JK ROWLING PLAGIARIZED ME?
True — or Mossad BS?
I am living in a void, within a greater void. North Gaza has become horizontalized, silent, uneventful, emptied of the human dimension. In a prairie, even an inch stands tall , but here, where are the inches? Yes, occasionally figures come to look at their ruined blocks, pick at some sodden possessions, then they leave again. This wasteland no longer supports much in the way of human life. Nor is there much to reflect on here, so one turns back to the more populous past of memory.
Surely the strangest episode in my life started almost 30 years ago. I am a young Palestinian refugee in London. I hate my room by the train and Shepherd’s Bush roundabout so much, I prefer to sleep in dives, or find older women who will take pity on me and give me meals and shelter.
One of these — Lady Mary — is married to a ninth-generation Viscount with a 100 acre estate. She lives in a six floor townhouse on Hyde Park. She is about 50, I am more than 20 years younger. She dresses in tight leather pants that cost £1000. She is a rigorous philosopher but looks a socialite.
Mary is the muse of the novelist, Martin Amis, and his femme fatales, Nicola Six in London Fields and Mary Lamb in Other People are said to be closely based on her.
What is Mary’s interest in me? I am not sure. She has a reputation for collecting writers. She is a true wit, and kind and hospitable. It is a long time since I have known anything but hostility and fear. She lends me an apartment in Notting Hill, to write my first novel in. It was previously owned by David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. When I turn up the heating, historic LSD spattered on the parquet off-gases, and I hallucinate, mildly.
I write a strange novel there, its protagonist initially called, yes, Harry. The location is a remote boarding school. This is a parallel universe, where evil forces possess some boys and brutality and chaos reign. That supernatural world is an allegory for my experiences growing up a Palestinian.
In 1994, the editor of Bloomsbury Publishing, Liz Calder, says she will publish my book. It is a moderate success. It wins the London Arts Board’s New Writer Award, is shortlisted for two other prizes; it gets reviewed in the MM.
Bloomsbury Publishing was in a Regency House in Soho Square then. My editor, Liz Calder, was spoken of with awe. She had discovered Rushdie, worked closely with Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Will Self, Jon Berger; she was London’s top fiction editor. I was so nervous in her presence, I just cracked jokes all the time — to hide any jejune remarks that might otherwise condemn me.
Whenever I was invited onto the BBC or media shows, I spoke about the plight of the Palestinians. My appearance on one BBC morning show, where I described the Sabra-Shatila massacre, still holds the record for complaints. Young and naive, I thought I was safe in London and could speak freely.
At this point, my life took an odd turn. A few months after my novel about the boarding school was published, the first hardback edition of Harry Potter was published by Bloomsbury. I didn’t make anything of this. Jo Rowling’s book was for children. The Brits are fascinated by boarding schools. So it was just a coincidence. Or was it?
Faxes and voicemail started coming through from withheld numbers. “She plagiarised you, aren’t you going to do anything, wimp, fag, loser" — and similar provocations. I ignored them. Rowling had been working on Harry Potter for longer than I had been working on my novel. That was already out there. Why should I disbelieve this? Even if Jo had seen my book at Bloomsbury, it would surely have been too late for it to influence her. In any case, apart from the setting and some vague themes, the two novels were substantively different.
By early 1997, I had started to receive a lot of hate mail. This culminated in an envelope arriving filled with acid, which burnt my fingers. The event was reported in the papers, with pictures of my damaged hand; I was given police protection.
Who was behind all this? A rumor had been circulating I had claimed there were secret queer cliques among the Sunni clergy. I had never said or written anything even remotely of the sort. This idea had never even entered my brain. But the mud stuck. People actually believed one of my novels contained this slur. Doubting myself now, wondering if I was going crazy, I re-read the book four times. No mention of queer Muslim clerics, not a single word.
Matters came to a head after some fake interviews with me were published anonymously or on the internet, which was in its first year of public use. Some seemed to involve genuine reporters being hoodwinked by imposters. They were phone interviews. The reporters never met “me”. All repeated the queer cleric slur. When another acid envelope arrived, I decided to lie low. I had, for the moment, been silenced.
Using proxies to penetrate the tight-knit Muslim community and radical mosques suggested UK Muslims almost certainly were not behind the attacks on me. Bizarre theories were floated that my being smeared was preparation for my being dangled as a Mossad informant by a certain Arab state.
To this day, I have no certain idea who was behind the campaign to silence me. If I had sued Rowling or even accused her, it would have ended in a costly legal nightmare. I would have lost and been ruined. As for the fake stories, that I was Islamaphobic, they almost took my life. Whoever was behind it all, if it was one actor, they were highly sophisticated. It was that which scared me most. The most frightening enemies are either totally dumb and reckless — or masterminds.
Looking out now at the rubble, this empty world of ruins, a Pompeii after the eruption, where once there was life, I am no closer to certainty. Would the Mossad bother with a shrimp like me, a young writer in London? Doubts remain. Lady Mary and I had an on-off affair for three years. Could this have been the work of her jealous aristocratic husband. But then Mary had lots of affairs, at least 12 were named in the divorce papers apparently, so singling me out did not make sense. Could Mary herself have been jealous and possessive to the point of controlling me with a smear campaign? I had trashed her apartment and cheated with other women. This is a shame that will never leave me, as she had only ever shown me kindness. But then again, her having other lovers, and being a kind and forgiving sort, made her involvement most unlikely. Maybe some other girlfriend was a psychopath? Jealous in turn of Mary? But at this point, one sees enemies everywhere and loses all reason.
Sometimes, one must live without answers to mysteries. One must accept there will never be answers. Yet the human mind demands answers. Perhaps, like believing in hope, when our final outcome is death, that is its greatest flaw.
