fiction, stories are expected to take place in the past and in a rural setting (Leese).
In terms of our topic, there is an evident need to devote attention to the reality of penury, which, as social research has confirmed, is a frequent setting for honor-related violence in connection with lives ruined by customs. Accordingly, Pamuk’s statement is pertinent:16
[…] [T];he problem of the representation of reality becomes more important than the artist or author deserves or wants. […] While non-western artists want the same freedom […] of representation that western artists want or look for, they feel an immense responsibility towards […] representing this part of the world. (ter Braak)
The writers’ parenthesizing of these conditions (in Husserl’s sense), for all their individual variation, ensures that they are not at a disadvantage concerning their work’s credibility. These are issues of such far-reaching importance that we will come back to them in various contexts.
We should extend our focus concerning the expectations to which writers are subjected. Criticism of novels like Khaled Hosseini’s at times presents itself as worried by a solidifying of East-West political difference in his work. Some critics, quite apart from publishers, evidently resent writers who, functioning as native informants,17 depict unattractive features of their society or culture, thus ←10 | 11→allegedly nourishing Western stereotypes and by various means suggesting or at least implying Western cultural superiority. One can surmise that some critics would prefer writers to dwell on morally and aesthetically attractive characteristics of their country and culture, as bringing about a level East-West playing field. In our context, however, it would mean erasing the distinction between honor and dignity cultures, which we will explain below; this would not do justice to either. It would mean equating all forms of domestic and honor violence (and very likely refraining from their fictional representation). Yet, as Phyllis Chesler and several other scholars argue, case studies show that “honor killings are quite distinct from domestic violence” (Chesler, “Are Honor”). An East-West dimension would be misleading, as honor-shame communities tend to form only a part of their respective countries.
Then, in the context of North Africa vis-à-vis Europe, another form of the question about attending to more than marginal realities has become strongly political, erupting in the controversy surrounding Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. At the end of 2015, massive sexual assaults on women by young men mostly from North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds in Cologne (Germany) provoked an op-ed by Daoud in The New York Times with statements that are in tune with his fictional representations:
[…] one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed. […] People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.
This in turn triggered a storm of harsh protest, for instance from a number of mostly French academics (see Maghreb Page Editors) who condemned Daoud for Islamophobia coming close to racist discourses. Finally the French prime minister Manuel Valls intervened with a post “Soutenons Kamel Daoud!”: “Ce que demande Kamel Daoud, c’est qu’on ne nie pas la pesanteur des réalités politiques et religieuses; que l’on ait les yeux ouverts sur ces forces qui retiennent l’émancipation des individus, sur les violences faites aux femmes, sur la radicalisation croissante des quartiers, sur l’embrigadement sournois de nos jeunes” (see also Zerofsky 63).
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This controversial debate, within the context of our second response, needs a little more contextual attention. A fatwa by Abdelfattah Hamadache calling for Daoud’s execution has been issued in 2014 (see Cocquet), though subsequently qualified a little. Orhan Pamuk has also experienced death threats. Elif Shafak was on trial in 2006 because her novel The Bastard of Istanbul was considered as “insulting Turkishness.”18 In a November 2018 lecture, Kamel Daoud speaks of his country’s “ability to accuse the West of all our evils while absolving ourselves of our own responsibility each day, in the face of each failure” (“Blaming”). Daoud is vindicated not least in the context of the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main: his arguments “sind beileibe keine, die man mit dem Verweis auf deren intellektuelle Marginalität zur Seite legen kann; sie schließen an eine viel ältere Tradition des arabischen Feminismus an, die von den postkolonialen Wissenschaftlerinnen vollständig negiert wird” (Schröter). Sema Kaygusuz has declared that “[s];ometimes, I know, a country needs to hear its reality from its writers” (“Sema”), a position which partly explains some of the vehement reactions.
Arab critics have also lashed out at Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit Sacrée (quite apart from its Arabic translation) for producing “an essentially Western text” which ignores historical contexts of Islamic cultural history and implies that Moroccan life is “irrational, depraved, […] raging, dark, angry,” that Moroccan localities are “godforsaken places” (Faiq 206–08); Ben Jelloun is one of the chief “reinforcers of orientalist stereotypes and clichés about everything Arab and Islamic” (Faiq 204).19 One could almost describe the criticism itself as “dark, angry”; whether this is an adequate description of the novel’s content is another matter. As for Ben Jelloun, writer Mohamed Choukri, scholar Mohamed Boughali, and others have likewise condemned works of his. Anouar El Younssi (Emory University) emphatically agrees, noting that Ben Jelloun “allegedly seeks to empower and give voice to oppressed women in patriarchal Arab-Muslim societies. However, he runs the risk of giving a simplistic, black-and-white representation of Moroccan society […]”; L’Enfant de Sable “essentializes the alleged cultural regression of Moroccans – and, by extension, Arabs – so much that oppressing women becomes part and parcel of the Moroccan, Arab ←12 | 13→collective” (240). “We must […] caution his readers against the cultural and political consequences his literature may engender” (248). This criticism is leveled at Khaled Hosseini, too, for portraying misogyny as “an innate characteristic of most Afghan men” (Fitzpatrick 249). We can observe that hostile critics appear to claim that there is a loss of the referent. Yet we can also observe that the conditions Ben Jelloun depicts are hardly isolated cases, being supported in other works (and also in social science).
Not surprisingly, Khaled Hosseini has been the target of vicious attacks. Like other authors some of whose works we are studying, he has been included in the category of “native informant.” His work A Thousand Splendid Suns (on an illegitimate daughter in Afghanistan and the hardship she endures, as well as Taliban cruelty) is now analyzed, elaborating on Coeli Fitzpatrick, as showing that Hosseini “contributes to the stereotypical discourse which opposes the ‘progressive’ West where everything is done for the better of humans to the ‘underdeveloped’ East which destroys lives of its people”; the work’s author “adjusts to the tastes of Western audiences”; “the ideology it adopts is fundamentally Eurocentric,” so that “the whole picture becomes skewed” (Dagamseh and Golubeva 2, 3, 9). This criticism, too, is political: in the novel Hosseini justifies the “benign nature of the United States’ involvement in the affairs of other countries” (Dagamseh and Golubeva 9).20 Hosseini has been faulted for not giving significant attention to economic deprivation in Afghanistan rather than culture (for instance Mader 90). Studies have found that, indeed, a majority of honor violence cases tends to occur in economically disenfranchised areas, as a response to women’s perceived defiance of social norms such as the right to work (e.g., Karo Kari, Mansur et al.). Yet it
