Upstaging Terrorists with Fictive Empathy and Humor" Julia Keefer, New York University NEMLA 2016

While authors have written about all kinds of terrorism from anarchism in Secret Agent to Irish freedom fighters in Vargas LLosa’s Dream of a Celt to disabled Quebecois in Infinite Jest to drug lords in GG Marquez’ News of a Kidnapping, my research is a review of significant global literature from the seventies to 2015 related to Islamist terrorism, touching on work from my global literature syllabus at NYU.  The global audience changes in competition with digital distractions, economic survival, “literature” illiteracy, and world events, especially the “performance art” of Islamist terrorists like ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh whose beheadings, promotional videos, and other ghoulish accomplishments are carefully choreographed and trademarked to depict horror and instill fear with its concomitant impotence. Literature, with its attention to figurative language, sense imagery, tone color in the original, dramatic structure, character creation and orchestration, and narrative voices and sequencing, makes intellectual demands on the reader that can trigger other emotive responses such as empathy, laughter, reflection, aesthetic appreciation, and the provocative questions that empower rather than amputate or truncate the plenitude of cognition.

Section I: Degrees of Removal from Representation
Literature never represents reality—it re-interprets it with varying degrees of aesthetic removal from the real event to naturalism, realism, romanticism, fantasy, surreal, magical realism, and then science fiction or in this case, speculative fiction shifting the focus, the perspective, and arrangement. These different genre incite different kinds of affect response and are enhanced by literary forms and the point of view of the author or narrator to the themes in question. I must always address this with students who often assume novels are reality because they spend so much time consuming media representations of real events.

Degrees of Removal from Reality
Documentary: Seven Good Years (memoir)
Naturalistic: The German Mujahid, Wild Thorns, Martyr’s Crossing, first part of The Submission, the stories of Etoiles de Sidi Moumen and This Blinding Absence of Light
Realistic: The Stranger, Meursault Contre-Enquete, Falling Man, Song for Night
Romantic and/or Aesthetic: The Attack, Swallows of Kabul, Terrorist, Garden of Last Days, Snow, Patience Stone
Caricatured Reality: A Disorder Peculiar to this Country, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, Children of Gebelaawi
Magical Realism:  Satanic Verses
Surreal: Etoiles de Sidi Moumen and This Blinding Absence of Light in voice, Patience Stone ending, surreal juxtapositions in Seven Good Years
Fantasy Element: Etoiles de Sidi Moumen, The Submission, A Disorder Peculiar to this Country
Fantasy: Children of Gebelaawi, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting
Fantasy World of Speculative Fiction: 2084, The Submission

Here is the degree of removal poem from the Un-Clashing Civilizations section of my fantasy trilogy published in 2006, inspired by 9/11.
When you are in it                                                   You think of nothing
You just sense things                                               A blizzard snowing white
But warm and dry instead of                                   Wet and cold 
Jalal calls it a white dust storm                               We froze
In shock

At a little distance you feel                                      Empathy
Or sense the terror like the                                       Seagulls
Who crouch on the shore                                         Wings in fetal folds
Afraid of those big steel birds                                 That usually fly by
Unheeded                                                                Until they showed just how
Much they could
Kill

From the river                                                          The River
We push the kayak through the                               Mirror of bleeding sky
Driven by adrenalin                                                Hoping fire will not meet water
Could anything extinguish that pain?                     The water only reflects the flames
A little further away                                                Say Central Park
A mother pushes her child on the swing                 For fun
She breathes the fresh green air                              Relieved it didn't happen to
Her                                                                          Horse carriages trot through the trees
Until the story leaks out and the tourists
Leave

Directly overhead the pilots
Think of Hiroshima and feel guilty
Or not
Were we at war?
Or was this a mistake?
Is it better to burn or drown?

From the distant sky
A thick scar of smoke
Blights the New York landscape
Like a huge smudge of
Cigarette smoke
Zoom in
And you will see
The incineration of
3000 histories
Burnt coffee crisp

Much further and you are
Curious
Want to know more
To hear the story on
TV again and again
Saccharine soap to water your
Tear ducts

Comedy could be squished here

When separated by time and not just
Space
It becomes art
Ossified in a museum
The storehouse of
Terror made Beautiful
Definition of the Sacred
It is now sacred ground.

In a terrorist attack, some people are instantly crushed or burned, some suffer a while half conscious, some are in shock. A little distance in space and they have the chance to run--fast. This is the time and place for the most adrenaline and highest cardiac output. There is the hope of survival but there is no time or space to turn the event to comedy or beautiful art. It is like paddling quickly away in the kayak. But as we get further away we start to feel empathy for the victims and sympathy with the seagulls. The river is a mirror reflecting the acts the way media does, instilling hope and fear. The minute we get to Central Park and see the continuity of life--a mother pushing her child on the swing--we experience the plenitude of survival and are free to breathe. But up in the sky we see the whole horrible picture although we have the freedom to think about it. Overhead there is thought and thought can always turn to satire, regret, and reflection. Dramatic structure comes from above because you need an aerial view of the whole thing.  Narrative voices and sequencing zoom back in to interpret the event again. If we missed the first parts of the terrorism, we are then chained to the reruns of mediated stories which can trigger tears of empathy or laughter. The soap opera addiction isn’t true empathy--it is a way to escape into someone else’s tears, an action that can be turned to laughter. Comedy is survival. But once the art is ossified into a museum, it gains a sacred connotation that forbids laughter. At the end beauty comes when separated by time and space, like museums. If beauty doesn’t succeed or there are too many flaws and ambiguities and frustrations, comedy takes its place. Can beauty and comedy co-exist? Someone can be pleasant or pretty but comedy comes from ugliness, fatness, and flaws. We step back in awe of beauty but comedy moves into medium range although it is not as intimate as sympathy or empathy. If you burst out laughing at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, you will get kicked out. However, readers are free to react any way they like when they read a book. Reading is the ultimate freedom when authors are free to write.  

Section II: Literary Techniques and Tropes: Making Terrorism Beautiful or Understandable
Sense Imagery
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar ben Jelloun
Etoiles de Sidi Moumen or Horses of God by Mahi Binebine
Song for Night by Chris Abani
Personification
Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Children of Gebelaawi by Naguib Mahfouz
God Resigns at the Summit Meeting by Nawal el Saadawi
Character Transformation
Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
Terrorist by John Updike
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Dramatic Structure
Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh
Martyr’s Crossing by Amy Wilentz
The Attack by Jasmina Khadra
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Meursault Contre-Enquete by Kamel Daoud
Intricate Layered Plotting
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
2084 by Boualem Sansal
Swallows of Kabul by Jasmina Khadra
Narrative Voices and Sequencing
The German Mujahid by Boualem Sansal
The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi
Hyperbole and Satire
Seven Good Years by Edgar Keret
A Disorder Peculiar to this Country by Ken Kalfus
The Submission by Michel Houellebecq

Human physiology (discussed in more detail in the reader response section) relates to degrees of removal because hormones and heart fluctuate in response to stress. In a terrorist attack, some people are instantly crushed or burned, some suffer a while half conscious, some are in shock. A little distance in space and they have the chance to run--fast. This is the time and place for the most adrenaline and highest cardiac output. There is the hope of survival but there is no time or space to turn the event to comedy or beautiful art. It is like paddling quickly away in the kayak. But as we get further away we start to feel empathy for the victims and sympathy with the seagulls. The river is a mirror reflecting the acts the way media does, instilling hope and fear. The minute we get to Central Park and see the continuity of life--a mother pushing her child on the swing--we experience the plenitude of survival and are free to breathe. But up in the sky we see the whole horrible picture although we have the freedom to think about it. Overhead there is thought and thought can always turn to satire, regret, and reflection. Dramatic structure comes from above because you need an aerial view of the whole thing.  Narrative voices and sequencing zoom back in to interpret the event again. If we missed the first parts of the terrorism, we are then chained to the reruns of mediated stories which can trigger tears of empathy or laughter. The soap opera addiction isn’t true empathy--it is a way to escape into someone else’s tears, an action that can be turned to laughter. Comedy is survival. But once the art is ossified into a museum, it gains a sacred connotation that forbids laughter. At the end beauty comes when separated by time and space, like museums. If beauty doesn’t succeed or there are too many flaws and ambiguities and frustrations, comedy takes its place. Can beauty and comedy co-exist? Someone can be pleasant or pretty but comedy comes from ugliness, fatness, and flaws. We step back in awe of beauty but comedy moves into medium range although it is not as intimate as sympathy or empathy. If you burst out laughing at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, you will get kicked out. However, readers are free to react any way they like when they read a book. Reading is the ultimate freedom when authors are free to write. 

