the true believers – the Osamas and Bushes – probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear – betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance – shouts that he will ‘do such things/What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.’
Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a ‘terrorist’ conspiracy with potential 11 September consequences. Similarly, the saintly Prospero in The Tempest contains both the self-righteousness and ruthlessness of bin Laden and the covert racism of Bush. When he sends Ariel to wreck the usurping King Alonso’s ship on his island, the airy spirit returns with an account of his success which – despite his subsequent saving of lives – is of near Twin Towers dimensions:
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam’d amazement. Sometime I’d divide, And burn in many places… Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel; Then all afire with me; the King’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring then like reeds, not hair Was the first man that leapt; cried “Hell is empty, And all the devils are here”.
In almost the same year, John Donne was using equally terrifying imagery, of a ‘fired ship’ from which ‘by no way/But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,/Some men leap’d forth…’ Prospero’s cruelty towards Caliban becomes more frightening each time I read of it, not least because The Tempest is one of four Shakespeare plays in which Muslims appear and because Caliban is himself an Arab, born of an Algerian mother.
‘This damn’d witch Sycorax,/For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing, from Argier/Thou know’st was banish’d…’ Prospero tells us. ‘This blue-ey’d hag was hither brought with child… /A freckl’d whelp, hag-born not honour’d with/A human shape.’
Caliban is the ‘terrorist’ on the island, first innocently nurtured by Prospero and then condemned to slavery after trying to rape Prospero’s daughter, the colonial slave who turns against the fruits of civilisation that were offered him.
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!
Yet Caliban must ‘obey’ Prospero because ‘his art is of such power’. Prospero may not have F-18s or bunker-busters, but Caliban is able to play out a familiar Western narrative; he teams up with the bad guys, offering his help to Trinculo – ‘I’ll show you the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;/I’ll fish for thee…’ – making the essential linkage between evil and terror that Bush vainly tried to claim between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Caliban is an animal, unworthy of pity, not honoured with a ‘human shape’. Compare this with an article in the newspaper USA Today, in which a former American military officer, Ralph Peters – arguing that Washington should withdraw from Iraq because its people are no longer worthy of our Western sacrifice – refers to ‘the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organised human endeavor’.* Prospero, of course, prevails and Caliban survives to grovel to his colonial master: ‘How fine my master is! I am afraid/He will chastise me/… I’ll be wise hereafter,/And seek for grace…’ The war of terror has been won!
Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman empire – then at its zenith of power – remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans. The history plays are replete with these fears, albeit that they are also a product of propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth and, later, James. In Henry IV, Part I, the king is to set out on the Crusades:
As far as to the sepulchre of Christ…
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy, Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessed feet.
* USA Today 3 November 2006.
Rhetoric is no one’s prerogative – compare King Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech with Saddam’s prelude to the ‘Mother of All Battles’ where Prospero-like purity is espoused for the Arab ‘side’. This is Saddam: ‘Standing at one side of this confrontation are peoples and sincere leaders and rulers, and on the other are those who stole the rights of God and the tyrants who were renounced by God after they renounced all that was right, honourable, decent and solemn and strayed from the path of God until… they became obsessed by the devil from head to toe.’
Similar sentiments are espoused by Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play. Tamburlaine is the archetypal Muslim conqueror, the ‘scourge of God’ who found it passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis.
But Othello remains the most obvious, tragic narrative of our Middle Eastern fears. He is a Muslim in the service of Venice – close neighbour to the Ottoman empire – and is sent to Cyprus to battle the Turkish fleet. He is a mercenary whose self-hatred contaminates the play and eventually leads to his own death. Racially abused by both Iago and Roderigo, he lives in a world where there are men whose heads supposedly grow beneath their shoulders, where he is black – most Arabs are not black, although Olivier faithfully followed this notion – and where, just before killing himself, he compares his terrible stabbing of Desdemona to the work of a ‘base Indian’ who:
… threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes, … Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees … Set you down this:And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him thus.
That, I fear, is the dagger that we now feel in all our hearts.
The Independent Magazine, 30 March 2007
After the Second World War, Palestine was crumbling. Menachem Begin’s Irgun had blown up British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British were executing Jewish ‘terrorists’, and the Jews had hanged two kidnapped British army sergeants. The Arabs were determined to destroy the future Jewish state of Israel. The old imperial mandate was in a state of incipient civil war. You have only to open Colonial Office file 537/2643 to understand why, in their moment of agony, the British toyed with the idea of negotiating with an Arab cleric whom they had, only two years earlier, tried to extradite as a war criminal.
Indeed, in 1941 Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had been chatting to Hitler in Berlin, urging the Reich to prevent the departure of European Jews to Palestine; and two years later he had been helping to raise a Muslim SS battalion in Sarajevo to fight on the Russian front. Later on, in 1944 claiming ignorance of the Jewish Holocaust, he told the German foreign minister Ribbentrop that if Jews were to be ‘removed’ from Germany, ‘it would be infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control [sic], as for example, Poland…’
When he attempted to flee Germany in 1945, the French captured the Grand Mufti, but allowed him to escape to Egypt. In 1947 he turned up in Lebanon as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, a powerful and influential voice that could pacify – or provoke – an Arab uprising against Britain in its last days of rule in Palestine. No wonder, then, that the old Colonial Office file was not released under the usual thirty-year rule, but kept secret for half a century. Its contents – astonishingly, they were overlooked by historians on their release last month – speak not only of hidden contacts between the Grand Mufti and British diplomats in Cairo, but also of imperial despair in Palestine and, most dramatically, of outrage at Jewish ‘reprisals’