It seems now, rightly, that every person with a conscience is asking themselves what they can do.

So what is it that the writer can – uniquely – do? As we live through our day, as we eat, dress, wash, as I try to write this piece children are being amputated, orphaned. Cities are reduced to rubble, the land and the rivers poisoned, norms and laws dismantled, institutions corrupted to make more room for war. I cannot speak for the poet, but in a time of urgency the writer of fiction cannot afford the time and the attention needed by the process of prospecting and excavating and coaxing and tweaking that will – maybe – yield the story.

The answer for some of us has been to walk away from our small quarry and join the good and humbling company of citizens of the world, from young direct-action activists to pensioner protestors, from dockers to doctors to students to lawyers to journalists to academics, to musicians and actors, why even to – a few – politicians,  all speaking truth to power, all using what tools they possess to hold off or to mitigate or document the unfolding catastrophe.

What do we bring to the company?

There is a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that says: ‘If one of you should see an instance of wrongdoing let them change it with their hand, and if they cannot then with their tongue, and if they cannot then with their hearts, and that is the least you can do.’

We, the writers, are the ones entrusted with words.

In 2006, Mahmoud Darwish, responding to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, wrote a ‘Diary’ in the Palestinian literary magazine, al-Karmel. It takes the form of 15 short pieces of prose and poetry. This is piece number 5:

Smoke rises from me / I reach out a hand to collect my limbs scattered from so many bodies / besieged from land and sky and sea and language./ The last plane has taken off from Beirut airport and left me in front of the screen to watch / with millions of viewers / the rest of my death / As for my heart, I see it roll / like a pinecone, from Mount Lebanon, to Gaza.

Yet Darwish, even Darwish with his genius for the word, two years later when he addressed the first season of the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest, spoke of the difficulty of the Palestinian writer who ‘has to use the word to resist the military occupation, and has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the repetitive.’

And as the years and the massacres and the years and the displacements and the years and the injustices have rolled on, the ‘difficulty’ for all of us has taken root and bloomed. So what do we bring to the table? A reputation perhaps? a readership? and any facility we may have with words in quotidian use. And the hope that one day the world will be such that we will once again have space to mine our hearts, to coax out precious fragments and fashion them into the patterns that speak to those who see them and find an echo in their hearts.

The post A Matter of Conscience: Ahdaf Soueif appeared first on English PEN.

There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell for years. It is a story that is not mine to tell. It is my friend’s story and only she has the right to tell it. Still, I grapple with the urge to write it from my vantage point. I have written countless iterations before, each one taking me further, helping me to articulate what it is that I want to say, and why I want to say it. This is not my story. But within the story of my friend becoming a widow, there is my story too. About who I was and who I became, a before and an after.

My version begins several years before the inciting incident, when we met in university. We were in a meeting and the facilitator asked us to introduce ourselves by sharing one unique thing about us. I don’t remember what I said about myself. ‘I love to read’ was how I used to introduce myself back then. I kept it safe and predictable, the wallflower that I was, still am. My friend raised her arm high and spread her fingers apart. ‘I can do this,’ she said, bending the third phalanx of each finger while keeping the rest of her hand and fingers straight. I had looked down at my own hands and tried to replicate what she was doing, but I couldn’t. My fingers could only bend in the normal way. We became friends easily. We discovered that we both loved to write and commented devotedly on each other’s blog posts. We passed notes to each other in MSA meetings. We took painting classes together.

Most summers, my friend would travel to Egypt with her family. While she was away, I would write emo lyrics on her Facebook wall, quoting Macy Gray: ‘My world crumbles when you are not here.’ Another year, after reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I wrote her a poem titled ‘There Is an Asmaa-shaped Hole in the Universe.’ That hole grew wider when she came back from holiday one year and revealed that she had met someone. She returned to Egypt that winter to get married.

I called my friend on the day of her wedding. Her sister snapped a picture of her while she was talking to me. That image of her in her pearl-white wedding dress, sitting on a garden chair, her joy palpable, even in that grainy image, is one of my favourites. A year later, she returned to Canada with her husband, her belly swollen. I visited her in the hospital the day their daughter was born. Her husband greeted us in the lobby, his face exploding with joy.