SENSE IMAGERY: Sense imagery is an important literary technique that survives translation and puts the reader in the scene. With the sense imagery, when you are in it, you sense things, you are in shock. Once you begin to survive, there is empathy and sympathy. Moroccan authors Tahar ben Jelloun and Mahi Binebine are especially talented at evoking scenes with imagery. Both of their novels are based on real events. On July 10 1971, 1,000 Moroccan soldiers were herded into trucks and taken to the palace of Skhirat, where King Hassan II was celebrating his 42nd birthday. Upon arrival, their commanding officers instructed them to find and kill him. Almost 100 guests lost their lives, but the king survived. Those deemed responsible were sent to Kenitra, a prison known for its harsh conditions. However, most of those imprisoned had not fired a shot.  On a steamy August night two years later, 58 of them were again herded into trucks and taken to the remote desert hellhole of Tazmamart; here they were thrown into underground cells 10ft long and 5ft wide, with ceilings so low they were unable to stand, and with just enough food and water to keep them on the edge of death for years. Each tomb had an air vent and a tiny hole in the floor that served as the lavatory. They were crawling with cockroaches and scorpions the men could hear but not see. There was no medical attention, no exercise, and no light. The only time they were allowed out was to bury one of their friends. Thirteen years would pass before the outside world found out that Tazmamart existed. It would take another five years of international campaigning to shut it down. There were only 28 survivors. By 1991, most had lost up to a foot in height. 
Note the “close-up” in the opening lines: "For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret."
Salim is not religious when he arrives in Tazmamart, but he escapes from his torments by imagining his way as far into his mind as his slowly decaying body will allow. He knows his reverie is over when he can smell the stench and the reader smells it as well. Karim becomes the talking clock to record their endless night. Ustad sings them verses from the Qur'an. One man recounts the plots of every film he's ever seen, another invents games to play with imaginary cards. Tahar ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light is remarkable for its sense imagery, particularly the kinesthetic sensation of being confined in that cell for years, something the author never experienced but borrowed from Binebine’s brother’s internment. The themes, point of view, and reader response of empathy are grounded in the close-up perspective of this sense imagery.

On May 16, 2003, fourteen suicide bombers launched a series of attacks throughout Casablanca, the deadliest attack in Morocco’s history. The bombers came from Sidi Moumen, a poor suburb on the edge of a dump whose residents rarely if ever set foot in the cosmopolitan city at their doorstep. Mahi Binebine’s novel Horses of God follows Yachine, Nabil, Fuad, and Ali, all raised in Sidi Moumen. The boys’ soccer team, The Stars of Sidi Moumen, is their main escape from the poverty, violence, and absence of hope that pervade their lives. Narrated by Yachine from the afterlife, Horses of God portrays the innocence of childhood and friendship as well as the challenges facing those with few opportunities for a better life. Their love of football (Euro soccer), local food, sniffing glue, smoking hashish, homosexual affairs, flirtations with older women, and causing trouble is common to young men all over the world but their desperate poverty drives them to become foot soldiers for terrorism because of the money and the way these Machiavellian imams make them think they will live forever in a beautiful paradise with delicious food, gorgeous houris, and everything they didn’t have on earth. The reader empathizes with the “terrorists” who are just adolescent pawns in a religious mafia.  Binebine navigates the controversial situation with compassion, creating empathy for the boys, who believe they have no future except in the paradise described by the corrupt imam. The first-person narration, realistic street scenes, and authentic dialogue create the inner world of the young men, not the imam who are the real terrorists or the European tourists or richer Moroccans antithetical to both groups. My favorite chapter is the second-to-last when Yachine enters the ritzy resort filled with cadaverous white tourists clad in Euro clothes that hide his suicide belt. He describes the dancing and women as if he were already in the promised paradise. The sense imagery makes us feel the moment and empathize with the boys but because Yachine is narrating from the afterlife, there is  an aerial perspective that explains things, makes the reader think, and offers reasons to explain horror if we get too close.

PERSONIFICATION
Humanizing prophets and re-interpreting religious stories via Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Naguib Mahfouz Children of the Alley or Gebelaawi, and Saadawi’s God Resigns at the Summit Meeting incite outrage from radical Islamists who then issued fatwas against Rushdie, censorship and imprisonment of Saadawi, or succeeded in partial assassinations such as the severing of Mahfouz’ brachial plexus with a knife slash in 1994. The forbidden personification hides the vitriolic satire of Islam from most Western readers but succeeded in getting the authors banned in Islamic countries for apostasy. Terrorists feel that their version of Islam is perfect and any human who falls short of its rules (Sharia) can be executed, stoned, or eliminated. There is no place for comedy’s flaws and messiness in ISIS and Al Qaeda although some may laugh at their horror tactics. Mahfouz paints the picture of successive leaders in “our alley” that resemble Moses, a hippie Jesus, and a womanizing, hashish-smoking Mohammad, and a god at the end of the garden who appears to have Alzheimer’s. While some may laugh and think as they read this allegory, it enraged Egyptian Islamic Jihad.  Saadawi has been a victim of their wrath and censorship for years. In Nawal el Saadawi’s play, god gets so frustrated he resigns at the summit meeting with his prophets and politicians Clinton and Netanyahu but then the women take over and Isis, the goddess, not ISIS, bint Allah, daughter of god, and Eve assume a stature that smacks of perfection. Bint Allah replies later on: “That is why there is no such thing as the absolute truth in the word of God. The truth of Allah’s words is always relative depending on the power which recourse to it. In some countries women have started to cooperate with one another and to represent a new force that interprets the Torah, or the Bible, or the Koran in a way which favors their liberation, rather than maintain their slavery. For example, they no longer address God as masculine in the language they use.” (184)
In her inimical feminist way, Saadawi lets Isis, the Goddess of Wisdom, not to be confused with ISIS, describes how women discovered time, agriculture, astronomy, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, music, poetry. “We were the first to write down letters and numbers, taught people the names of the stars, and planets, discovered and calculated the leap year. Mothers taught their daughters and their granddaughters and so knowledge was handed down from generation to generation. They initiated astrology then astronomy, built towers in Upper Egypt to follow the movements of stars and planets in space.”(189)

Finally God resigns at the Summit Meeting: “I was a cruel God who tried to compensate for this cruelty with words about compassion and justice. I also was divided myself, since I separated between body and spirit. I denied the existence of my body, and imagined that I was only a spirit in the air. When the crucial moment arrived, when I had to descend to meet you on earth I had no alternative but to face the truth and to put on the body which you now see in front of you. It is the body of a man who says he is not human, the body of a human being who insists he is a God. The time has come for me to be what I truly am, to announce my resignation from my position, as a single eternal everlasting God. To be eternal is a curse, not a blessing. Imagine what life can be like when there is no death. I prefer to be a human being that will die…” The play ends when the police enter to arrest Bint Allah for writing this book, reminiscent of how Saadawi was arrested in the eighties and imprisoned for her audacious writing, also a premonition of the inevitable censorship of this play by twenty-first century authorities like Al Azhar. 

