Dead Poets Society

Two years ago, in 2013, Syrian rebels trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria beheaded the statue of 11th century blind poet Abul Ala al-Maari. It was retributive violence that al-Maari, an atheist-iconoclast and philosopher, did not have to face in his life time despite being labelled a heretic.

A man who could easily give Richard Dawkins a run for his money had he belonged to the current century, al-Maari, famously wrote that all mortals were composed of two great schools — intelligent men and fools wedded to their faith. He poured scorn on prophets and priests through his verse and went to the extent of stating that Islam does not have a monopoly on truth. He was lucky of having born in the Abbasid era, known for rich philosophical debates and freethinking. It took a turn of century for the traditionalists to gain upper hand and the fanatics had to travel 20 centuries back in time to bring to the block a man — one of greatest Arab poets — they considered an apostate.

The Saudi Arabian court which sentenced poet Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia to death had on their hands takfiri prejudice, not evidence. Fayadh, a prominent member of the nascent Saudi art scene who has curated several shows, was accused of growing his hair long, posing for pictures in company of women and authoring a 2008 collection of poems titled ‘Instructions Within’ that “insulted the Godly self”. Fayadh, who had no recourse to legal defence earlier has a lawyer now and can appeal against the verdict, but the tragedy that has struck his family is unspeakable. His father Abdul Sattar Fayadh died soon after he came to know about his son’s death sentence.

Poet Mona Kareem, who has led the campaign to free Fayadh has translated some of the “disupted” poems from the book published by Beirut-based Dar al-Farabi. There is hardly a line in it that sounds blasphemous. Fayadh himself has stated that the book was about him being a “Palestinian refugee” and about “cultural and philosophical issues”.

He was first detained in 2013 after a Saudi citizen filed a complaint with the Muttawa (Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice), a state agency that has institutionalised zealotry. He was let off on bail only to be arrested months later, in early 2014, by the Bureau for Investigation and Public Prosecution around the time Iran hanged poet and human rights activist, Hashem Shaabani. In May last year a general court in Abha sentenced him to four years in prison and 800 lashes. His appeal was dismissed during a retrial in November 2015 by a new panel of judges, which refused his apology and wanted him executed.

Reports say that the Saudi state has now threatened to sue a Twitter user who likened the court decision to execute the poet, Islamic State-like. For a state readying to behead more than 50 people accused of “terrorism’ and is frequently in the news for flagrant violation of human rights and free speech, IS-like not a charge wide off the mark.

Saudi writer and dissident Raif Badawi who was flogged 50 times after he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for blasphemy, reportedly, is set to receive the second set of corporeal punishment. Despite the global outrage and several rounds of diplomatic lobbying Badawi remains a prisoner of conscience. No global power has the nerve to rub the House of Saud the wrong way.

Incidentally, one of the charges against Ashraf Fayadh is that he uploaded a video of inhumane public flogging by Saudi religious police, which angered them. There are many like him in Saudi prisons including the ‘poet of revolution’ Adel Lobad, detained in 2012 and sentenced to 13 years in jail. There’s a worldwide movement building up in support of Fayadh and it is important that it does not lose steam even if the sentence is suspended or lessened. The world cannot let someone languish in prison because of opinions they expressed or a poem they wrote.

The Arabs were slow in creating written literature, but they have had a rich tradition of oral poetry and it played a crucial role in the pre-Islamic society. One of the favourite legends that illustrate the Arab love for poetry is the ‘Hanging Odes’ compiled by Hammad al-Rawiya in eighth century. The seven poems called Mu’allaqat, written in the qasida form, were transcribed in gold and hung from Ka’aba in Mecca, the most sacred site for Islam. The legend has been contested by scholars, but has stayed on in the collective imagination of Arabs. A poem is the only thing that should hang from a public square, for others to read. Not God’s messengers.