The following summer, the current Egyptian president overthrew the democratically elected government, and protests in response to the coup were met with gunfire. My friend, her husband, and their daughter had gone back for a visit. Before they left, before there was a hint of the impending violence, they were considering staying in Egypt for good. I met my friend and her daughter before their trip at a coffee shop called Yellow Cup Café. Yellow ceramic mugs hung from hooks above the food counter. Even the walls were painted yellow. When her husband came to pick them up, I told him, ‘Bring her back, please.’ Perhaps I should have said, ‘Please come back, both of you.’

The Rabaa Massacre happens. I spend all eight hours at work that day scrolling through news websites and articles, scouring Facebook for pictures and videos. ‘The bloodiest massacre of protestors in modern history,’ the headlines proclaim. I remember leaving work, walking to the subway station with a feeling of impending doom. I couldn’t fathom how people were going about their day, as if nothing had happened, while I couldn’t unsee the dead bodies lined up next to each other in a mosque, enormous blocks of ice on their chests, faces caked with dry blood; couldn’t unhear the gun shots, the sound of grenades bursting, the screams of women ringing through the air.

On 16 August 2013, I went to jummah. That morning, I had received an email from my friend, a reply to my message pleading with her to come back, saying that Egypt was becoming too dangerous, especially for her husband, who had a beard of the kind that made him a target. ‘Can Amr shave his beard?’ I had written to my friend, ‘So he doesn’t stand out?’ Her reply was not reassuring. ‘He went to the protests today, but it’s a very large one so hopefully it won’t be targeted by the police.’ About the beard, she said, ‘I asked him, and he won’t. And I respect that. Insha’Allah the protest is peaceful and nothing happens.’

I waited in the mosque for my husband after praying. He had left his bag and phone with me, so I scrolled through his Facebook feed – my phone was old and clunky and didn’t have any social media apps. I paused to read a post from an Imam in the UK, someone who knew my friend. His words felt like a whack to my throat. He must have mistaken her for someone else, I told myself. It can’t be her. I fumbled through my husband’s bag and took out his tablet. I tried to log into my Facebook account, but my fingers were shaking and wouldn’t land on the right letters.

‘Are you okay? Your face is pale.’ I heard my husband’s voice near me somewhere.

‘Asmaa. I need to check something. Her husband.’ My voice came out in a hoarse whisper. My husband took the tablet from me and typed in my password. I scrolled hurriedly through my feed, and for a sliver of a moment I felt relief. Nothing indicated that anything had happened.

And then that moment was gone. I saw a post from my friend’s sister: ‘My sister is a widow. Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.’ I don’t remember anything from that moment except my hand flying to my mouth, trying to contain a sob. It erupted anyway, pushed itself out through the gaps between my fingers, burst out from the corners of my mouth.

I called my friend that evening. I don’t recall who answered the phone at her in-laws’ home, or how I introduced myself. Such details have been lost from my memory.

“Assalaamu alaikum?” My friend answered, her voice weary.

I immediately felt guilt. She didn’t want to hear from me. I had called too soon. I was treading callously on her pain.

“Wa alaikum assalaam. It’s me, Hajera.”

“Hajera. Hajera.”

No one snapped a picture of my friend that day while she was talking to me. But I know now that images aren’t the strongest reminder of memory. Voices are, the way a name is stretched and elongated, as if it were something to hold on to, but falling just out of reach.

My best friend’s husband was shot and killed at a protest in Egypt, two years after they got married. My friend became a widow and her nine-month-old daughter an orphan. I don’t have the right to tell this story because it isn’t mine. But can there be another story here, nestled quietly within a larger one? Or maybe a story that’s entirely different, fighting for its own space, its right to exist. Like a series of concentric circles fighting to stay whole, resisting collapse into a black hole. I have been wrestling with these questions over the years.

