One day in 1994, Ali Salem, the Egyptian playwright, packed up his old Soviet car and drove east, across the Suez Canal, through the desert waste of Sinai, until he came to the Israeli border. He hadn’t bothered to tell his wife or three children. “It wasn’t a love trip but a serious attempt to get rid of hate,” he later explained. “Hatred prevents us from knowing reality as it is.”
Salem was a satirist calling the Arab world to reconciliation, rather than what he termed “a mental state of war.” That is different from a real war, he explained, with characteristic acidity. “In a mental state of war, you fight without going into the field, you’re transformed into a cannon without ammunition, a smoke bomb, a popgun. All your actions and words are transformed into slogans and battle cries. It’s a state of hatred of self and of others; it’s the highest degree of lie.”
The book about his experience, titled “A Drive to Israel,” was a best-seller in the Arab world. And yet, Salem would be shunned for the rest of his life by Egyptian intellectuals. He was expelled from the Writers Syndicate, a decision that was overturned by an Egyptian court (whereupon Salem immediately resigned from the syndicate, saying he only wanted to prove a point). He was merciless about the cynical use of the Palestinian cause to justify the military coups that resulted in so many Arab countries after the humiliating loss to Israel in 1948. “Quickly or gradually, they eliminated human rights in their countries,” he wrote of the new class of dictators. “But we would slight them if we didn’t also admit that they succeeded in adding several hundred thousands to the number of refugees, just as they added hundreds of thousands to the list of fatalities, wounded, and the maimed. They naturally didn’t forget to enrich the ranks of widows, bereaved parents, and orphans. We should also concede that these military rulers succeeded in relieving the Arab nation of the burden of governing a great deal of real estate.”
Salem had an immense, bold face, a sensuous mouth, and eyes that were both lively and sad. When I first met him, in Cairo, shortly after 9/11, he mischievously announced that he was starting a kindergarten for extremists. “Kids, don’t believe that others worship the same god as we,” he said. “They are infidels. The task for which I am preparing you is to purge the world of them.”
“Dear children, hate music. Hate all manner of artistic, literary, or scientific endeavor. Hate tenderness. Hate reason and intellect. Hate your families. Hate yourselves. Hate your teachers. Hate me. Hate others—all others. Hate this school. Hate life, and everything in it.”
“Go on, get to class.”
Salem passed away at his home, in Cairo, on September 22nd. The Arab world has lost a brave and perhaps irreplaceable voice. The refusenik intellectuals have also lost their favorite scapegoat. “It has become a ritual in this country to attack me on talk shows,” Salem once told me, as we shared a bottle of wine on a gentle Egyptian evening. “What else can they do? They can’t catch Israel. For sure, they can’t catch America. But they can catch Ali Salem.”