DRAMATIC STRUCTURE
Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Wilentz’s Martyr’s Crossing, and Khadra’s The Attack use the Ordinary/Special World paradigm of Joseph Campbell, described in Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey and critical to an understanding of how heroes mirror what they perceive to be their shadows as they journey into the Special World that they fear the most but in these books heroes plough through their forbidden Special Worlds,  illuminating the Cain/Abel conundrum of the Arab-Israeli conflict as empathy is heightened towards the “enemy.” These books also conform to the timed structures of classic Aristotelian drama which is why they make good films. Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh describes Usamu the terrorist as vulnerable, crying during Eid when his favorite pet was slaughtered, writing poetry, and coming home to fight and die for the cause. His relative Adil carried the child of the slain Israeli officer, victim of his attacks. Ignoring the warnings of fellow Palestinians, Adil spoke to the Israeli widow, ‘Calm yourself,’ he said gently in Hebrew. He splashed water on the little girl’s face, who stirred. … Then he picked up the little girl, hoisted her on to his shoulders, and walked off down the empty street. Her mother followed behind, silently weeping.” (160) Adil’s family home is still bulldozed later by the Israelis in retaliation for Usamu’s attack and Adil ends the book dreaming of freedom for Palestine. The omniscient narrator shifts to a more intimate second person singular address to Adil: “If only you were more cruel, or harder of heart, you’d blow up everything you could lay hands on, from the Atlantic to the Gulf and on to the world’s furthest reaches.” (206) But Adil chooses to live, to go about the daily business of buying vegetables, fruit and bread and listen to the interminable, lamentable news about the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. He, unlike Usamu, can see both sides of the conflict.

In Amy Wilentz’ Martyr’s Crossing, Doron, the Israeli border guard indirectly responsible for the death of baby Ibrahim from an asthma attack because the records showed that his father Hassan was a “terrorist,” falls in love with Marina his mother and stalks her all over Palestine, disguising himself as a Palestinian. I always assign these two books together just as I assign Heart of Darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
In Jasmina Khadra’s The Attack, the Palestinian surgeon treats the victims of a terrorist attack that, unbeknownst to him, was caused by his now-deceased wife, who was a secret terrorist. Empathy for the Other goes as far as sharing a bed without the same cause! The doctor is imprisoned and must eventually watch his ancestral home bulldozed by the Israelis. He returns to his hospital as a patient, having finally understood the Palestinian cause. One could argue that Palestinian “terrorists” are freedom-fighters sacrificing themselves for their land. Their version of Islam isn’t as extreme as ISIS or Al Qaeda, one reason these organizations have not helped them that much. These novels show how close the Arabs and the Israelis are to each other. I am teaching these novels now to students logging in from all over the world--one lives in Tel Aviv, another in Riyadh. This is our global readership, which I will discuss further in the conclusion.

In his book Meursault, Contre-Enquete, Kamel Daoud writes the Arabic counterpoint to Camus’ The Stranger, giving the nameless Arab victim a life, family, and history, and the name Moussa, but still creating an Arabic version of existential atheism when Haroun, his brother, attacks the imam the same way Meursault attacked the priest before his execution. Moussa commits his crime under a full moon while Meursault killed the “Arab” on the beach under a hot sun. In fact Haroun was also penalized for not being an Algerian terrorist while Meursault was mainly convicted for not crying at his mother’s funeral, revealing that social conformity trumps individual murders. Only novels can allow us to reflect leisurely on the similarities between two opponents fighting for different causes. This is a different way of looking at terrorism because one could flip the coin and make the victim the terrorist. It shows how racism and colonialism relate to terrorism but also how a Frenchman and an Arab have the same desire for freedom and rebel against the church and the mosque, both fighting with priest and imam before they die.
If we step back far enough to get an aerial view, we can see the similarities between these two enemies. If terrorism is a deus ex machina for the victims, what does this do to dramatic structure? It necessitates some perspective from the terrorists’ point of view so unless the author is deep inside the head of the terrorist, direct representation is problematic.
In these books victim and perpetrator are “brothers,” but in The Patience Stone and The German Mujahid, roles are reversed between victims and perpetrators. However, the distinctive literary technique in these books is narrative voices and sequencing.

NARRATIVE VOICES AND SEQUENCING
Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid, through  tandem competitive narrative sequencing of the contrasting journals of the Malrich brothers Rachel and Malrich as they unravel the shocking history of their father’s incriminatory role in the Holocaust, thereby linking the devastating genocides of these two racist dystopias, mitigates the horror for the reader with a sweeping understanding of history. Malrich has a toughness and street sense that Rachel lacked in spite of his superior education. Rachel Schiller commits suicide in his own gas chamber (his car) wearing Holocaust pajamas after he learns that his father Hans Schiller was secretly an SS Officer before he became an Algerian Islamist. Sansal makes the analogy between the Shoah or Nazi genocide and what the Islamists have done and would like to do. The younger brother Malrich is street-smart and empathic enough to survive but his humorless, hard-working elder brother Malrich succumbed to extreme depression when learning what his father had done. Malrich fights with the imam at the end of German Mujahid like Meursault fights with his priest and the Arab Haroun fights with his imam in Daoud’s book. He equates the fanaticism and genocide of the SS officers to the jihadists. While ISIS amputates time to make the future resonate with dread, this kind of writing digs out the human elements to understand genocides across time, space, and culture.

One way to feel into the Other is to reverse roles. Perhaps this is why sadists can be masochists and vice versa. In The Patience Stone, the fallen jihadist is in a coma, empowering his “submissive” wife to tell all her secrets to him and taunt him with horrid truths like the fact he is not the father of his children. Even though he explodes at the end like the Synge Sabor he represents, his deadened state has given her a power she would never have otherwise. There are lots of close-ups in this book as the woman cares for her comatose husband, fiddles with her prayer beads, masturbates, and even has sex with a young soldier. Rahimi said he deliberately pulled back in his film adaptation to show the outside world but the novel is a huis clos. The closed, claustrophobic world allows the woman to tell all her secrets to her corpse of a husband until he explodes like a suicide bomb. But at least she has unburdened herself. One way to feel into the Other is to reverse roles. Perhaps this is why sadists can be masochists and vice versa. The Patience Stone begins and ends in a room, removed from the outside war, but besieged by it through sound and memory and occasional interruptions from soldiers who need shelter or sex. It could be the Afghan war but enemies are not named. Nor is the Woman, who begins as the archetypal Muslim woman who is voiceless and faceless, hid in her burqa. In this scenario, terrorism is going on outside but the jihadhi is caught inside in the purgatory of a coma, instead of in his paradise for martyrs, nursed by his wife who fiddles with prayer beads, IV, teardrops, and finally her vagina. Rahimi was inspired by a woman who was killed by her husband for writing erotic poetry, but because the book is archetypal, he writes for all the Muslim women who have been beaten, humiliated, and suppressed.  The novel is a close-up of the naturalistic rituals of her daily life, punctuated by screams, gunshots, and the sounds of merchants and then men coming to her room, one of whom later becomes a momentary, stuttering, awkward lover. The wounded soldier rests comatose throughout as her secrets become more shocking and incriminating and she finally masturbates and puts the blood from her vagina in his face. The closed, claustrophobic world allows the woman to tell all her secrets to her corpse of a husband until he explodes like a suicide bomb. But at least she has unburdened herself. The tables have been turned: She is the powerful one and he is the voiceless one—until her final revelation that his children are not his, the worst shame a Muslim man can experience. As her dramatic monologue reaches its catharsis, she pulls her religion into their bodies, “Yes, my sang-e saboor…do you know the ninety-ninth, which is to say the last name of God? It’s Al-Sabur, the Patient! Look at you; you are God. You exist, and do not move. You hear, and do not speak. You see, and cannot be seen! Like God, you are patient, immobile. And I am your messenger! Your prophet! I am your voice! Your gaze! Your hands I reveal you! Al Sabur!”(140) The Woman has committed blasphemy, the unforgivable sin. “He stands up suddenly, stiff and dry, like a rock lifted in a single movement.”(140) She thinks it is a miracle, a Resurrection. Now the real terror begins—“The man pulls her toward him, grabs her hair, and dashes her head against the wall. She falls. She does not cry out, or weep. …Her crazed eyes shine through her wild hair. ‘My sang-e saboor is exploding! Thank you, Al-Sabur! I am finally released from my suffering’ ” Violence becomes ecstatic in its catharsis. She snatches the khanjar and drives it into his heart but there is not a drop of blood. He bangs her head against the floor, and brusquely, wrings her neck, turning her scarlet with her own blood. This ending seems like magical realism because as someone knocks at the door, the man lies down on the bed with the sword in his body and as “the someone” enters the room, “The woman slowly opens her eyes. The breeze rises, sending the migrating birds into flight over her body.” (142) Or is this a surreal ending that has turned sub-real to join the body to the spirit?

