Fayyad’s affair: Neither Saudi Arabia nor Soyinka is right

The purpose of this piece is to address a sincere concern expressed by revered Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka during the “Free Ashraf Fayyad Now” campaign led by him in Lagos on Thursday 14th January, 2015, where he said, “We need to know what the Prophet said about it or is it an imposition?” ”Islam […]

The purpose of this piece is to address a sincere concern expressed by revered Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka during the “Free Ashraf Fayyad Now” campaign led by him in Lagos on Thursday 14th January, 2015, where he said, “We need to know what the Prophet said about it or is it an imposition?” ”Islam has to talk to Islam to prevent interlopers like myself from talking about it”.  This piece in therefore intended to address the need for the revered laureate and the entire world to know what the Prophet or Islam says about the subject of this paper.  It is also intended “to prevent interlopers like him from” laying claim to knowledge of Islam. 
But one wonders if any prevention is still useful to the world-famous scholar who has gone all out to tell the entire world, as reported in various dailies across the world, that, one, Hijab must be abrogated because it is slavery and second class status for women who are confined to wearing it in the name of religion; two, Hijab subjects women to humiliation; three, women should be left alone to wear what they want and not imposed upon; four, ECOWAS Heads of Governments are wrong on hijab; five, No culture or religion should place one gender superior to another; six, Humanism is my religion; seven, it is time to uphold humanism as the global ideal, and eight we allowed the sacred texts to overwhelm our lives. Why should a bunch of mortals sit down and pass death on others. What kind of arrogance is that?” 
One is perturbed by the logic involved in the respected laureate’s decision to pronounce so extensively on some of the fundamentals of Islam before receiving the enlightenment he solicited from Muslim scholars. There are express scriptural provisions for most of the Islamic principles the laureate attempted to deflate. The uninformed advocacy that “women should be left alone to wear what they want” is an encroachment upon the sacred nature of Islamic teachings for, Islam defines what its adherents wear.
The laureate’s incitement of Muslim women that they are being “enslaved”, “humiliated” and given “second class status” through hijab, sounds like an attempt to prompt them to break out in rebellion and go erratic and  haywire. Such an advocacy seems below the minimum expectation from our revered laureate. It is also unfortunate that the literary giant will attempt unsuccessfully to rationalize that “no religion has the right to place a gender superior to another”. A declaration such as this in the context of a Muslim-related discourse suggests insensitivity for, the Qur’an is unequivocal in that regard. May I ask if all the unfortunate pronouncements on Hijab and other core teachings of Islam are part of the protest against the death sentence on the embattled Palestinian poet or strategically designed but veiled attacks on Islam as well as hijab and its advocates! My concern is, of what is the correlation between hijab and literature?
Yet it may not be fair to place the blame squarely at the door of the distinguished laureate, for the Saudi authorities, too, have some role in the frustrations that probably aggravated the distinguished laureate’s disdain and attracted the arguably unfounded statements.
What exactly are the allegations or issues culminating in the death sentence? His poems are not Islamic? They promote atheism? He is licentious? He has liaisons with alien women? He stored photographs of women on his phone and therefore violated Saudi anti-cyber crime law? He smokes? His hair is long and bushy?  These were the allegations leveled against Ashraf Fayyad. Yet no one is talking about the fact that what became a celebrated case in the world media only started as a disagreement between Fayyad and his friend while watching a football match together. The gentleman, an illustrious son of a prestigious Saudi family threatened to send Fayyad, a Palestinian settler, packing out of Saudi Arabia. Could the gentleman in question be a member of the Saudi Royal Family? That is a subject of another piece. Let it be assumed that Fayyad is guilty of all of the above, for the sake of argument. On what basis is his execution the only option to Saudi authorities? The most grave of the allegations is the purported promotion of atheism in the Holy Lands, through the disputed poems.
I thought it appropriate to provide, at this juncture, an insight into Fayyad’s disputed poems originally published in Arabic in 2008 as Al-Ta’limat bi-d-Dakhil, meaning  Instructions Within   by Dar Al-Farabi in Beirut.  It is my view that my provision of highlights of the disputed poetry has the potential to improve the Nigerian public understanding of the issue involved in the Saudi death sentence on Fayyad. After all, none of the highly educated Nigerian literary activists, who joined our revered Nobel Laureate in his “campaign against the death sentence” thought it appropriate to access the content of the disputed poetry which was why they all failed abysmally to engage scholarly and even literarily with the subject of their protest.
The poet employed a number of creative embellishments that enhance the literary value of the piece. His original Arabic version features few instances of euphemism, anti-thesis, synecdoche, personification, onomatopoeia, metonymy, metaphor, alliteration, anaphoria, assonance, and others.
Most interesting is Fayyad’s allusion to the Holy Qur’an in his admonitory message to Saudi authorities in Stanza 1.  “Dark faces” are central to the Holy Qur’an’s portrayal of melancholic look of the infidels in the face of judgment or accountability (See, for instance, Qur’an 2:106 & 39:60) and one expects this to appeal to the apparent   religious dispositions of the Saudis. Alas, they are bent on hanging Fayyad whose successful use of allusion to the Qur’an in a rather creative and dexterous fashion makes his poetry, a literary piece of merit. Although it is not easy to accurately decipher what Fayyad means by “…your obscene withdrawal from that flabby religion, from that fake Tanzeel, from gods that had lost their pride” or exonerate the poet from a possibly Islamically “incriminating” composition, the question seeking attention here is whether Saudi Arabia should always portray itself as destitute of formulating any punitive measure for errors or offenses, other than death sentences and executions.
One wonders why there has not been a scholarly rejoinder to or deflation of Fayyad’s ideas as contained in the poetry since its publication almost ten years ago. Such an endeavour would have enriched the understanding of the contemporary world about Fayyad’s real “crime”. Or, could it be true that the ‘disputed poetry’ was just an attempt to give a dog a bad name for the purpose of hanging it. Why did the Saudi authorities fail to tread the path of Egypt, a fellow Muslim country whose Islamic jurists approached a similar case scholarly in 1937 when the Egyptian writer, Ismail Adham published a book entitled, “Why I am an Infidel” and the Azhar University in Cairo wasted no time in publishing a comprehensive, scholarly and highly sophisticated rejoinder on the subject, written by Dr. Muhammad Farid Wujdiy.  
Al-Azhar was so Islamically civilized and intellectually opinionated that it neither incited the Egyptian Government nor pronounced a death sentence against the writer. This probably explains why Egypt has the richest Arabic literary heritage which perhaps navigated way for the emergence of Africa’s second Nobel Laureate in Literature, after Prof. Wole Soyinke of Nigeria, in the person of Najeeb Mahfouz.

Rufai, is Ag. Dean, Faculty of Education, Sokoto State University.