It is important that this collection of poetry should appear when it does. Mahmood Jahmal has lived in Britain since 1967, having been born in Lucknow in India in 1948. HIs family, like many Muslim families, thereafter moved to Pakistan and it is as a progressive Pakistani poet, film-maker and translator that Mahmood Jamal was to become known in Britain.
At present Britain is daily poisoned with broadcast and newspaper racism and the whipping-up of mass fear. From prime minister down, through Press and electronic media, the Enemy Within has moved from being porn-amassing predatory pedophiles, litter-scattering noisy gypsies, young people on council estates (Yob Culture, as the government would have it) lazy single mothers on benefit, invalidity benefit Scroungers (ie the sick, especially those in their fifties and early sixties), illegal immigrants with whom the country is supposed to be Awash, teenagers wearing hooded clothes (more Yob Culture) ' and now the Muslims, most especially the 'fundamentalist fanatics'.' New Labour's ever-rolling policy through the years of Crackdowns and Crusades has at last joined into one. Crusades is now the operative word.
I know exactly what fundamentalism is. I was reared on the stuff. 'The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians' was one of my religious teacher's favourite, of many favourite, sayings in the daily RE lesson I' got. If you died a martyr, all your sins would be forgiven at that moment, no matter what they were. Mind you, someone else had to kill you. But getting all your sins forgiven in one go seemed about the only way of being sure of getting to heaven in the sin-laden dire-warnings atmosphere of the RE lessons to assembled adolescents of which I was one.' 'Mysticism' was sneeringly dismissed as 'misty schism'. There was one, true, holy and apostolic church. And that was it. The rest were superstitious nonsense: at best misguided, at worst the influence of Satan.
This kind of attitude still flourishes in all fundamentalist outlooks' ' Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Zionist Jewish. But only Muslim fundamentalism is presently described by Blair et al as 'evil': Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, far from being 'evil', provide too much betimes useful support for' Western foreign and domestic policy. 'Before the destruction of Falluja a rare glimpse on BBC was given of American soldiers receiving communion before battle, and being lectured on the supposed fact that Falluja was where they were to do battle with Satan. It is rare for such expos's to occur on the British media ' even since that film was shown some six months or more ago, the gaps have been closed.
The most notable silence is on Palestine. To mention any detail of the sufferings of the Palestinians, or the brutality of the Israeli occupying forces, it seems, is to 'foment terrorism'. Only this notion can explain the now total, corrupt complicity of journalists of the electronic and paper media in Britain. There is collective silence at the exstinguishing of the Palestinian people's hopes of nationhood and human dignity in ordinary day-to-day living. There are still some avenues to get scattered information through the internet: nothing from British press or broadcasting. I am writing this on July 22 nd 2005.' Four days ago a fourteen year old Palestinian was shot dead by an Israeli soldier for no apparent reason, to witnesses, while sitting in a car at a West Bank checkpoint.'' Where was this covered in the British media? Answer: nowhere ' of course. It never is. We are treated more and more to the television show trials of those who have committed 'crimes against humanity'. Needless to say, these show trials are of perpetrators of crimes who have been on a side that opposes British and American colonisation. As for the daily construction of a wall twice the width of the Berlin Wall, that cuts through villages, travels for hundreds of miles, blocks people from education, hospitals, their tillable land, their relatives; reduces by another 40-50% that mere 22% of their original land the Palestinians occupied; that annexes East Jerusalem, brings another 30.000 illegal settlers into the compass of Jerusalem and expels 50,000 Palestinians from that same city ' of all this, nothing at all. It is quite extraordinary. Nothing at all. No photographs, no programmes, no interviews.' And anyone who gets energised about these palpable crimes, it seems,' must only be 'a Muslim fanatic'. Such a supposition is indeed racism.