Terror has been transcended, a Muslim male author has given voice to a Muslim woman and the reader empathizes with her on a level that transcends the stereotypes of racism and sexism and the “us versus them” games of terrorism. Even religion has been transcended through the body, echoing back to the inscription to Artaud at the beginning, “From the body by the body with the body since the body and until the body.”
Although born Muslim, Rahimi said, “I am Buddhist because I am aware of my weakness, Christian because I admit it, Jewish because I make mockery of it, Muslim because I condemn it, and atheist if god is omnipotent.” (Interview 2015) These are the themes and point of view towards terrorism, letting us see how deep literature can go beneath the surface of lies, the masks of burqas, and the rhetoric of Islamists, showing that power is not eternal in this world.
Rahimi said he wrote the novel in French to escape the unconscious taboos of his native Persian.  To improve his French, he studied L’Amant by Marguerite Duras and his spare, poetic style is influenced by hers. (Interview, 2015)
The Patience Stone won the Goncourt but was censored all over the Muslim world for its frank and shocking portrait of the inner life of a flawed, sexual, angry, adulterous Muslim wife and devoted mother of her illegitimate children. The novel is a series of carefully constructed dramatic monologues that unpeel the layers of her being, giving her voice, in a way that led American feminists to applaud Rahimi for his sensitivity when he read at PEN in 2012. He also directed the film adaptation because he is a filmmaker. He said he deliberately opened it up to shoot the outside world of terrorism but even in the film, the woman’s revelation and the details of her daily life and the author’s empathy upstage the constant struggles of the men to prove themselves and their allegiance to their gods.

I have taught this novel for the past six years to male and female students all over the world and everyone empathizes with the Woman, whether they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, confused, spiritual, Buddhist, or pantheist. I have watched their body language during the film adaptation and they stay riveted to the screen. They are shocked by the ending but breathe slowly with her as she experiences transcendence instead of the numbing feel of real terrorism.

MULTI-LAYERED PLOTTING
With his intricate plotting reminiscent of an elaborate Turkish rug, Orhan Pamuk orchestrates government coups, performance art, and terrorist attacks during a 3-day snowstorm in Anatolia in in his award-winning novel Snow in order to layer as many aspects of history and culture on top of each other where the narcissism of terrorist protagonists embedded in a twentieth century media culture shines like the poems and snowflakes falling into the miasma of imperfect humans. Terrorists grew up in the same narcissistic world culture as movie and pop stars and it can be argued that many of them manipulate the media in the same way. Orhan Pamuk creates a dashing, handsome terrorist two-timer called Blue who is having affairs with two beautiful sisters, one of whom, Ipek, is beloved by Ka, the Westernized poet journalist who came to Kars to fall in love with her again. No Christian guilt here. Terrorists enjoy sex, are proud of their bodies, and manipulate the media for their causes, just like Osama bin Laden did. to show how similar they all are. While terrorists develop their propaganda with the same degree of narcissism of fashion and movie producers, they pretend to be pious, religious, otherworldly, using torture as a Machiavellian means to an end, an end they pretend or actually believe is spiritual. But books like Pamuk’s Snow paint them as the narcissists they are-- insecure, vulnerable, often boyish, or as lustful and charismatic as any movie star, i.e. Blue. Pamuk is satirical, occasionally funny, and he always elicits thought and reflection. Turkish rugs are artistic. Although life in all the dimensions of physics may be this layered, we don’t experience it this way. As we charge through our days, we can’t hit every layer of being simultaneously.  Pamuk condenses time and space in order to pack as many events and ideas as possible into Kars and its diverse inhabitants. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we cry; there is beauty and ugliness; characters strive to be great even as they fail beautifully; and poetry in the shape of a snowflake resonates through the messy humanity punctuated by terror’s narcissism—beauty amidst the blood.

Al Qaeda and ISIS also spend more time coordinating media campaigns than they do in terrorist training. Note the narcissism of Osama bin Laden in his statement about media policy: “No matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in her anger.” (bin Laden 17)
Khadra’s thrillers are often simply written with a clear dramatic structure, but Swallows of Kabul has intricate levels of plotting to reinforce the theme. Khadra begins Swallows of Kabul in a scene where the jailer gets swept away by the passion of the crowd and throws stones at the adulteress, showing that under the right or wrong circumstances, anyone can be a killer. Many terrorists feel they are stoning the devil in reality or metaphorically and that it is a religious obligation. But this shows how “innocent bystanders” can be turned into people who create terror. “Everyone can be guilty when throwing stones” is an action examined in Swallows of Kabul since it happens so often in Afghanistan and even in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj rites in Mecca.

CHARACTER TRANSFORMATION
Updike’s Terrorist, DeLillo’s Falling Man, Dubus III’s Garden of Last Days perform an American makeover of the guilt-ridden Islamist terrorist, who was never as sorry as Americans want him to be, making the enemy more like us and even pathetic or laughable.  Character transformation is an important aspect of American dramaturgy. After 9/11, many American authors researched Islam, terrorism, and reworked scenarios inside the Other’s mind. However, most of these authors like Updike and Andre Dubus III give their terrorist characters a kind of Christian guilt about sex that rarely exists in books written by Muslim authors. Dubus III’ terrorist is so obsessed with lap dancers that he seems unbelievable. Yes, the 9/11 terrorists enjoyed some of these distractions but I doubt they felt so guilty. In Falling Man, De Lillo writes poetically about the power of Islam and diligently paints a terrorist based on common research but always saves his power, wit, and depth for his American characters. In Falling Man, DeLillo also has trouble imagining his terrorist characters. Hammad, like Pamuk’s heroes, is not above narcissism, “He watched TV in a bar near the flight school and liked to imagine himself appearing on the screen, a videotaped figures walking through the gate-like detector on his way to the plane.” (173) Like Pamuk, DeLillo wedges in some anecdotes with falling performer David Janiak, contrasting his masochistic narcissism with the cruel choice faced by those who jumped from the burning Towers. Near the end the jihadist in the plane ironically fastens his seatbelt as this scene bleeds into Keith Neudecker in the Tower as the plane hit as if DeLillo couldn’t stand any more time in the Other’s brain, especially as he awaited his “paradise.” We follow the American down the Tower to the dust-strewn street sealed with the final image of an empty shirt with “arms waving like nothing in this life.” (246)

