Nahid Rachlin By Jeet Heer National Post (February 19, 2004) The lies of fiction can often bring us closer to reality than the facts of scholarship. Consider the current crisis in the Middle East and the larger Islamic world. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, readers throughout the world have anxiously turned to experts to find out the origins of Islamic radicalism. Bestsellers lists have been peppered by books like Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? and Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History. At their rare best, such books are informative, if often sketchy and over-generalized. They tell us how Islam looks from the outside, but don’t give us feel for the lived reality of Islamic culture. At their worst, these civilization-spanning primers contain strong doses of venomous xenophobia (authors David Pryce-Jones and Daniel Pipes are particularly guilty of this sin). Moreover, many of the so-called experts on Islam have a terrible track-record. Throughout the last two centuries, many academic specialists of the Islamic world have been compliant hirelings of Western imperialism, skewing their scholarship to support regimes friendly to European and North American interests. For example, Bernard Lewis has repeatedly minimized the historical horrors of Turkey’s genocidal campaign against its Armenian citizens. As a supplement and corrective to writers such as Lewis, readers would be well advised to turn to works of fiction that more honestly and sensitively grapple with human experience. Particularly valuable is the Iranian-American novelist Nahid Rachlin, whose work illuminates the psychological roots of religious fanaticism. Many secular souls have been surprised at the remarkable global rise of religious zealotry, not just in the Islamic world but also among Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and other faiths. Since the 18th century, many forward-looking thinkers have argued that religious fervor would diminish as society became more modern and technological. Yet the opposite has clearly occurred. Modernity seems to be breeding more and more religious intolerance. Most surprisingly, religious extremists have not typically been backward peasants fighting to preserve an old way of life, but are frequently well-educated people, adept at using the latest gadgets to spread their messianic message. If Nahid Rachlin’s first novel Foreigner (1978) had been widely read, people would not have been surprised at the emergence of sleek and modernized fundamentalism. Written and published before the Iranian revolution of 1979, which saw the overthrow of the secular rule of the Shah and its eventual replacement by a radical fundamentalist regime, Foreigner traces the troubled life of Feri McIntosh, an Iranian who uneasily tries to assimilate into North American culture. As a young adult, Feri seeks to escape her suffocating family in Iran by moving to the United States, where she studies, becomes a biologist and marries an American named Tony McIntosh. However, Feri continues to live under the long shadow of her birth culture. While living in the United States, Feri dreams of Iran with nostalgic home-sickness. Yet when she returns to Iran, Feri finds no peace, since her family seems as repressive as ever and the culture now seems alien to her. Throughout the novel, Feri is torn between two worlds. She is ill at ease in both traditional Iran and high-tech America. The fact that she made the journey from Iran to the United States only increases her sense of alienation. An Iranian doctor tells her that going to the United States “will only make us [Iranians] restless and dissatisfied.” The doctor describes this as “the Western illness.” Filled with a nameless dread which cannot be staved off by either marriage or work, Feri seeks solace in religion and becomes a fundamentalist. After being a cultural orphan, she finds a home in Islam. Religion, as a wise man once observed, is “the heart of the heartless world.” Foreigner is a very personal and quiet work. There is almost no explicit references to politics in it. Yet it is hard not to see the novel as prophetic, an early warning of the social and political upheavals of our age. As Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul once noted, after 1979 Foreigner seemed to be remarkably prescient. Rachlin’s fiction stands up particularly well if we compare it with the academic and policy-making experts on the Islamic world who were writing in the same period. Aside from a handful of writers (Hamid Algar of the University of California was one), most scholars in the 1970s paid little attention to the emergence of political Islam in countries such as Iran. Analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, that Inspector Clouseau-esque spy organization, repeatedly argued that the Shah’s regime was strong and faced no serious opposition. Unlike these specialists and authorities, Rachlin had a strong premonition of the shape of the future. Rachlin was born in Iran and is now a fellow at Yale University. She is the author of four books, all written in the United States. Because of her implicit critiques of religion, her books have yet to be translated into Farsi and are little known in her native land. In the West, Rachlin has been praised by such well-known writers as V.S. Naipaul and Anne Tyler, but her books have only a small cult following. She deserves more readers: Foreigner stands out as one of the best novels ever written about the psychology of fundamentalism, describing the modern angst behind religious extremism. The novel is a striking vindication of the power of fiction to help us understand our world.