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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 would be implausible to assume that in Afghanistan or elsewhere poverty and lack of education per se induce honor-related violence, irrespective of cultural factors.²¹ Iis Sugiyanti praises ←13 | 14→A Thousand Splendid Suns for being “honest enough to give a more informed and rounded appreciation of the life of Afghan women” (48). But there is another angle of attack: strangely equating Pashtun people as a whole with Pashtun men, ones especially having “the responsibility of shielding honor of their women” (421), Khan and Afsar on this basis contend that Hosseini “disorientates readers by distorting real picture of Pashtun people” in that his “representation of Pashtun characters is not based on the traits for which they are known,” so that he “pleases Westerners by devaluing cultural values of Pashtuns/Muslims” and justifies U.S. intrusion into Afghanistan (426). Evidently literature can become a weapon not only of political conflict but of warfare. When another team of critics faults Hosseini’s work for being narrated from a female perspective (Khan and Qureshi 397), we can see how consistently masculinist criticism, with its allies, seeks to safeguard its cultural priorities in nosing out ideological concerns in its study object – but only there. It may need to consider Edmund Husserl’s warning that scientific questioning requires an “inhibiting” or “putting out of play” all “positions taken toward the already-given Objective world” (epoché or parenthesizing, in Cartesian 20). Moreover, whereas Mader condemns Hosseini’s novel for depicting Pashtun men as either brutish or effeminate (88), Khan and Qureshi find them portrayed as “matchlessly helpful to the needy” (392). Does the novel show a different face to different critics?

Another of the authors we will mention, Kader Abdolah, has been analyzed with similar categories:²² he “regularly employs old, orientalist stereotypes: ‘West’ is rational, straightforward and active; ‘East’ is irrational, traditional and passive” (Moenandar 61).²³ As for Iran, when Parinoush Saniee’s Book of Fate was banned, she reports about the question of its depiction of realities: “Even when I asked what subject matter in the book was far-fetched, and where had I possibly exceeded realities at the time, the ministry’s response was that it was not a question of the subject matter being untrue ←14 | 15→or unrealistic, but that [the book] was bitter and would negatively impact perceptions” (Al Bustani). It is noteworthy how the whole issue of representative or distorted depiction can thus be neatly sidestepped. The realities are, in Saniee’s summary: “Indeed, there is no shortage of suicide, long family feuds and even honour killing. Societal expectations are more vital to people than life and death” (Al Bustani).

In the Chinese context there is a recent and heated debate, which is also significant for understanding the global dimension of the question of representation. It concerns Mo Yan, who has been severely criticized for not depicting “typical characters in typical environments”: has he not “distorted the Chinese history and reality” with a “wild and exaggerating” fictional discourse (Song 3, 4)? Song Binghui cites a critical stance that resembles charges brought against Middle Eastern authors: “though not intentionally

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