A hilarious conversation between Ahmad the terrorist and Jack Levy the Jewish student counselor driving in a truck destined to blow up in the middle of the Lincoln tunnel. Levy tells Ahmad he “fucked” his mother who was “fantastic.” Ahmad retorts that she sees herself as a “liberated modern person.”(301) Levy gets impatient, “Go ahead, push your fucking button. Like the guy on an airplane on 9/11 said to somebody on the cell phone, it’ll be quick.” Jack reaches across his body toward the detonator and Ahmad for the second time seizes his hand in his own. “Please, Mr. Levy,” he says. “It is mine to do. The meaning changes from a victory to a defeat, if you do it.” Levy convinces Ahmad to turn around, to embrace life, and perhaps become a lawyer. However, Updike’s last sentence paints Ahmad’s eternal distaste for New York:” All around them, up Eighth Avenue to Broadway, the great city crawls with people, some smartly dressed, many of them shabby, a few beautiful but most not, all reduced by the towering structures around them to the six of insects, but scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, , their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks, have taken away my God. (310) At the end of Terrorist, Updike actually has his guidance counselor Jack Levy convince Ahmad the terrorist not to blow up the Lincoln tunnel and they drive back to Manhattan to live unhappily ever after.

These American authors give their terrorist protagonists an almost Christian guilt about sex, something we don’t see in the hyper-sexuality of male characters in novels written by Arabs. Attempts by American authors like Updike, De Lillo, and Andre Dubus III to research Islam to create and inhabit the minds of Islamist terrorists, which is not completely successful since most of these characters are cowards, intellectually inferior to many real Islamist leaders (never underestimate your enemy). Isn’t this makeover narcissistic or solipsistic, an offshoot of American exceptionalism? There is no beauty in this book but it is very funny. There is ugliness, humanity, empathy, and error. Characters are very flawed. But the reader isn’t threatened.

Section III: THEME OR POINT OF VIEW ABOUT TERRORISM

Global authors come from a plethora of cultures—Muslim, Turkish, Indian, American, British, African, and French etc. and embed their fiction with many themes and perspectives. But I argue that to recharge reader-response theory with a 21st Century global perspective, we must realize our readers, and our students come from all over the world. Some authors like Saadawi, Rahimi, and Khadra, infuse their stories with a feminist perspective; Sansal gravitates to the big picture to make the connection between genocides and imagine a complete dystopia founded on the imperfect perfectionism of Islamists; Khalifeh, Wilentz, and Khadra seek entente between warring cultures; Houellebecq wants us to see the connection between ISIS and Saudi Arabia and France’s vulnerability; Daoud and Camus write their own versions of existentialism while Muslim-born Mahfouz, Rushdie, and Saadawi commit apostasy by humanizing their gods. Terrorism is a critical 21st century theme like ecoliterature or medical humanities. Even though some of these books may seem like thrillers that “entertain” the reader, all of them have a strong point of view on terrorism and some are didactic at the risk of getting a bad review in the Times.

Section IV: READER RESPONSE
Reader Responses: I will list author’s last name—check bibliography for details
Page-turning Suspense/Curiosity/Surprise: Khadra
Understanding Empathy: Binebine
Rough-Edged Hilarity: Kalfus
Empathy for the Enemy, Wilentz, Khadra
Empathy for the Victims: Foer, DeLillo, Abani
Empathy for the Author: Saadawi, Mahfouz, Rushdie
Sympathy with the Narrator: Binebine, Updike
Role-Play a Power Switch: Rahimi, Sansal
Thoughtful Laughter: Saadawi, Mahfouz, Rushdie
Empathic Understanding: Wilentz, Khalifeh, Khadra
Tolerance and Forgiveness: Khadra, Wilentz, Khalifeh
Horror that Reader shares the Guilt: Khadra
Imagining the Worst and Making Historical Connections: Sansal
Imagining the Worst and Making it Funny: Houellebecq
Fear Quelled by Understanding: Sansal

From its inception in the sixties and seventies, reader-response theory relates to psychology and neurophysiology. Changes in heart rate, blood pressure, hormonal discharge, and specific cerebral activation can be measured as readers or viewers respond. Neuroscience and physiology have mapped the human brain as it processes emotion. Attention is focused with suspense, curiosity, and interest but if this turns into the kind of fear and horror that ISIS creates, dangerous levels of cortisol rush through the bloodstream as heart rate and blood pressure can go up. Eventually this flight or fight charge paralyzes because there is no outlet, no way for the average person to fight and retaliate. This stress can do physical harm as it does financial and sociological harm to the community, now afraid to lead normal lives. But the warm feelings of empathy and the laughter from humor stimulate other hormones like endorphins and dopamine and lower cortisol levels. These feel-good hormones help connect the hypothalamus with the cortex as readers are empowered to use their imaginations and cognitive processing to recreate the world in the novel. Mirthful laughter has been shown to reduce levels of cortisone and epinephrine so people can relax, breathe, think, and enjoy life. Sometimes we cry when we share the pain of another but that is a gentler, more cathartic emotion than abject fear. SELF- and OTHER-related processing activates a network of medial and lateral prefrontal, temporal, and parietal brain regions involved in emotional perspective taking. Therefore anything that enhances empathy strengthens cerebral activity. Humor and empathy are sociable emotions but we cower alone in fear. However, some medical studies have shown that people with high blood pressure have a more muted emotional response to things like terrorism or even to joy and laughter as the body’s way of protecting them.

While all humans have the same physiology, different cultures may have different emotive responses based on tradition and values. Some are less demonstrative, some laugh at pain, some exaggerate will ullulations, and they may route for different characters. They may also have different standards of beauty or literary art. Since readers must usually read some works in translation, they may not all have access to the tone color and rhythm and idioms of the original language.
Global literature and Islamist propaganda elicit suspense, curiosity, and surprise but terrorist attacks catapult the viewer/reader into apocalyptic horror that always promises to get worse--that is the secret--to increase paranoia and fear in the enemies of their version of Islam. From its inception in the sixties and seventies, reader-response theory relates to psychology and neurophysiology. Changes in heart rate, blood pressure, hormonal discharge, and specific cerebral activation can be measured as readers or viewers respond. Neuroscience and physiology have mapped the human brain as it processes emotion. Attention is focused with suspense, curiosity, and interest but if this turns into the kind of fear and horror that ISIS creates, dangerous levels of cortisol rush through the bloodstream as heart rate and blood pressure can go up. Eventually this flight or fight charge paralyzes because there is no outlet, no way for the average person to fight and retaliate. This stress can do physical harm as it does financial and sociological harm to the community, now afraid to lead normal lives. But the warm feelings of empathy and the laughter from humor stimulate other hormones like endorphins and dopamine and lower cortisol levels. These feel-good hormones help connect the hypothalamus with the cortex as readers are empowered to use their imaginations and cognitive processing to recreate the world in the novel. Mirthful laughter has been shown to reduce levels of cortisone and epinephrine so people can relax, breathe, think, and enjoy life. Sometimes we cry when we share the pain of another but that is a gentler, more cathartic emotion than abject fear. SELF- and OTHER-related processing activates a network of medial and lateral prefrontal, temporal, and parietal brain regions involved in emotional perspective taking. Therefore anything that enhances empathy strengthens cerebral activity. Humor and empathy are sociable emotions but we cower alone in fear. However, some medical studies have shown that people with high blood pressure have a more muted emotional response to things like terrorism or even to joy and laughter as the body’s way of protecting them.