After my friend returned to Canada, I didn’t know how else to be a friend other than to do what friends do: be there. I took the subway all the way to her parent’s house, where she was staying, and spent the day with her and her daughter. We would go for walks in the neighbourhood, bundled in our winter coats. We made lunch together – sometimes elaborate meals like salmon steaks and rice, other times simple ones like cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. I read books to her daughter. She laughed as I said her favourite lines repeatedly, hoping that the sound of laughter could once again become familiar to us. I kept showing up at my friend’s house. I didn’t know if my presence was helping, but I knew the alternative of not seeing her was unfathomable; the last words I had said to her husband wouldn’t stop echoing in my mind.

Years later, a mutual friend suggested in passing that none of us were truly there for our friend after her husband was killed. Something unfamiliar unleashed from my body. I knew this person was projecting, that it had nothing to do with me or my relationship with my friend, but I couldn’t contain the anger in my chest. My worst fears had risen to the surface – that everything I did was worth nothing. That I failed my best friend. The feeling revisits me now. Am I failing her again by writing this story?

I am now forty, and have known my friend for more than two decades. She is still one of my closest friends. The story of what happened to her belongs to her, I know that. What I also know is that without her presence in my life, without the story of what happened to her, there is a different me. I don’t want to claim my friend’s story. But I don’t know who I would be if I hadn’t encountered such a heavy grief at that time in my life. If I didn’t teach myself to sit with its silence, to stay in its uncertainty.

This feels like a safe and predictable way in which to end this essay. It allows me to remain a wallflower, to claim that this is my friend’s story and to centre her, even as I talk about myself and my experience of her tragedy. But there is something gnawing at me that keeps getting harder to ignore. My writing this essay defies my claim of being a wallflower. It puts me at the centre, and being the centre of attention has always made me want to crawl out of my skin and disappear. Which then begs the question of why I’ve felt so compelled to tell this story.

The truth is that my friend’s story is my story too because it changed both our lives. Before self-publishing her memoir, my friend asked me if I could read it and give her some feedback. She mentioned me in the acknowledgments, thanking me for the inspiration for the idea for the book in the first place. She went on to publish two picture books, and to establish a publishing company that is now in its tenth year. What began as a writer-friend sharing thoughts transformed into me becoming an editor. If I work backwards, I wouldn’t be an editor and a creative writing teacher today if my friend hadn’t established her publishing company, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to sit with the question of whether my friend would have started her publishing company if her husband hadn’t been killed.

Who am I hiding from? I ask myself. Writers do this all the time though, don’t they? Take from what inspires them, build stories out of it. I have done this in my fiction too. But I have only taken from my own experiences, heavily changing any recognisable events and character details. The handful of times that I have written nonfiction, the stories have always been mine, a transformative healing announcing the end of the essay.

There is no healing in writing this. Only discomfort. Still, I will show it to my friend before it gets published. I know she will not object to any of its contents. She will tell me that it is very much my story to tell. We will shed tears over WhatsApp messages, reminiscing about the past, how little we knew about ourselves, how young we were. But I will still be uncomfortable. I will still cringe when I see this piece published. My fingers will tremble before I hit post on Instagram where I announce that I have a new publication.

And yet, I am choosing to write this, and agreeing to have it published. Maybe because even after trying for all these years to escape the reach of this story, it still comes back to haunt me. It’s the one essay that is sitting in my nonfiction folder, waiting to see the light of day. Maybe because, when all is said and done, we cannot escape the fact that the lives of our friends are also intertwined with ours. That a friend losing a loved one isn’t like losing a loved one myself, but it is like losing something. It’s losing the friendship you had built and not knowing how things will look moving forwards, how things will irrevocably change. I remember how hesitant I was in the days after my friend returned to Canada. I would email her instead of texting. I would say things like ‘Please don’t feel like you have to reply.’ I felt like an intruder. I’ve been seeing more commentary lately about the grief of losing friends, and how no one talks about what it feels like when friendships end. I felt it back then – the fear of losing my friend to her grief; the fear that my presence would just be a reminder of her old life.

Maybe I keep coming back to this story because I need myself to know something. That I did a hard thing by standing by my friend, offering whatever support I could. That her grief is a part of our friendship and inseparable from who I am now. Is that worth writing about? Is it worth the possibility that I will encounter readers who think less of me as a writer for writing a story that isn’t mine? I don’t know. No matter how many times I circle back to the question of why I’m writing this essay, the answer gets more muddled, and new questions arise, until all of it collapses into itself, and the black hole implodes.

