Middle East's "Literary" Dictators Abound

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The British journalist Daniel Kalder’s new book The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, deals with something rather odd: the writings of despots and mass murderers. 

While living in Moscow, he set himself the task of reviewing an extensive selection of works penned by the dictators of the 20th and early 21st centuries. (The British title of the book is Dictator Literature.) 

Among the authors he discusses are the Communists Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong, and fascists such as Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.

There are some surprises. When you think of two former tyrants in the Middle East, literary talent is the last thing that might come to mind.

Yet both Libya’s Colonel Moammar Gaddafi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein fancied themselves writers.

Gaddafi’s Green Book achieved a certain notoriety and was force-fed to students in the country. In the early 1970s he had set out to prove himself a leading political philosopher, developing something called the third universal theory.

The theory, as expounded in the book, claimed to solve the contradictions inherent in capitalism and communism (the first and second theories),  to put the world on a path of political, economic and social revolution and set oppressed peoples free everywhere.

In fact, it was little more than a series of fatuous diatribes. As for his short stories, published in Escape to Hell, they were not Nobel Prize material either.

Saddam Hussein, even while busy slaughtering Iraqis, found time in 2000 to publish the historical romance Zabiba and the King. The book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, his home town, and tells the story of a leader who sacrifices a luxurious life for the sake of his people.

Saddam had fallen in love with the twenty-four-year-old daughter of one of his advisers. She became his fourth wife and, according to the book’s English editor, Sa’adoon al-Zubaydi, she gave the Iraqi strongman renewed “inspiration” and “vitality” in the latter stages of his rule. 

It was she who “encouraged him to pick up pen and paper” and so the world was presented with Zabiba and the King.

Comparing himself to the great conqueror Saladdin, more books emerged from Saddam’s pen, including novels such as Walled Fortress and Men and the City; the latter described the rise of the Ba’ath Party in Tikrit. 

So dedicated to his literary career had Saddam become that he finished Be Gone, Demons! a direct rebuke to the invading American forces, right before the Battle of Baghdad in 2003. 

The novel recounts a Zionist-Christian conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims that an Arab army eventually defeats by invading the Zionist-Christian land and toppling one of its monumental towers, an apparent reference to Sept. 11, 2001.

Editing continued throughout the fighting. The manuscript of the book is said to have been spirited out of Iraq by one of Saddam Hussein’s daughters.

Consumed with a literary urge even as his dictatorship was about to be destroyed, this is a side of the Iraqi dictator few know about.

Kalder sums up by noting that most of these works are full of “tedium, megalomania, banality, mendacity, vanity and inadvertent self-revelations.” There is also the complete absence of humour.

But, he observes, Gaddafi and Saddam, like the other dictators, had “what every author can only dream of: a captive audience.”