ISIS, the Gen Ex, video game evolution of Al Qaeda has created a slick propaganda using social media to make potential suicide bombers feel they will find glory in the afterlife and fame in this life, albeit digital, when their bodies explode in terrorist attacks. But no one is free in their organization as they are chained to dogma, politics, and their insidious plans. As in 2084, their thoughts and emotions are carefully censored. So why does Houellebecq create a Caliphate at the Sorbonne where profs make three times as much money, eat, drink, and even teach the decadent literary subjects of European culture? Because it is a Saudi-style sexist nepotism, not the Caliphate that bin Laden, ISIS, and the Taliban purported to desire.
Whether comedy is dry with satire, warm with good-natured humor, wet with slapstick, hyperbolic with farce or fantasy, or bitter with irony, it plummets the imperfection of humans and gods. Keret’s Seven Good Years and Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to this Country combine the hilarious mundane details of juggling terrorism with daily life events such as childbirth, car driving, cooking, and marital spats while mitigating its real tragedy in order to survive and inspire resilience in the reader.  Edgar Keret’s Seven Good Years begins with a nurse claiming “I just hate terrorist attacks,” and then, as if to accept their everyday occurrence, “Want some gum?” Keret’s wife is screaming in labor while all the terrorist victims are quiet. Journalists interview him about the attack but he is focused on the baby. This hysterically funny and desperately sad memoir is bookended with a final chapter called “Pastrami” where the parents “play” slices of bread to cover the now seven-year-old baby as if he were pastrami during an air raid on the highway. When the youngster likes the game so much Keret ends with the quip that they can still play these games without the sirens.  After I met Keret last summer and laughed through his readings, I stayed up all night crying. But at least he makes me think. He turns slapstick surreal to survive. Comedy is about survival and ISIS and Al Qaeda worship death.

In A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus embeds the naturalistic soap opera of a divorcing modern couple, Joyce and Marshall, over 9/11 and Bush’s War on Terror, ending with an ice cream celebration of the capture of bin Laden. He doesn’t attempt to depict terrorists or Muslim culture but his hilarious comedy of manners digs into the flaws and foibles of twenty-first century American life. The couple’s hatred for each other and their endless financial and domestic problems almost trump the disasters of terrorism. But near the end of the book, after Saddam is killed, nukes are discovered and neutralized, and Americans are wearing “Death to Terrorists” t-shirts, Marshall is still in debt and their divorce stalled. So he enters the kitchen where Joyce is peeling a carrot, opening his bathrobe to reveal explosives around his midsection. “I made it myself. I have enough dynamite to blow up half the block. God is great.” (189) But it didn’t work. Joyce asks him why he didn’t follow the instructions. “They were in Arabic…” So Joyce tries to fix the suicide belt as their two young children watch this ludicrous charade. After the intimacy of trying to disassemble his vest, he goes to his room, takes it off, throws it out, and bursts into tears. Like Keret, Kalfus blows up the mundane until we laugh so hard that we can’t stop crying. At the end of his novel after the description of a downtown NYC celebration of Osama bin Laden’s capture that rivals the super bowl, he punctuates the event with this acid sentence, filled with the hate and irony of a vitriolic Jonathan Swift, “The moment would last forever, [American exceptionalism] or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.”(237)

Futuristic dystopias abound in world literature and thanks to Michel Houellebecq’s La Soumission and Boualem Sansal’s 2084 we can imagine what an Islamist Caliphate might be like in the 21st century.  Houellebecq’s transformation of the Sorbonne into a well-funded, Saudi-run medieval university with the manly comforts of multiple wives and luscious food and drink at home for the randy twentieth century literature professor who must submit to Islam to enjoy these Islamic delights is facetious but fueled by a realistic assessment of global politics and oil power. Sansal creates a dire apocalypse as the Islamist answer to Orwell’s 1984, helping readers imagine scary what-if scenarios of terrorist takeovers. Sansal’s 2084 speaks to Orwell’s 1984 and Michel Houellebecq joins nineteenth century decadence, Sixties free love, and an Islamist win in the French government in 2022. ry. A randy, decadent Sorbonne professor is forced to submit to Islam when the Muslim Brotherhood wins the election, Mohammed ben Abbes becomes President of the Republic, and the Sorbonne turns into an Islamic University like Al Azhar in Cairo enhanced by Saudi millions and taste. However, he can still have sex with his veiled students, drink alcohol, eat fatty foods, and make three times as much money as he did before! Although the first-person professor narrator ends the novel in the future conditional tense it allows the reader to also imagine a new kind of Europe Saudi-style. Their expansionist ideology envisions an Islamic Caliphate similar to the facetious dystopia in Boualem Sansal’s 2084 although its financial roots can probably be traced back to the Saudi-style culture in Michel Houellebecq’s Submission.

Sansal’s 2084 is more apocalyptic, worse than anything Orwell imagined in 1984 but with the same fascism and a Holocaust-type cruelty. While Houellebecq embeds his Muslim fantasy in the real world, Sansal designs a dystopia in detail in Abistan talking Abilang after a lot of Holy Wars. As we use our imaginations in this way, we may laugh or cry but we are nonetheless empowered. The important thing is that the cortex is connected to the limbic system and amygdala so readers think as the characters get brainwashed by the dystopia.

Laughing at the Holocaust may be unethical but since terrorists’ agenda is to rely on the fear of the survivors even more than the relatively few people they can kill, is it not retaliatory to not be afraid? This is a tactic Israelis have used for years.  “Humor is used for feelings that are too deep for tears. It can bring to light things that can hurt as well as delight-and once they are brought to light, they never seem to hurt as much. Very early in my career the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima gave me three separate shocks. The first was the horror of this new death-dealing invention. The second shock was a few weeks later when I heard, with revulsion, a joke about that same horrendous weapon. My third shock was a few years later when I found myself writing a joke about an atomic bomb." (Saks 21)
“If we can put misfortune in the proper perspective, we can use humor to show the foolishness of our anxieties, the absurdity of our anger, and we make the unbearable bearable……..The attitude and mood of comedy is the decision to disavow the heat and pain of living. We use it because we are too big to cry but not mature enough to dismiss it.” (Saks 13)

“Satire, regardless of how comforting or confrontational it is for angst-avoiding audiences, it is also planting some serious seeds.” “……. if you want to get a message across and the frontal lobe is locked, you go through the back door. The premise for every joke is that something is wrong-with you, with the country, with your mother, with something! If nothing is wrong it’s not a joke, it’s making conversation. Ultimately the audience chooses whether to view what they see onstage as thought provoking or thought preventing. But the important point is that it is a thought.” Betsy Borns writes in Comic Lives (28 – 39)
Walter Sorell, states in Facets of Comedy
“‘The endurance of comedy is merely a symptom of our will to survive, to spite and to overcome death and damnation. Not that man could not live without comedy, but he cannot exist without laughing. He must summon the clown to help him with his public exasperations and private despairs, to soothe his anguish without medication, to make him see the absurdity of tragedies. And the clowning man will always raise his head to make sure he has the eyes and ears, the mind and heart of an audience with whom he can go on laughing.”

