Among the horrors perpetrated by the Isis brain trust last year was one that took me longer than usual to process.
This particular PR stunt didn’t produce dead bodies. It didn’t have a catchy, shrewdly edited video that went viral. It didn’t feature a well-choreographed suicide attack, rehearsed ahead of time like some big end-of-show musical number. In the stunt I’m talking about, Isis thugs attacked the Mosul Public Library, the second biggest library in Iraq after Baghdad’s, burning books by the thousands, bombing the building itself, and salvaging, according to press reports, “only Islamic texts”. This means, we must assume, that the fanatics destroyed all the library’s copies of Beowulf. As a Muslim, I found this reality more deeply disturbing than all the other sick events of a very sick year. Yet I didn’t quite know why.
In my mind, I pictured a dozen or so thugs, their red eyes illuminated by some night-lit bonfire, gathered into throngs. I pictured one of them tossing Seamus Heaney’s translation of the great epic poem of Old English onto a broadening heap of flaming, manifestly non-Islamic texts. I heard the thugs roaring that peculiar empty, approving howl, the howl of those who believe they have successfully destroyed that which they do not wish to know or understand. (You hear the same howl at Trump rallies.)
For a few years now, Isis has secured the leadership position in a highly competitive global industry, that of increasing polarity and hatred. It has accomplished this by provoking and sustaining a global blood feud. Isis insists, as any number of characters in my novel Jihadi: A Love Story do, that the world is actually quite simple; that it is composed of two colours, white and black, of “us” on the one hand, and those who want “us” dead on the other. That the colour grey does not exist.
Isis insists, ultimately, that we who accept the Qur’an as divine scripture must also adopt a worldview in which Muslim libraries have room only for Islamic texts, a world in which books like Beowulf, for all practical purposes, do not and should not exist. And damn it, people are agreeing.
So I have found myself returning to Heaney’s Beowulf. There are, fortunately, still plenty of real libraries and still plenty of Muslims ready, willing and able to defend them. So let me suggest, while that is still the case, that there are some vital points of commonality between the great literary source-text of the English language, Beowulf, and the divine book I read every day, the Qur’an. Here are three instructive parallels I think Muslims – and everyone else – should know and study.
Murder of the innocent is unjustifiable. The Qur’an insists on this point without the least ambiguity and on multiple occasions, notably in a breathtaking recounting of the Cain and Abel story. Early in the Beowulf text, the unknown poet draws our attention to the same event and draws precisely the same conclusion: butchery of the innocent invokes the condemnation of God.
For the killing of Abel, the Eternal Lord had exacted a price: Cain got no good from committing that murder, because the Almighty made him anathema… (107-110, Heaney’s translation).
Both texts agree that murdering non-combatants who have committed no crime violates basic moral law. The Beowulf poet goes further, identifying those who countenance such murders as members of the exiled “clan of Cain”. Its most famous member is Grendel, arch-enemy of the noble warrior Beowulf. Grendel typifies the beastly, ungovernable side of humanity, the side of human experience that “nurse(s) a hard grievance” – and rips societies to shreds.
Greed is without honour. The Qur’an warns believers repeatedly about the dangers of cultivating greed and covetousness. The Beowulf poet paints a picture of Grendel as a monster possessed of an endless, devouring, never-satisfied desire for more than he has. Grendel is not merely a creature beyond law and reason. He is devoted to appetite, to greed.
The mere desire for flesh, or for ready cash, is not the stuff of honour, and following such a desire wherever it leads is condemned in the poem and forbidden in Islam. Grendel’s “greedily loping” (711) path evokes the crooked path of money-lust and possession-lust that Muslims are warned repeatedly to avoid – the path that leads, in our time, to trafficking in illegal drugs, to theft of antiquities, and to mass execution, the ultimate means of supporting theft on a vast scale.
Warfare, if undertaken, must be conducted within clear ethical and legal boundaries. The Qur’an commands observance of certain norms of civilised behaviour during wartime. These days, paranoiacs and fascist apologists have chosen to unite with the self-proclaimed “scholars” of Isis by maintaining seriously that Islam promotes burning people alive, murdering women and children, and making rage a way of life. I disagree. My scripture tells me to fight when I am attacked, but it also tells me not to transgress moral limits if I do fight, and it tells me to restrain my anger.
On which side of such a debate would a being like Grendel show up? With the paranoiacs, with the fascist apologists, and with the minds planning and justifying the “cultural cleansing” now dividing the Middle East. The Beowulf poet reminds us constantly of Grendel’s transgressing, chaotic, unbounded nature. Of his refusal to listen to parleys. Of his slaughter of young and old alike. Of his constant, unyielding rage and cruelty. This lack of boundaries, this willingness to cross clearly drawn lines, this desire for a blood feud that never ends, marks Grendel out as more beast than man.
I wrote Jihadi: A Love Story hoping that it might become part of a global conversation about moving away from polarity, and toward coexistence. I still hope to take part in that conversation. But after the desecration of that library in Mosul, I feel a certain rage. Rage, I suspect, is what Isis wants people to feel. That is what all extremists want.
At one point, after Grendel’s “rage boiled over”, Heaney tells us that his eyes shine with
“… a baleful light, Flame more than light (726-727)”
It occurred to me, late last year, that I recognised those eyes. They were the eyes of thugs gathered around the bonfire, eyes of people who know all they need to know, eyes devoted to pursuing a feud to the bitter end.
Heaney was wrong. Grendel did not die. Beowulf did not kill the beast after all. Grendel is alive and well, bloodstained and furious. He is devouring the innocent, and he is burning unfamiliar books. I suppose mine will be one of them. Grendel rules Raqqa now.
[ Jihadi: A Love Story is published by Orenda Books on February 29th, at £8.99Opens in new window ]
