, and I wonder if he had a lot of Sufi thoughts he needed to get off his chest. Is this book really some kind of exploration of Sufi theology, or maybe a riff on Sufi themes? The problem is, I know next to nothing about Sufism, and I can't find a review of this book by anyone who does, so I am left in the dark.
There is ceretainly much here that is at least vaguely philsophical. The theme of waking from one dream into another is a common one for Christian mystics, so it would not surprise me to hear that it is known to Sufis. One keeps coming across sentences like this:
It seemed that the friar must speak, that the friar himself must confess and admit there was no struggle between good and evil in the World, that there were not two parties to the struggle but only one, the party being of those who knew, and that those who did not know were their playthings. (172)
I did find one academic article about the book, but the authors either know less about Sufism than I do or consider that theme unimportant compared to obscure musings on "post-modern fantasy." (I am not surprised to encounter a scholarly discourse on modern fantasy, but after this taste I am resolved never to read a word of it again.) These professors do call The Arabian Nightmare a "mixture of popular fantasy with learned intertextuality," another hint that there might be something a little deeper going on. They also report that Irwin once said, "I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness," which once again makes me think that he was trying to convey something about Sufism.
The theme of suffering may also have religious meaning. Irwin once said, "There may be ecstasy, but there is also a lot of suffering in Sufism."
On the other hand, Irwin also once said that while some Sufis are religiously strict, others are "merely playing lateral-thinking-style mind games." "Lateral-thinking-style mind game" might be a perfect description of The Arabian Nightmare.
Another way to think about this book would be to consider it a mediation on dreaming, and the relationship of dreams to stories. I thought Irwin conveyed quite brilliantly the confusion and frustration that are central themes in my own dreaming. Of all the things people claim to be able to do, lucid dreaming might be to me the strangest. To me, a state of powerlessness is central to almost all my dreams. Dreams are something that happens to me, not something I do. I am sometimes able to do small things, but only with great effort, and usually not with any very good result. Also, I regularly find myself in stupid situations that are bad, but in ways that my waking self would immediately dismiss as preposterous. My dream self, alas, lacks the facility to identify the absurdity, leaving to experience real angst from nonsense like crashing my car by driving from the back seat with my eyes closed.
The Arabian Nightmare is more like a dream than any other book I have ever read. It has the absurdity of a dream, the mystery, the sense of narrow constraints and shifting geography. It unfolds with the logic of dreams: rather than being causally or coming in temporarl order, one scene inspires the next by a sort of free association. This is an achievement of sorts, but it also brings out how different most dreams are from stories. Irwin has one of his characters, the storyteller who is supposed to be telling this story, comment on how weird everything is, and apologize for being so distracted.
As well he should. He has given us a collage of scenes from dreams and nightmares, richly enlivened with his knowledge of Islamic history and lore, but shapeless, senseless, and, so far as I can tell, ultimately pointless.
2 comments:
Irwin has always come off as a bog-standard Orientalist, and not one of his protestations to the contrary has ever even begun to convince me otherwise. He looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, so I have little reason to suspect he is somehow subtly not a duck.
It also doesn't help that seemingly every North African I speak to or read the opinion of online disagrees with Irwin. For example, here's one claim of his: "Even today, with the exception of certain writers and academics, the Nights is regarded with disdain in the Arabic world. Its stories are regularly denounced as vulgar, improbable, childish and, above all, badly written".
When I've spoken to native Arab speakers about One Thousand and One Nights, they've frequently compared it to Grimm's Fairy Tales - not modern high brow literature by any means, but certainly not something "regarded with disdain" and "denounced". Rather, it's merely the sort of story everyone knows, even if they've never actually read it. It's also broadly well thought of - the sort of thing children have told to them at bedtime, or which you find references to scattered liberally through popular culture.
One of my North African friends compared it to the tales of King Arthur - something that for all the modern academic and high literary analysis it may sometimes get, was nevertheless originally a bunch of loosely related folk tales told for sheer entertainment, and was never actually intended to convey much of deeper meaning beyond that.
Hence, I struggle to see Irwin as anything but a classic Orientalist - someone who knows a tremendous number of facts and details about the Arab world, but who instead of stepping back and viewing the world through that Arab lens, insists on projecting his own English worldview through it and drawing conclusions from that. He may get his facts straight, but he often gets his interpretations completely wrong, because he is approaching that information from an outside position.
It's like someone who has memorized the New Testament, but who doesn't have an understanding of what life was actually like in Roman Judea, or how people in that time and place thought or viewed the world. They pick out a verse to read, and they interpret through the lens of their own modern worldview, and come to a completely wrongheaded conclusion because they don't understand that the same words would have meant something entirely different to the people they were originally written for. They lack the cultural context to properly parse and correctly understand the information, despite all the effort they put into "learning" it via memorization.
I found a quote from an Arab writer that very well encapsulates and mirrors my own feelings toward the man:
Irwin just wants to say that “orientalism” understands the true value of Arabic heritage more than the Arabs did (common orientalist trope about many peoples).
I had been struggling to wrap my head around the problem, but that seems to hit the nail on the head.
We're talking about the kind of arrogant Englishman who "decided to become a Sufi saint" on a whim, as if it was just a matter of following the correct steps in a recipe, rather than being a social status conferred upon an individual by a community at large for far greater and more complicated reasons than just "sat on top of a pillar and meditated", "recited Sufi poetry", etc. He really does think he knows better than the Arab peoples themselves do.
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