The Puncture of Punctuation by Professor Julia Keefer (2015)
Tragedy must end with a period
Amputate loose ends of retribution
Terror continues with a question mark
An execution is a performance
Bounded by time and combusted in space
And Horror is its exclamation point
Comedy cackles while spitting out fun
Satire smirks with its steel edge in the sun
Side-splitting rib-tickling suicide stunts
Bullets blast innocents from right to left
Vests explode on a cacophonous road
While Terror taunts us with its question mark
Drama, with its comma, can transform pain
Empathy upstages Other’s evil
To soothe Tragedy’s mournful period

Section IV: READER RESPONSE
Reader Responses: I will list author’s last name—check bibliography for details
Page-turning Suspense/Curiosity/Surprise: Khadra
Understanding Empathy: Binebine, ben Jelloun
Rough-Edged Hilarity: Kalfus
Empathy for the Enemy, Wilentz, Khadra
Empathy for the Victims: Foer, DeLillo, Abani
Empathy for the Author: Saadawi, Mahfouz, Rushdie
Sympathy with the Narrator: Binebine, Updike
Role-Play a Power Switch: Rahimi, Sansal
Thoughtful Laughter: Saadawi, Mahfouz, Rushdie
Empathic Understanding: Wilentz, Khalifeh, Khadra
Tolerance and Forgiveness: Khadra, Wilentz, Khalifeh
Horror that Reader shares the Guilt: Khadra
Imagining the Worst and Making Historical Connections: Sansal
Imagining the Worst and Making it Funny: Houellebecq
Fear Quelled by Understanding: Sansal

This poem correlates the relationship of genre to open or closed scenarios. Empathy and humor are ongoing, contributing to transformative drama, dramedy, comedy, and even satire. Terrorists elicit the finality of the tragic reaction with its perennial fear and paranoia.
Analyses: Arabs, Israelis, Jewish New Yorkers, and Algerians write about both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict, showing how similar these warring factions are in spite of contemporary cultural differences. Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Wilentz’s Martyr’s Crossing, and Khadra’s The Attack use the Ordinary/Special World paradigm of Joseph Campbell, described in Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey.  These heroes mirror what they perceive to be their shadows as they journey into the Special World that they fear the most, ploughing through their forbidden Special Worlds, illuminating the Cain/Abel conundrum of the Arab-Israeli conflict as empathy is heightened towards the “enemy.” These books also conform to the timed structures of classic Aristotelian drama which is why they make good films. Wild Thorns by Sahar Khalifeh describes Usamu the terrorist as vulnerable, crying during Eid when his favorite pet was slaughtered, writing poetry, and coming home to fight and die for the cause. When the usual suicide attack occurs, his relative Adil carries the child of the slain Israeli officer, victim of his attacks. Ignoring the warnings of fellow Palestinians, Adil speaks to the Israeli widow, ‘Calm yourself,’ he said gently in Hebrew. He splashed water on the little girl’s face, who stirred. … Then he picked up the little girl, hoisted her on to his shoulders, and walked off down the empty street. Her mother followed behind, silently weeping.” (160) Adil’s family home is still bulldozed later by the Israelis in retaliation for Usamu’s attack and Adil ends the book dreaming of freedom for Palestine. The omniscient narrator shifts to a more intimate second person singular address to Adil: “If only you were more cruel, or harder of heart, you’d blow up everything you could lay hands on, from the Atlantic to the Gulf and on to the world’s furthest reaches.” (206) But Adil chooses to live, to go about the daily business of buying vegetables, fruit and bread and listen to the interminable, lamentable news about the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. He, unlike Usamu, can see both sides of the conflict.

Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid, through  tandem competitive narrative sequencing of the contrasting journals of the Malrich brothers Rachel and Malrich as they unravel the shocking history of their father’s incriminatory role in the Holocaust, thereby linking the devastating genocides of these two racist dystopias, mitigates the horror for the reader with a sweeping understanding of history. Rachel Schiller commits suicide in his own gas chamber (his car) wearing Holocaust pajamas after he learns that his father Hans Schiller was secretly an SS Officer before he became an Algerian Islamist. Sansal makes the analogy between the Shoah or Nazi genocide and what the Islamists have done and would like to do. The younger brother Malrich is street-smart and empathic enough to survive but his humorless, hard-working elder brother Malrich succumbed to extreme depression when learning what his father had done. His empathy is so pure and intense that he commits suicide as a deluded “act of love.” Malrich fights with the imam at the end of German Mujahid like Meursault fights with his priest and the Arab Haroun fights with his imam in Daoud’s Meursault Contre-Enquete. He equates the fanaticism and genocide of the SS officers to the jihadists. While ISIS amputates time to make the future resonate with dread, this kind of writing digs out the human elements to understand genocides across time, space, and culture.

Humanizing prophets and re-interpreting religious stories via Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Naguib Mahfouz Children of the Alley or Gebelaawi, and Saadawi’s God Resigns at the Summit Meeting incite outrage from radical Islamists who then issued fatwas against Rushdie, censorship and imprisonment of Saadawi, or the severing of Mahfouz’ brachial plexus from his writing arm with a knife slash in 1994. The forbidden personification hides the vitriolic satire of Islam from most Western readers but succeeded in getting the authors banned in Islamic countries for apostasy. Terrorists feel that their version of Islam is perfect and any human who falls short of its rules (Sharia) can be executed, stoned, or eliminated.  Mahfouz paints the picture of successive leaders in “our alley” that resemble Moses, a hippie Jesus, and a womanizing, hashish-smoking Mohammad, and a god at the end of the garden who appears to have Alzheimer’s. While some may laugh and think as they read this allegory, it enraged Egyptian Islamic Jihad to attempt an assassination against the first Arab author to win the Nobel Prize.  Saadawi has been a victim of their wrath and censorship for years. In Nawal el Saadawi’s one-act play, god gets so frustrated he resigns at the summit meeting with his prophets and politicians Clinton and Netanyahu but then the women take over and Isis, the goddess, not ISIS, bint Allah, daughter of god, and Eve assume a stature that smacks of perfection. Bint Allah replies later on: “That is why there is no such thing as the absolute truth in the word of God. The truth of Allah’s words is always relative depending on the power which recourse to it. In some countries women have started to cooperate with one another and to represent a new force that interprets the Torah, or the Bible, or the Koran in a way which favors their liberation, rather than maintain their slavery. For example, they no longer address God as masculine in the language they use.” (184)
In her inimical feminist way, Saadawi lets god resign at the Summit Meeting: “I was a cruel God who tried to compensate for this cruelty with words about compassion and justice. I also was divided myself, since I separated between body and spirit. I denied the existence of my body, and imagined that I was only a spirit in the air. When the crucial moment arrived, when I had to descend to meet you on earth I had no alternative but to face the truth and to put on the body which you now see in front of you. It is the body of a man who says he is not human, the body of a human being who insists he is a God. The time has come for me to be what I truly am, to announce my resignation from my position, as a single eternal everlasting God. To be eternal is a curse, not a blessing. Imagine what life can be like when there is no death. I prefer to be a human being that will die…” The play ends when the police enter to arrest Bint Allah for writing this book, reminiscent of how Saadawi was arrested in the eighties and imprisoned for her audacious writing, also a premonition of the inevitable censorship of this play by twenty-first century authorities like Al Azhar.  For further laughs with Saadawi, watch our interview on You-Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0drWLEFJ5g
Mirthful laughter has been shown to reduce levels of cortisone and epinephrine so people can relax, breathe, think, and enjoy life. Sometimes we cry when we share the pain of another but that is a gentler, more cathartic emotion than abject fear. SELF- and OTHER-related processing activates a network of medial and lateral prefrontal, temporal, and parietal brain regions involved in emotional perspective taking. Therefore anything that enhances empathy strengthens cerebral activity. Humor and empathy are sociable emotions but we cower alone in fear. While all humans have the same physiology, different cultures may have different emotive responses based on tradition and values. Some are less demonstrative, some laugh at pain, some exaggerate with ululations, and they may prefer different characters. They may also have different standards of beauty or literary art. Since readers must usually read some works in translation, they may not all have access to the tone color and rhythm and idioms of the original language.
Trauma studies and psychoanalytical criticism plummet the pain of the characters and how this affects the reader. ISIS and Al Qaeda would love for the survivors of terrorism to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome for the rest of their lives. Because they can only kill so many people, their power resides on the fear they create and the money that is spent on counter-terrorism. Literature should therefore be open to all kinds of emotional and cognitive responses because laughter and thought are empowering.  Whether comedy is dry with satire, warm with good-natured humor, wet with slapstick, hyperbolic with farce or fantasy, or bitter with irony, it plummets the imperfection of humans and gods. Keret’s Seven Good Years and Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to this Country combine the hilarious mundane details of juggling terrorism with daily life events such as childbirth, car driving, cooking, and marital spats while mitigating its real tragedy in order to survive and inspire resilience in the reader.  Edgar Keret’s Seven Good Years begins with a nurse claiming “I just hate terrorist attacks,” and then, as if to accept their everyday occurrence, “Want some gum?” Keret’s wife is screaming in labor while all the terrorist victims are quiet. Journalists interview him about the attack because as a writer he must have something original to say about terrorism. He said it is always the same old thing so he prefers to focus on the birth of his baby. This hysterically funny and desperately sad memoir is bookended with a final chapter called “Pastrami” where the parents “play” slices of bread to cover the now seven-year-old boy as if he were pastrami during an air raid on the highway. The youngster likes the game so much Keret ends with the quip that they can still play these games without the sirens.  After I met Keret last summer and laughed through his readings, I stayed up all night crying. But at least he makes me think. He turns slapstick surreal to survive. Comedy is about survival and ISIS and Al Qaeda worship death.