The post This Is Not My Story to Tell appeared first on English PEN.

RAPHAEL CORMACK: I have two answers to this question. The first one is the simple one. My first book, Midnight in Cairo, was a history of the 1920s and 1930s entertainment industry in Egypt’s capital. As I was doing research for that project, I reasonably frequently came across references to stage hypnotists and spiritualists who appeared on Cairo’s cabaret stages alongside some of the biggest musical stars of that era. I started to ask myself what they were doing on these bills and what audiences made of them. That soon led me towards Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh but it also led me towards many others like them – Dr Salomon Bey the hypnotist, and other fakirs like Rahman Bey and Hamid Bey. It was a whole scene that has now been almost entirely forgotten.

The second answer is more complicated. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can see the 1920s and 1930s as global decades or, at the very least, write the Middle East into the standard histories of the period. That is something I was trying to do by writing about the entertainment scene in Egypt, which was globally connected. I saw an opportunity to do this with the occult too. If you read anything about the early twentieth century, it doesn’t take long before you come across some manifestation of the occult, whether it’s theosophy, spiritualism, hypnotism or another mysterious art. Not only was it very popular, it seems to me to capture something of the spirit of the age: irrationality, hope, post-traumatic anxiety, and curiosity. Again, I saw a chance here in the characters of people like Dr Dahesh to write the Middle East back into the story of the interwar period.

Neither of them were strictly speaking doctors, in the conventional sense of the word. But they used that title with all seriousness, and used spectacle and mysterious methods to convince a large section of their public that they had superpowers. Why do you feel that, 100 years ago, as you feel now, people in fear of drastic historical changes and the arrival of a new unpredictable era wanted strong men in politics and men who claimed supra-scientific or supernatural powers in private?

There is an uncomfortable connection between these holy men and the strongmen dictators of the period. When I started this book, I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the occult and I still do (to an extent). I was drawn to its desire to create a new world, its rejection of the corruptions of the material world, and also, to be totally honest, its fun and charismatic characters. But the more I researched the harder it was to ignore the links to various kinds of fascism. These links were rarely direct (neither Tahra Bey nor Dr Dahesh were fascists – nor were they really involved in any kind of politics at all). Still, the indirect connections were very strong. Not only were there similarities between the way that these holy men held their followers in their sway and the way that the strong men like Hitler and Mussolini inspired such devotion, but also the rejection of bourgeois rationalism and the appeal to a great new world coming were eerily alike. Something about the occult seems fundamentally non-egalitarian, despite its frequent claims to promote the equality of all humanity. As Anna Della Subin has said, talking about the same period, ‘occultism, the realm of hidden, elite mysteries, seemed to contradict the spirit of democracy.’ If one person or a small group of people can claim special access to the world beyond the veil, a hierarchy necessarily emerges. It’s only a few steps away from dictatorship.

Tahra Bey: an Armenian pretending to be an Egyptian Fakir in Paris and the maternal cousin of Charles Aznavour. Is this how a refugee one century ago found a way to fame and success in the West?

Tahra Bey’s Armenian-ness is clearly a key part of his story. For those who have not read the book, Tahra Bey came to Europe in the mid-1920s, claiming to be an ‘Egyptian fakir’ and performing various miraculous feats which baffled the scientific establishment. He could seemingly control his body with the power of his mind, changing his heart rate at will, piercing his flesh without feeling pain, and putting his body into a death-like state during which he would be buried alive in front of a live audience. All of these things astounded audiences, who were also were drawn by his exotic garb (flowing white robes and headdress) and his claims to be a fakir descended from a long line of fakirs. These stories, though, were all false. He was an Armenian from Istanbul, born Krikor Kalfayan.

