Salah Stetie: Mahomet.
Accad, Evelyne
Paris. Pygmalion/Gerard Watelet. 2000 359 pages. 120 F. ISBN 2-85704-660-X
SALAH STETIE, a Lebanese-born author of more than twenty works --
essays, poems, and novels, most of them issued by major publishers
(Gallimard, Stock, Seghers, et cetera) -- has been widely translated and
is the recipient of the 1995 Grand Prix de la Francophonie de
l'Academie Francaise, among other prestigious awards. For years he
served his country as a diplomat and as an ambassador in several world
capitals and international organizations, among them UNESCO.
Why did Stetie choose to write about the Prophet Muhammad, founder
of the third monotheistic religion, Islam? In these troubled times when
Islam tends to be looked upon as an extremist, intolerant religion, he
felt the need to rehabilitate the precepts of a humanism that can be
extrapolated from the life he so interestingly investigates. But most
important, he admits, the project was for him a way of looking back into
his own childhood and into what made him the man he has become. By
depicting the Islamic prophet's life, he felt he was analyzing part
of his own identity as a Muslim Arab man, and also examining the nature
of life and death. These are important questions for someone of
Stetie's age who has had serious medical problems and has been
close to death several times.
In an interesting narrative, Stetie tells us about the adventures,
the struggles, the wars, the loves and hatreds, the genius of a man with
many facets who was set upon giving his contemporaries a new dimension
of God within a Jewish and Christian world in crisis. Stetie also
initiates us into the precepts of the Qur'an and the scope of its
spiritual message.
Among the book's more inspiring and troubling notions is that
of "divine breath." The universe against which Muhammad sends
his fighters is not only the outside world but also the inside one, and
man must fight a jihad on both fronts. Stetie notices that long before
Rimbaud, Muhammad had understood that "spiritual combat is as
brutal as real wars." In a time when one is trying to demystify the
notion of Islam's (or any religion's) aggressiveness, I found
this aspect disturbing, to say the least. But perhaps Stetie wants to
show us how complex and dialectical the life of this amazing man was.
And in that he has succeeded.
Evelyne Accad
University of Illinois, Urbana