The media are at the moment gearing up for' the 'withdrawal' as it is called of the 8,000 illegal settlers in Gaza. The Israeli government is for its own interests constructing a state-of-the-art reporting centre for several thousand reporters to broadcast this worldwide.' Like all Jewish settlers throughout the Occupied Territories, these 'settlers'' have been funded to excellent accommodation and social amenities, aggressively protected by Israeli soldiers, connected with expensive government-funded top-class roads. Now Sharon, while yesterday for instance assuring settlers in the West Bank settlement of Ariel that their settlement or 'bloc' as he would have these called would soon be increased in size and would be forever a part of Israel ' contrary to all international agreements and not reported in Britain needless to say; while his Wall still cuts its inexorable colonising miles through Palestinian land - this Sharon is to be presented in The Gaza Withdrawal Media Show, if it goes ahead,' as The Statesman Man of Peace taking on his 'right wing' on the one hand and 'Muslim extremists' on the other. It is cynical and preposterous nonsense: but knowing that it is cynical and preposterous nonsense, yet Bush, and Blair, and Jack Straw trot it out as a reasonable view. And complicit journalists relay it. Thousands are to report this withdrawal from the tiny strip of land on a sea-edge of Israel that houses one and a half million mostly refugee Palestinians. The illegal settlers, from Brooklyn or wherever it is that most of them have come from, are each to be rewarded with fine new housing elsewhere and thousands of dollars 'compensation'.
And this, the official script trudges on, is to further the 'road map',' to bring about The Peace Process. What about The Justice Process? Without justice, a peace process is only a pacification process. The pacification of the natives, again. That is what is being asked of the natives ' the true natives ' of Palestine. We have had centuries of 'pacification' by colonisers. It has nothing to do with justice, and nothing to do with peace. Here is merely the wished-for conclusion to another military adventure. In Palestine, it is to be a crushed and hopeless population in a topographic quilt of ghettos under permanent electronic and military surveillance, with perhaps another puppet administration of this completely non-viable entity whose main function will be to root out 'extremism' under its wing and be rewarded with episodic photo opportunities with Western leaders. Or the population can clear off to Jordan. But we won't call that ethnic cleansing.
Does all this reasonable cause for anger justify people blowing themelves up in subways full of people going about their ordinary lives? No, nothing justifies that. As Mahmood says in one of his poems here, THAT STILL DOESN'T MAKE IT RIGHT. State terrorism does not justify stateless terrorism. But until state cruelty and brutality and carnage stops, we can only expect more of the stateless kind. That's the unfortunate fact of the matter. When Western leaders rush to photo-opportunity handshakes with a Russian leader whose troops have been using' devastating 'akin to a tactical nuclear bomb' fuel-air-explosives in the city of Grozny for instance, is it really so surprising that we have Beslan to follow in its wake? Nothing 'justifies' people taking over a school full of children to blow themselves up, nothing can 'make that right'. But what justified the brutality of the Russian government killing thousands of civilians in Chechnya? Nothing makes that right, either.' Not above all a strategic silence.
'In 1991, writing about the effects of the first major bombing campaign of Iraq, I wrote in an essay published as a booklet by AK Press, 'One would have thought that it might have at least occurred to people that there will be Iraqi survivors, or their descendants, who will feel that if there is any justice in the world, the cities of Britain and America will one day get at least a little of what their citizens were apparently so indifferent to inflicting on the towns and cities of Iraq.' (See On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, commonly known as "The Gulf War") Now that what was so obvious fourteen years ago has happened ' and my surprise was that it took so long to come about' - will the only response be more state violence abroad, more surveillance and detentions at home? Probably yes. Ever more undiscussed money to the arms industry and 'security', ever more erosion of basic rights to privacy.' Ever more 'management of the language environment', evermore complicit 'responsible' self-censorship by the media, ever more from the evangelical Mr Blair about how he is on the side of 'reason' against 'evil'. 'The word 'evil' invites people to join with the Western goverments on the side of' 'good'. It is Crusader speech.'
'In a deeply unhealthy, some would say insane, culture like this, it is refreshing always to turn to Art, not to get away from reality, but to be in a reality where honesty and integrity of purpose and language can still prevail. Where the human still has currency as a universal. In a society saturated with agenda-language for the purposes of maintaining the position of those in power, how good to turn to Mahmood Jahmal's collection of poems: here is the simple business of an intelligent poet making art from his own culture, making his own way in the world which is all we can try to do in some kind of peace and sanity. In a book that is being published by the independent Edinburgh bookshop WordPower, I am almost tempted to say, Welcome to the often-boring world of 'Scottish Literature', Mahmood. We humans on the side of creativity in and out of Art, can only try to go on as best we may despite everything, in any time and place.