As I was writing this book (and partly helped by the discussion after a talk I gave on the subject at the Moon Station in Athens) it became clearer and clearer to me that Tahra Bey’s identity as an Armenian refugee was crucial to understanding his persona. In Europe at the time Armenians faced both discrimination and suspicion. I interpret his construction of the mysterious Eastern persona as an attempt to style himself as an exotic and interesting outsider, rather than a suspect refugee as many Armenians in Europe were seen. Likewise, his whole act – his imperviousness to pain, his conquest of death – could pretty easily be read as a response to the traumas of the Armenian genocide. Although Tahra Bey himself does not seem to have personally witnessed violence, he would undoubtedly have heard stories and many of his relatives would have perished in the 1910s.

I think the period you chose is an extraordinary period of history, and I find it fascinating you chose to explore it through Dr Tahra Bey: ‘Tahra Bey born in Istanbul . . . travelled across Europe out of the ruins of the Eastern Mediterranean until he reached France as a refugee in 1925. In Paris, advertising himself as an “Egyptian fakir” from a long line of mystics, his ability to manipulate his physical body in inexplicable ways using the power of his mind made him a summer sensation. . . . Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit, Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.’

Do you feel that there was something that the East possessed which audiences in the West craved, and which Tahra Bey delivered for them in the character of a Fakir? What was it? 

What we learn from Tahra Bey is that people in the West were obsessed with the idea that they could be saved by Eastern philosophies but that they really only wanted a simulacrum of the East not its reality. The craze for Eastern wisdom in the 1920s was not informed by true curiosity about the long traditions of mysticism from across Asia and North Africa. In fact, many people were often confused as to whether Tahra Bey was Egyptian, Indian, or something else entirely. The embrace of the East was largely just a rejection of the West. It was based on very little knowledge and so many people were fooled by anyone who came along dressed in long robes. A few people did eventually embrace the spiritual traditions of other cultures, including Sufism, and learn about them seriously. But these people were few and far between.

In the case of Dr Dahesh, your second subject, a Palestinian who moved to Beirut after the formation of Israel and used western science as a cloak and justification for his ‘magic’, soon becoming a celebrity in Beiruti high society, do you think that he is in a way a mirror image of Tahra Bey? Instead of dressing in Eastern robes, he wore western suits; instead of talking about Ancient powers and techniques, he claimed ‘Western Science’ as his source of extraordinary power.

Dr Dahesh is the centrepiece of the second part of the book and his story guides that narrative. I use his story to write the Middle East back into the history of the modern occult – not as an exotic, mystical fantasy, but as a real place with real people in it.

Dr Dahesh also fits into the narrative nicely because he first appeared on stage in 1929 doing an act that was clearly inspired by Tahra Bey and his fakirism. Dahesh would pierce his flesh without feeling pain and bury himself alive just as Tahra Bey had done in Paris. However, instead of dressing in long white robes and headdress like an exotic Rudolf Valentino-style Sheikh, he put on the garb of Western modernity. Soon he began to talk of hypnotism and spiritualism instead of fakirism, explaining that this new science could unlock many secrets. He was not the only one, either. Many hypnotist spiritualists were active at the same time, some more famous than Dr Dahesh and some less so.

Unlike these other hypnotist-spiritualists though, Dr Dahesh went on to form his own religious movement. People who were stunned by his miraculous abilities – ranging from materialising large objects out of thin air to reading their minds – were drawn to the complex metaphysical doctrines he espoused and were inspired by his calls to unite all religions under the banner of Daheshism.

One obvious interpretation of all of this would be the one you proposed: that in the ‘East’, ‘Western science’ was playing the same exotic role in the public imagination that Tahra Bey’s mysterious ‘Eastern’ doctrine of fakirism did in Europe; that they are mirror images of each other. There is much to be said for this interpretation, but I would add one more thing to it as well. As I show in my book, these hypnotists were really doing something extremely similar in form and content to the things that Jinn summoners were doing at the same time. In the early twentieth century, traditional practices using the power of the Jinn to access mysteries from the world beyond were still popular. However, they were considered backwards by many bourgeois modernisers in the region, because Jinn summoners were the subject of many high-profile legal cases in the 1930s, accused of charlatanry and fraud. Still, many people would go to them to find answers to their questions – who stole my money? where is my lost ring? should I travel abroad? who will I marry? and so on. Hypnotists – who put their mediums into trances and told audiences to ask them extremely similar questions – unlike Jinn summoners, claimed the power of modernity as well as its prestige.

The Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s was not experiencing the same fears of civilisational collapse as Europe, but it was going through something equally momentous. A combination of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing encroachment of European colonial powers in the region led to a period of uncertainty and instability. Many at the time looked to modern science, which seemed to be delivering all kinds of inexplicable wonders, to fashion a new almost magical existence.

Is interest in magic and the supernatural simply a misguided cure for feelings of fear? Or do you think that people do believe that our paradigms of knowledge are too narrow, making them open to a vision of the world that transcends scientific materialism? Do you whole-heartedly believe they were both full-on charlatans? Or do you think they were also in touch with realms of knowledge to which modern science does not have access?

This is a question that hangs heavily over this entire subject. But it is not an easy one to answer. I have a few different ways of thinking about it, and will lay out a few. Firstly, pretty much the entire history of the world makes it clear that humans are not satisfied with scientific materialism alone. Some people will always seek out the mystical, the spiritual and the sublime, no matter how irrational it may be. That seems to be a pretty ironclad fact of human nature. The question of whether the metaphysical plane is ‘real’ is harder to answer. In some ways, I like to look at mysticism and the occult as one language and scientific materialism as another. They are both ways of interpreting the world. In some cases, they will express the same thing with different words, and, in others, they will have words or phrases that don’t translate into the other language. To speak of a language as ‘true’ or ‘false’ or ‘real’ or ‘fake’ doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it is the same with the materialist and spiritual interpretations of the world.

Things become very difficult when you write a history book about the occult. History is a materialist language. To ask, for instance, whether Dr Dahesh truly accomplished miracles is not a historical question. To ask why people were attracted to his message and what he offered people, however, is a historical question. As is the question of why some people were so opposed to him. So, these are the things I have focused on.

In order to answer the other question, a new genre of writing is needed. I very briefly toyed with the idea of turning this book into a work of fiction but decided that it wouldn’t solve the problems. What we need is something between fiction and non-fiction that can leave the question of logical truth hanging suspended before us. I am not sure what that is.

Before Political Islam turned into a political and militant movement, first used by the West as a weapon against leftist movements in the Middle East during the cold war, and its transformation into a target after 9/11, did Islam have more of a mystical and/or romantic image in the West? Was the idea of the East being a hot bed of terrorism and religious extremism as wide-spread then as it is now – before the establishment of the state of Israel and before the rising of the oil-rich Gulf states?

The idea of the Arab world being a hotbed of extremism goes back to at least the late nineteenth century, though in those days they would have called it ‘fanaticism’. There is a good argument that this view of Islam and Muslims as particularly ‘fanatical’ or extremist was really solidified with the rise of colonialism in the Middle East (opponents to colonial rule were branded ‘fanatical’ or irrational). Today, ‘terrorism’ seems to be a political category rather than something rooted in objective fact – at least, I cannot think of any consistent definition of the term that seems to hold water and corresponds to how it is used.

At the same time there has long been a simultaneous view of the ‘East’ as mystical, exotic and mysterious. The two have gone hand in hand since at least the nineteenth century. The two can make sense together if you say that the West is committed to viewing the East as irrational and illogical; sometimes this takes the form of ‘fanaticism’ or ‘extremism’, sometimes of ‘exotic Eastern mysteries’, but the basic fundamentals are the same.

In fact, I think it’s no coincidence that at exactly the same time as Tahra Bey is becoming a star in Paris, the French colonies in North Africa are being threatened by the revolutionary president of the Republic of the Rif Abdel Krim. As I say in my book:

When a man in ‘Arab’ robes and a headdress appeared in the Parisian press, it was most often in the role of dangerous enemy of France. But Tahra Bey, a mysterious man from the desert in long white robes and with a dark beard, had not come to take their empire; he had come to save their souls. For some, no doubt, he was a conscious or unconscious salve for their colonial anxieties.

