Word!

Air Canada resolves author's dilemma

Over the past several weeks, Calgary-based author Jaspreet Singh encountered difficulties when checking in to Air Canada flights at Canadian airports. Mistaken for someone else with a similar name he has been intensely questioned and informed his name appeared on a no-fly list. Rather than experience the demeaning process once again, Singh cancelled two book events in Toronto, June 14 and 15.

Jaspreet Singh and his publisher were extremely concerned by the situation, especially because the author was in the middle of promotional tours for his recently-published novel, Chef. In a story
that appeared in the Calgary Herald (June 17), a spokesperson for Transport Canada stated that Jaspreet Singh was not on Canada's no-fly list. In a conversation Jaspreet Singh had today with Laura Logan, Director of Security for Air Canada, the author was told that he was not on the domestic or American no-fly lists, however, that there is another person with his name on the airline's "internal" no-fly list, and that the airline would take steps so that this problem does not occur again.

Jaspreet Singh is the author of the short story collection, Seventeen  Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir and the recently-published novel, Chef.

Seventeen Tomatoes is a series of linked stories which revolve around two Sikh boys coming of age in an Indian army camp in Kashmir. Each story takes a minor character from the previous tale and builds a new tale, weaving a collective portrait of the border community. In addition to the boys, Adi (a student of gardens) and Arjun (a budding chemist), we meet a boatman's daughter, a captured Pakistani officer, a celebrity cricket umpire and Parachute Aunty. From modern missiles to cricket matches, from religious miracles to the sumptuous gardens of Shalimar and Nishat, Singh treats beauty and politics and religion in a gentle and humane manner. "His scientific knowledge and diction is unusual in a storyteller—like technology and poetry smashing into each other. It's an exciting collision." —Quill & Quire "The robust, haunting stories of Jaspreet Singh recite an extraordinary human drama. They create a portrait of Kashmir and India that is at once convoluted, comical, raw and savage, steeped in myth yet paradoxically tempered by science. As the old and the new clash, the stories examine the edges of human experience and their wayward effects upon the heart." —Trevor Ferguson "Funny, tragic, elegantly told, these Tales from Kashmir should be read everywhere." —Kristen den Hartog "With just the right mix of suspense and lyricism, and an exacting eye for mot juste, Jaspreet Singh weaves a tapestry out of the fabulous and the real." —Taras Grescoe.

Born in 1969, Jaspreet Singh grew up in India and Kashmir. In 1990 he moved to Montreal, where he received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from McGill University. In March 2002, Quill and Quire identified him as one of the five new talents to watch. His stories have appeared in the Fiddlehead and Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope and he is currently at work on a novel, The Book of Hanging Gardens.

Kureishi: Writing courses are the "new mental hospitals"

 The novelist, screenwriter and playwright Hanif Kureishi has launched a withering attack on university creative writing courses, calling them "the new mental hospitals".

Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University, said: "One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it's always a writing student.

"The writing courses, particularly when they have the word 'creative' in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice."

Kureishi - whose most famous work includes The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette - was speaking at the Guardian Hay festival about his latest novel, Something to Tell You.

He said he was impelled to start teaching writing after seeing his children have tennis and piano lessons. He said: "I felt if I knew something, I should pass it on."

Kureishi said of his students: "When I teach them, they are always better at the end - and more unhappy." But he said that creative writing courses set up false expectations that a literary career would inevitably follow. "The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers - and no one will disabuse them of that. When you use the word creative and the word course there is something deceptive about it."

Aspiring writers had plenty of things to say, he added, "but then they get degrees. I always give people the same mark - 71% - and then you write these reports. I always say they were well-behaved, well-dressed ... But how can you mark creative writing?"

Of readers' inquiries about the relationship between autobiography and invention in his work, Kureishi said: "It's such a dull question. And then people always want to know what time you get up, or whether you write with the window closed, or what your desk looks like."

Perhaps taking a swipe at Guardian Review's weekly photographic series Writers' Rooms, he said: "People come and take pictures of writers' desks. They don't," he continued, gesturing around the tent to his audience, "come and take photographs of your desks, do they? It's as if the talent is in the desk."

Kureishi revealed that he will be returning to the stage to workshop his novel The Black Album at the National Theatre. Of working in the theatre, he said: "It gets you out of the house, and then you start to hate the people. And then you can go back and sit in a room and write."

He recalled his early job at the Royal Court Theatre reading scripts when David Hare, Christopher Hampton and Lindsay Anderson were Court stalwarts. "I was fired from the Royal Court," he said. "They said I was being too horrible about the work of these great playwrights."

Kureishi also said that when he goes to his desk each morning to commence writing, he thinks to himself: "Why am I doing this? Shall I commit suicide?"

by Charlotte Higgins
The Guardian

Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State

On May 23, Steve Paikin of TVO interviewed Tarek Fatah on The Agenda to discuss Fatah's book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

Click here to listen to the conversation between Paikin and Fatah, as they discuss the book and the struggle between Islam and Islamists struggle.