In A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus superimposes the naturalistic soap opera of a divorcing modern couple, Joyce and Marshall, over 9/11 and Bush’s War on Terror, ending with an ice cream celebration of the capture of bin Laden. He doesn’t attempt to depict terrorists or Muslim culture but his hilarious comedy of manners digs into the flaws and foibles of twenty-first century American life. The couple’s hatred for each other and their endless financial and domestic problems almost trump the disasters of terrorism. But near the end of the book, after Saddam is killed, nukes are miraculously discovered and neutralized, and Americans are wearing “Death to Terrorists” t-shirts, Marshall is still in debt and their divorce stalled. So he enters the kitchen where Joyce is peeling a carrot, opening his bathrobe to reveal explosives around his midsection. “I made it myself. I have enough dynamite to blow up half the block. God is great.” (189) But it didn’t work. Joyce asks him why he didn’t follow the instructions. “They were in Arabic…” So Joyce tries to fix the suicide belt as their two young children watch this ludicrous charade. After the intimacy of trying to disassemble his vest, he goes to his room, takes it off, throws it out, and bursts into tears. Like Keret, Kalfus blows up the mundane until we laugh so hard that we can’t stop crying. At the end of his novel after the description of a downtown NYC celebration of Osama bin Laden’s capture that rivals the super bowl, he punctuates the event with this acid sentence, filled with the hate and irony of a vitriolic Jonathan Swift, “The moment would last forever, [American exceptionalism] or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.”(237)

Futuristic dystopias abound in world literature and thanks to Michel Houellebecq’s La Soumission and Boualem Sansal’s 2084 we can imagine what an Islamist Caliphate might be like in the 21st century.  Houellebecq writes in the first person, creating a Sorbonne professor, specialist in nineteenth century decadence who initially leaves Paris with an Islamist win in the French government in 2022 when Mohammed ben Abbes becomes President of the Republic. The Sorbonne turns into an Islamic University like Al Azhar in Cairo, a well-funded, Saudi-run medieval university with the manly comforts of multiple wives and luscious food and drink at home for the randy twentieth century literature professor--if he submits to Islam. The protagonist can still have sex with his veiled students, drink alcohol, eat fatty foods, and make three times as much money as he did before. I laughed out loud reading about his page-turning exploits!
Sansal creates a dire apocalypse as the Islamist answer to Orwell’s 1984, helping readers imagine the details of a rigid, violent society modeled more on the Taliban than the Saudis but with ingenious nomenclature such as Abilang for the holy language, Abistan for the holy place, and Abi as the prophet. Sansal embraces the world and crosses cultures the way he did in The German Mujahid. Sansal wants his readers to really think about terrorism from global and cultural perspectives, not to suffer like his characters.
With his intricate plotting reminiscent of an elaborate Turkish rug, Orhan Pamuk orchestrates government coups, performance art, and terrorist attacks during a 3-day snowstorm in Anatolia in his award-winning novel Snow in order to layer as many aspects of history and culture on top of each other. Terrorists grew up in the same narcissistic world culture as movie and pop stars and it can be argued that many of them manipulate the media in the same way. Orhan Pamuk creates a dashing, handsome terrorist two-timer called Blue who is having affairs with two beautiful sisters, one of whom, Ipek, is beloved by Ka, the Westernized poet journalist who came to Kars to fall in love with her again. No Christian guilt here. Terrorists enjoy sex, are proud of their bodies, and manipulate the media for their causes, just like Osama bin Laden did. While terrorists develop their propaganda with the same degree of narcissism shown by fashion and movie producers, they pretend to be pious, religious, otherworldly, using torture as a Machiavellian means to an end, an end they pretend or actually believe is spiritual. But books like Pamuk’s Snow paint them as the narcissists they are-- insecure, vulnerable, often boyish, or as lustful and charismatic as any movie star, i.e. Blue. Pamuk is satirical, occasionally funny, and he always elicits thought and reflection. Although life in all the dimensions of physics may be this layered, we don’t experience it this way. As we charge through our days, we can’t hit every layer of being simultaneously.  Pamuk condenses time and space in order to pack as many events and ideas as possible into Kars and its diverse inhabitants. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we cry; there is beauty and ugliness; characters strive to be great even as they fail beautifully; and poetry in the shape of a snowflake resonates through the messy humanity punctuated by terror’s narcissism—beauty amidst the blood.

Al Qaeda and ISIS also spend more time coordinating media campaigns than they do in terrorist training. Note the narcissism of Osama bin Laden in his statement about media policy: “No matter what material we send, I suggest that we should distribute it to more than one channel, so that there will be healthy competition between the channels in broadcasting the material, so that no other channel takes the lead. It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News, let her die in her anger.” (bin Laden 17)

I propose a 21st century  global reader response criticism that respects the diversity of the global readership, uses the latest research in human physiology and cognitive science to substantiate reader response, gauges the degrees of removal of the literary representation from reality to distinguish literary art from media consumption, and incorporates cultural themes like terrorism and ecology or medical humanities, three important concerns of the 21st century, and the traditional connotative close textual analysis to parse the literary techniques of the author to relate form to content. In the past reader response theory sometimes avoided formal or cultural analysis, didn't include brain research, and most importantly, assumed a Western readership for the Western canon. My students log in from Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, South Korea, Paris, London, or Buenos Aires, offering the different perspectives of their culture and experience as they read these novels from my Literature and Terrorism reading list. A few religious Muslims don't have the same opinions as Westerners; some Asians may have a different emotive response than Americans to humor or empathy, and they don't route for the same heroes, thereby disrupting the binary nature of an “us versus them” conflict. But this is the readership of global literature no matter who writes the book. Because these rich, diverse novels empower readers while the media paralyzes most of us with fear, there is a future for global literature. We can’t let ISIS and Al Qaeda steal the show.

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