Just as the Muslim world was vibrating to the 'insult' visited on the Prophet Muhamed (Peace Be Upon Him) by an Anglo-Pakistani fictionist of genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country's long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to 'understand' the other by means of epic romance. To the fatalism of a subject population, who are serfs to a Turkish empire and captives of a holy book they cannot read. Lawrence cheerily and repeatedly intones: 'Nothing is written.' By this he does not intend any insult to the lapidary, but only a bracing 'Western' injunction against surrender. Yet Islam means surrender. The very word is like the echo of a forehead knocking repeatedly on the floor, while the buttocks are proferred to the empty, unfeeling sky in the most ancient gesture of submission and resignation.

LRB 26 October 1989 | PDF Download