What are the illusions the East has about the West – what we could consider the opposite lens to Orientalism? A lens where the ‘other’ looks and sees what it wants to see? And apart from the wonders of modern scientific inventions, how do you feel the eastern view of the West has changed over the last century? 

The question of views of the West in the Middle East through the twentieth century is an extremely complex one, over which debates have raged. There are questions of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and religion lying behind them all. Obviously, too, Eastern views of the West cannot simply be a reverse of Orientalism because that concept is so tied into power as well as simply perception. As Edward Said notes, all cultures to some extent have stereotypical views about other cultures, but what marks Orientalism out as something different is the way that these views are turned into a discourse that implicitly justifies Western rule in the East.

Still, I hope that the characters in my book, particularly Dr Dahesh and the other hypnotists, provide one way to look at this multifaceted question. They demonstrate the growing fascination with the West in the early twentieth-century Arab world and they show how far it spread. But, just as Tahra Bey reveals the ignorance of many in Europe about the realities of the Middle East, so these hypnotists show how people were willing to believe extremely outlandish things if they were presented as miracles of Western science.

I love that you’ve chosen to cover popular culture and strange phenomena in the region such as charlatans and fakirs. Your first book was about women in Cairo’s 1930s nightlife scene, while this book is about two unusual men who have pursued careers as magicians, seers or charlatans. Your interest in the world of entertainment and magic is a great way to show a side of the Middle East to which western readers don’t often have access. Do you feel that you saw a gap in the narratives about the Middle East, and realised while living in Cairo that you wanted to shed a light on that?

My aim has really always been to show the fun parts of Middle Eastern history, in particular popular culture and entertainment. To be honest, this is not primarily out of a desire to change the minds of Western readers about the Middle East, but because those are the stories that interest me. I am drawn to counter-cultures, the demi-monde and the kind of people who do not usually feature in ‘serious’ history. I like to read books about that kind of thing, and I like to write them too. If you’d asked me five years ago, when I started writing this book, I might have said that it might also change some stereotypes about the Middle East and show a different side to the Arab world than pictures in the news. Now, though, I am not sure I feel that way. After the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and the constant dehumanisation of Palestinians there, as well as the total lack of interest shown in the war in Sudan, I don’t really think my books are going to change the minds of people who don’t see Arabs fully as people. I’m not currently optimistic about the power of literature or writing to change minds. The primary audience of my books is (and probably always has been) people in the Arab world, people from the Arab world, or people who know the Arab world.

I have, though, been thinking a lot about comparisons with my previous book, Midnight in Cairo, which focused on female performers as opposed to the holy men of this book. In a lot of ways, the way that male occult performers of the 1920s and 1930s are perceived in polite society is not too dissimilar to the way that the dancers and nightclub singers were seen. In the Middle East, as in Europe, they were often seen as a dangerous threat to society and the nation. Both hypnotise and deceive their viewers, taking their money and leaving them bereft at the end. Of course, the comparisons are not direct. But they open up interesting avenues of inquiry!

Talk to me about the parallels you see between the era you explore – the turn of the twentieth century – and our current turn of the century: the rise of fascism, the proliferation of magical thinking and the business of delusion in the wake of the collapse of another empire and the birth of a new century. 

I also see these parallels to our current age and find them quite difficult to interpret. One of the core arguments of my book is that the occult makes up the avant-garde of the collective psyche. If you are looking to find the anxieties, fears, hopes, or dreams of an age, then the best place to look is with the gurus, holy men, and occultists. In 1920s Europe, people were disenchanted with Western civilisation and were searching for a whole new way to see the world. In the Middle East, they were fascinated by the potentials of modernity, but were worried about its connection to imperial powers whose reach was stretching across the region. Today, in the wellness gurus and the new-age movements of the day which appear to be the analogues of the occult movements of the 1920s and 1930, we see the same thing happening. In my interpretation (though others may have different views) what these groups promise is a way to cope with the anxiety of the world that feels as if it is about to fall apart. I don’t feel we are in a world that has collapsed, but rather one that’s tottering. People are trying to hold fast to what exists, and there are all kinds of people who are trying to convince you that if you buy this product, if you do this course, if you meditate the right way, then everything will be alright. But it won’t.

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