I have reproduced below a review of the book by Michelle Collins from Embassy, Canada's Foreign Policy Newsweekly

"It seems perhaps as good a time as any for the always outspoken Tarek Fatah to be stoking the fires of the often touchy matter that is Islam within Canadian society.

As Canada's politicians talk endlessly of a massive need to attract more immigrants to curb a looming skilled labour shortage, there seems but a whisper of a national conversation about the ways in which the Muslim religion has recently become a hot potato of policy-making.

Mr. Fatah, however, is not one to shy away from sensitive and sometimes controversial debates. In his book Chasing A Mirage, Mr. Fatah leads the reader through centuries of history, exploring in detail the evolution of Islam across different parts of the world and into some of the present controversy in Western countries.

Through his personal experience, and drawing on 10 years of research, Mr. Fatah brings to life the story behind the Quran, behind the power of the caliphate and the imams, the Islamic states of the Middle East, and today's intricately connected network of mosques.

With precise clarity, Mr. Fatah delivers surprisingly frank commentary on issues and debates that, as demonstrated throughout his book, are playing out with surprising regularity in newspaper opinion pieces and behind the walls of the country's political institutions.

Among the complicated and politically sensitive issues Mr. Fatah is clearly determined to bring into mainstream are the ways in which extremists have taken advantage of Canadian society and politicians. A card-carrying Liberal who supported Bob Rae for the Liberal leadership, Mr. Fatah says there are major gaps within Canada's "chattering classes" that further contributes to a country-wide misunderstanding.

"I don't know of a single politician who has stood up and said that in this country we will not tolerate identity laws that are based on religion and race, almost no one," Mr. Fatah says in an interview last month. "And so their right-wing Islamist fanatics have a field day in planting in the head of young Canadian-born Muslims that if you find any obstacle in your way, it is because you are a Muslim and the West hates Islam."

Mr. Fatah takes particular issue with federal politicians who demonstrate ignorance about Canada's Muslims. He says they too often fall into the trap that only male mosque leaders and those who wear traditional clothing can speak for Canada's Muslims on the national stage.

"As if the 800,000 Muslims in Canada do nothing except pray and preach," Mr. Fatah says. "This notion of a false community is unfair and lends us to making errors in policy development."

In his book, Mr. Fatah explores the way leftist politicians are often susceptible to bending the rules in order to accommodate the extreme demands of some Muslims, calling it racism of lower expectations.

"It's saying if you are white mainstream we have one standard, but if you're Muslim we lower the standard to a level where we will patronize you in a condescending manner," he says. "Until politicians of all hues set standards for all Canadians and judge us all on the same barometer, only then will we be able to fight the Islamist threat to the West."

Mr. Fatah argues that some of the most concrete examples of the influence Islam has exerted over policy-making have occurred in Canada recently, issues which he explores at length and puts into clear context within the workings of government.

The relevant issues explored and the questions Mr. Fatah raises provide valuable contributions to the debate and are worth considering on all policy fronts where Islamic tradition is being promoted as an option.

Last year, Ontarians were exposed to one of the most encompassing debates around Islam as the campaign to introduce Sharia law into Ontario's judicial system nearly proved successful. Mr. Fatah provides a fascinating chapter on Sharia law with spectacular insight into what happened behind the public view of the campaign, and who some of the key actors influencing this were, and why.

Most recently, some financial institutions have introduced Islamic banking, yet another issue of policy with which Mr. Fatah disagrees and provides compelling, and disturbing, evidence as to why. Mr. Fatah also weighs in on the controversy surrounding the hijab in France, and within Canada.

Throughout the book, Mr. Fatah insists Islam is a religion of peace and freedom that was never meant to be taken to the levels some leaders have taken it to. Instead, he says, he has observed the ways in which some have taken advantage of the religion and the naiveté of Westerners toward it.

Near the end of the book, Mr. Fatah directs his anger at the ways in which young Muslim Canadians are prey to extremist influence and sometimes brought up to hate the country that has welcomed them.

"[M]any imams have taken advantage of the inherent decency as well as naiveté of Canadian society to pursue their goals," he writes in the book. "The Islamist attempt to hoodwink the mainstream establishment combined with the unfortunate need of politicians to dip into the 'ethnic vote bank,' has ensured that radicalism and calls for segregation from Western society continue unabated across the Western world."

A longtime activist, journalist, Muslim, and founder of the secular Muslim Canadian Congress, Mr. Fatah says he felt compelled to write this book because he has seen things getting worse in both Islamic states and in what he calls liberal secular societies.

"Something that never existed in this form and strength has today become a nightmare," Mr. Fatah says, linking the growing wealth and prominence of extremist Muslims with operations of the U.S. CIA throughout the Cold War. "I'm glad that so far...the Islamists have not come up with a response. The book is based on hard facts, backed by 60 pages of notes and a very extensive bibliography.

"I'm hoping that in a very respectful way to Islam, the Prophet and the Quran, I have taken things from the day after Muhammad dies."