Is this a time to be messing with the minds of Islamic clerics by staging a satirical play about religious death edicts?
Indian-born Anuvab Pal, now an American businessman and playwright, certainly thinks so.
His comedy “Fatwa,” a hit at last month’s New York International Fringe Festival and now on the boards at Manhattan’s Blue Heron Arts Center, tackles the subject with relish, complete with such touches as having a death edict, or fatwa, issued by the almighty Islamic Council of Wyoming.
His inspiration, obviously, came in part from the fatwa issued by Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini against author Salman Rushdie in 1989 for the crime of having blasphemed against the faith in his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
“For a long time I’ve thought about Salman Rushdie and the Nigerian journalists and the Bangladeshi journalist, all of whom got fatwas,” said Pal, in an interview. “There was a world, really, that was created after 9/11 that continued to fester this idea.”
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But Pal, who lived in the Middle East in his childhood, was less interested in Islamic fundamentalism in the present-day context of wars and terrorism than he was in the true nature of fatwas and how they evolved into the menace invoked by Khomeini.
`The world stopped’
“I was much more fascinated with what really constituted a fatwa, what were the gradations of it?” he said. “I remember when Khomeini issued the edict, the world stopped. Every TV station, every newspaper. There was this hysteria created.”
And Rushdie became a world-famous figure. Sales of “Satanic Verses” soared, whereas without the fatwa, they probably would have been down at the level of, say, a collection of vers libre poetry on the place of root-feeding mealy bugs in the cosmos.
But not every fatwa gets the media so hyperventilated.
“I read in the papers that a local cleric issued a fatwa, and it was relegated to a small article in the back pages,” Pal said. “That’s where I began my research.”
He discovered that fatwas originally were issued as religious opinions and guidelines, rather like the Catholic prohibition against eating meat on Fridays.
“They were issued for various things,” Pal said. “If people were too fat in Muhammad’s Mecca, a fatwa was issued setting down a set of guidelines like the Atkins diet. During the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish invasions by the Moors, they talked about the way to eat and to dress and how to write books and what good fiction was.”
But, as seems inevitable, politics and power got mixed in with the practice.
“Various caliphs found that the fatwa, if they tweaked it a little bit, could be a good tool to quell disturbances and protests,” Pal said. “Then, when extremist fanaticism came about, they used the concept of a fatwa for whatever they wanted but primarily to issue against anybody they disagreed with.”
This has not been unique to Islam. Christianity’s Tomas de Torquemada, he of the Spanish Inquisition, was keen on similar practices, especially involving burnings at the stake and especially against Jews.
The early religious courts of 17th Century Puritan New England were rather stern themselves. But all that was centuries ago. Pal is dealing with the here and now.
Imam of Cincinnati
“Sometime back, there was an American playwright who had written a play called `Paradise’ about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said. “Some local imam in Ohio issued a fatwa on the play, which was supposed to be done in a festival in Cincinnati. [The play] got shot down. I thought, how interesting that here in the United States, producers canceled because they didn’t want to offend anybody. The question is, How much power does the imam of Cincinnati have?”
Or the Islamic Council of Wyoming, which figures in Pal’s play.
It’s a departure for him because his previous plays involved Indian characters and this does not.
“I wanted to write about the Middle East and ideas about it,” he said. “This is the most political and current [in time element] play I’ve ever written.”
The comedy centers on the plight of two pathetically unsuccessful American writers in their 70s named Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.
“They were given the names before they became famous ones,” Pal said. “Michael Jordan is an ordinary Irish name, and Muhammad Ali is an ordinary Muslim one.”
The fame the writers yearn for is literary, however, and it has been elusive.
Deciding to make a last stab at success and celebrity before the grim reaper hauls him off into the abyss of eternal obscurity, Jordan writes a deliberately blasphemous book in which he has a Persian man urinate on a homeless person, offensiveness he counts upon to stir up Islamic wrath and bring down a fatwa on his head.
But no one in the Middle East reads it. Worldwide it sells only 80 copies. So, with the aid of his writer friend Ali, who looks very Middle Eastern, and a video camera, Jordan takes matters another bold step.
The question of fame, of course, quickly transcends whatever literary content the book may boast. Which Pal finds pretty true to life.
“There’s the cheeky idea of literary immortality being associated with a fatwa, where the work of fiction gets forgotten,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about `The Satanic Verses’ in terms of its literary ability, even though I read it.”
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